Wednesday, October 16, 2024
8:54 a.m. My Room at the House
Port Dickson, Malaysia
(5,309 words)
Some unusual things have happened in the last few days. I wrote about all these things at length, but since I don’t have WiFi, these journal entries were saved only to my laptop and weren’t uploaded to the cloud and saved there. And then, out of nowhere, my MacBook broke down again. Therefore, I lost everything that I wrote. I assume it is still on the SSD drive of my MacBook, but since the MacBook won’t turn on, I can’t access it. If I don’t fix my MacBook, it is gone forever. Of course, it isn’t such a big deal. It’s not like I wrote anything important. I was just babbling about my life here in Port Dickson and my plans and preparations for leaving.
Of course, in the last few days, I continued to experiment with different ways of mounting the GoPros on my bicycle, and I wrote about all of that. I eventually decided that it was better to put both GoPros on the short broomstick rather than have one on the broomstick and one on the handlebars. The GoPro on the handlebars seemed to be a bit jerky. Somehow the motion of the handlebars was more exaggerated on that GoPro than on the GoPro that was farther away on the broomstick. That doesn’t make logical sense to me, but I guess my logic is off. Right now, I’ve gone back to the original system of having the GoPro Hero 12 mounted on the end of the broomstick. And I would normally have that GoPro facing me as I ride the bicycle and talk directly into the camera. And then I have the GoPro Hero 9 mounted partway up the broomstick but hanging upside down from the bottom and pointing forward. I can still have a third mount directly on the handlebars, which would be convenient, but I’m struggling with that. There isn’t enough available space on the handlebars, and no matter how I mount the GoPro, the broomstick always ends up in the video. I need to move the GoPro over to the left or right, but there just is no way to do it. This brings me all the way back to 1998 when I bought this bicycle. I often think about the moment when I ordered this bicycle, and it showed up at the bicycle store in London. I was working with the bicycle mechanics at this shop to customize it and set it up for my needs, and for some reason, we decided the handlebars were too wide, and we cut them shorter. We cut a little bit off each side. And I’ve regretted that decision ever since. It probably doesn’t really matter, but I find myself often wondering if having the handlebars just that little bit wider would have made a big difference over the years. Of course, I could have replaced the handlebars at some point, but I never got around to doing that.
I haven’t found the time to play around with mounting the 360 camera. And I haven’t had the time to remove my old mounting system with the long broomstick. Maybe I can finally do that today. Probably this afternoon. The days are flashing by, and I have to start moving quickly with serious final packing and organizing. One big problem is that my package from the Netherlands still hasn’t shown up, and the tracking system is so primitive that I have no idea where it is or what is going on. It was supposed to be delivered here on October 8th at the latest. But that was a week ago. Not to my surprise, the language of the tracking app is vague and unclear. It gives updates such as, “Your package has crossed the border.” But it doesn’t say which border. Are they saying that the package left the Netherlands? Or are they saying that it crossed the border into Malaysia? I’m endlessly disappointed at how badly organized almost everything in the world still is. You’d think that in the computer age in this century, information would become more complete and accurate. But I find that that isn’t the case most of the time. I see clear problems, confusions, and inaccuracies in almost everything around me. And they are so obvious to me that I wonder why no one at those companies ever fixes them. It doesn’t take a genius to see that saying your package “crossed the border” is incomplete information. It should specify which border. The main item in this package is a rain cover for my trailer. I took the time and went to the expense of ordering the darn thing. So it would be a great shame if it doesn’t arrive in time for me to use it. Then I might as well have not ordered it at all. But an equal problem for me is the stress that simply not knowing introduces into my life. I find that this is very common. I have endured so much stress in my lifetime from lacking information and not having any control. This feeling of not having control creates so much stress. There is simply nothing I can do about this package but sit here and wait. I can’t get more information. I can’t go get it. I can’t contact anyone. I can’t yell at anyone. I can’t do anything except sit here, day after day, and worry about where it is and what is happening to it and whether it will arrive on time. In the past, I’ve ordered other items online, and they were held by customs over duty and taxes. Maybe that has happened to this package. But how can I find out? I can’t. I’m just helpless, and I hate that helpless feeling.
I’ve done a few other things to prepare for my upcoming trip. I got out my camping gear, for example. I wanted to just open it all up and sort through it and air it out and test it. That has included my tent, my sleeping bag, my sleeping pad, and my water bag so far. The tent is a mess, of course. All tents are always a mess. There really is no point to keeping a tent long term. They all fall apart in a very short amount of time. One should have enough money available so that you can buy a brand new tent for every trip. Then you can use it one time when it is in good condition, and then get rid of it. Just buy another tent for the next trip. If you try to keep that tent, it will just fall apart. The waterproof coatings will dry up and flake off. And the other material will just turn sticky and unpleasant. I’m pretty sure that this tent is not waterproof at all anymore. Plus, the floor of the tent is so sticky and gummy. It’s horrible. If I had money, I would just buy a new tent. But since this is the only tent I have, it is the tent I will bring.
My sleeping bag seems okay. And the sleeping pad seems fine. I inflated it and left it for a few days, and it doesn’t seem to have any leaks. My Trangia stove is indestructible, so I know it works fine. I also have my MSR Whisperlite stove, but I don’t know if I will bother taking it with me. To be honest, I’d be much better off bringing no camping equipment at all. I often end up carrying around all this heavy equipment and rarely using it. However, the times when I use it, I really need it. Again, it comes down to money. If I had enough money, I’d just travel light and plan to stay in hotels all the time.
With other preparations, I ran into some trouble. Yesterday, for example, I finally found the energy and the time to apply for my visa for Indonesia. The plan is to get the 30-day tourist e-visa. And I thought this would be a very simple and straightforward process. I’ve done this before, and I even have an account on the Indonesian immigration website. I thought that since I have already uploaded all my documents and filled out all the fields and forms, I could simply apply for a new tourist visa with almost a single click. That was my understanding of how the website accounts worked. However, when I signed in to my account, nothing happened. Nothing was done automatically, and none of my previous uploads were saved. I had to do all the uploading all over again. It wasn’t a big deal to be honest, but it was still annoying when I was looking forward to NOT having to do it. Luckily I had these documents saved in various folders on my phone, and I quickly uploaded a copy of my passport and a photo.
The next stage was filling out all the personal information. And the website even said that this would be done automatically and that most of the fields would be populated automatically. But, of course, nothing happened. And I had to fill out everything all over. Again, this wasn’t a big problem. It just took time. I was just disappointed. I was looking forward to NOT having to do it. But then I got to the worst surprise. Indonesia has since added new requirements in their online systems, and at the very end, when I thought I was done, they now asked me to upload a PDF of my passport AND a PDF of my flight out of Indonesia. They never asked for this before. And I wasn’t ready for this, so I had to abandon my application.
For one thing, I didn’t have a PDF of my passport. All my copies are simple JPEGS. And I don’t know how to create a PDF. Same thing for a flight out of the country. Since my plan was to go to Indonesia by ferry and leave by ferry, I don’t have flights. But immigration systems worldwide NEVER account for this. Even now in this modern century, we run into similar catch-22 situations with immigration worldwide. Immigration systems ask for flights and that’s it. And they do not account for people entering the country by land or sea. It’s ridiculous, and it’s an obvious problem, but of all the hundreds of thousands of people working for governments and immigration offices around the world, not one ever realizes this is a problem and tries to fix it.
And even if you do have a flight out of the country, you run into another catch-22. Indonesia, for example, makes a big deal out of how their 30-day e-visa can be extended for an additional 30 days. Therefore, you can stay in Indonesia for 60 days. However, your flight out of Indonesia has to be within the 30-day period of your original visa. You can’t submit a PDF of a flight for a date 60 or 50 days ahead. The system will only accept a flight within 30 days. Yet, you plan on staying for 60 days. So you have to somehow provide them with details of a flight you can’t even use and have no intention of taking. It’s such an obvious problem. I have run into this problem for all the years of my adult life. Yet, after all these decades, the problem still exists. No one has thought to fix it.
My other problem with all this is not having a laptop anymore. I have made PDFs in the past, but I always did this on my laptop. And now I had to figure out how to do it with a smartphone. But I was so flustered and irritated at this point that I just gave up. I couldn’t face it. I will try again this morning. I spent some time last night trying to find a PDF program that works on my phone. One thing I discovered is that you can use Google Drive to make a PDF. You can open your camera app from inside Google Drive and take a picture. And then you can save that picture as a PDF. One catch is that this PDF MUST be uploaded to Google Drive. It can’t be saved to your phone automatically. You have to save it to Google Drive automatically and then download it manually to your phone. However, when I did it, guess what happened? It refused to upload. I just got a spinning wheel and a message saying that it was trying to upload or waiting to upload. The wheel just spun and spun and spun and nothing happened. Of course it wouldn’t work. How could it be otherwise? I will try again this morning.
I also had a visitor down here in Port Dickson. A YouTube subscriber and friend from Malaysia, Lim, has a towing company. And he had a customer who needed a car picked up from Port Dickson and driven to Damansara in Kuala Lumpur. Lim reached out to me, and since he was coming to Port Dickson anyway, we met up for a chat. We didn’t make specific arrangements, because it depended on when and how he would be able to get this car. And I just went on the assumption that he would get the car sometime in the mid-morning. So I went ahead with my regular plans to go to the Paklang Kopitiam at 8 in the morning. I had some videos to upload and other work to do. This was before my laptop died. So I was going to set up my laptop and edit video and work on Patreon. And then I figured Lim could come find me at the Kopitiam when his work was done. I assumed that would be late in the morning. But then at 6 or 6:30 in the morning, I got a message from Lim saying that he was already in Lukut, which is a small town just ten minutes away from Port Dickson. This was too early to go to Paklang Kopitiam. It doesn’t open until 8. So I met Lim at a different place at 7 and we had tea and chatted. And then we both climbed into his big truck and he drove us to the Kopitiam.
It was a fun experience for me. My father was a truck driver for a part of his life, and I’ve had my fair share of summer jobs on construction sites, so I have childhood memories of riding around in the high and rough and bouncing cabs of big trucks. Climbing into the cab of Lim’s big truck brought back memories of being in trucks with my dad or at other times. Trucks are probably not a huge pleasure to drive in crowded cities, but they are great fun for passengers like me. Lim dropped me off at the Kopitiam and then he went looking for a parking spot for his big truck. He hung out with me for a while at the Kopitiam. He was curious to see what it looks like when I’m working on Planet Doug videos. (Unless I decide to go to the trouble and expense of fixing this MacBook again, that could be the last time I ever use it.) Lim had some nasi Lemak for breakfast, and I had my usual cham. And then he had to go pick up the car. Once he had the car loaded, he drove the truck back to Paklang and we hung out for a bit more. Then he left and drove back to KL. That was fun.
Afterwards, I was thinking that I missed an opportunity. Instead of sitting there editing an old video from Vietnam, I should have gone with Lim and shot new video of the life of a truck driver. I could have shot some video of us driving in his truck to go pick up and load up this car. But at the time, I never thought of it. I was too involved in what I was working on at the time. And then later on that day, my MacBook broke down. It made the same loud cracking or snapping sound that it did in Vietnam. And then it shut down, just like in Vietnam, and refused to turn back on.
After Vietnam, I brought the Mac to a repair company in KL, and they fixed it for me. I don’t fully understand what they did. When they talked to me, they said they had to replace some kind of chip. But I asked to see this chip, and I don’t think it’s a chip at all but some kind of capacitor. In any event, I think they charged me 380 ringgit, which is around $90 US. Thinking about the overall situation, I don’t think replacing the burned-out capacitor actually fixed the problem. I think the capacitor was a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. There’s some kind of problem with the power system and heat management. And that underlying problem led to the capacitor shorting out. That’s my guess anyway. So I don’t know if it is worth the money and effort to try to get it repaired again. By the time you repair a laptop like this three times, you probably spent enough money to just buy a new one.
After my MacBook died, I sent Lim a message telling him the sad news. And then later in the day, Lim said that he was talking to his sons, and they might have an old laptop they don’t use anymore. If it was suitable for video editing, he would just give it to me. Lim sent me a link to an online listing for this laptop, and it seemed like it might work. It’s hard to tell because I wasn’t 100% sure that this laptop online was the same year/model as the one he had. And I don’t have a lot of experience with video editing laptops. I’ve only had two laptops. One was a cheap Dell that was designed for students and word processing. It was never meant for graphics or video editing of any kind. Brand new, it cost $300. The only program I used on it was Windows MovieMaker. That’s all it could run. And since then, I’ve had this MacBook. And the laptop that Lim was offering me was a Windows model. It was an Asus VivoBook of some variety. When I went over the specs, it looked promising. It only had an i5 chip, but it did have a dedicated graphics card. The GPU wasn’t high-powered or anything. It was an NVIDIA GeForce MX130, I think. But I’ve never had a laptop with any kind of GPU. So I thought that maybe this i5 chip with the MX130 plus 16GB of RAM could work really well. Who knows? The only way to know for sure is to test it and try it out.
Lim was actually kind enough to get into his car the next day with the laptop and his son and drive down to Port Dickson. We went to the Big Sista Kopitiam to try out their curry mee. And while we were there, his son set up the laptop and we were able to play around with it. Unfortunately, almost instantly I knew it wouldn’t work. Most normal people don’t understand what is required to edit video. And they might look at an old laptop and think it can do the job. Personally, I suspected the laptop was not going to be suitable the second I saw it sitting on the seat in the back of the car. It was clearly a much older model than I expected. And when we plugged it in and hit the power button, it took something like 5 to 8 minutes just to boot up and load Windows. There was clearly something wrong with it. It was either just really slow because it was underpowered or there was an issue with the components.
But since Lim had come all the way down to Port Dickson and I’m no computer expert, I thought I should at least give it a shot. And I kept the laptop here while Lim and his son returned to KL. I played around with it in my room at the house for a while. And then I packed it up and took it to ZUS Coffee so that I could use their WiFi to download DaVinci Resolve and give the laptop a real test. That turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Just turning on the computer seemed to take forever. Every time I thought it was finished loading, some other process would begin and new windows would pop up. And it seemed like it hadn’t been connected to the Internet for a long time because once I connected it to the ZUS WiFi, the laptop started downloading and installing a long series of updates for everything. It just went on and on. Meanwhile, it kept disconnecting from WiFi. I don’t know if the ZUS WiFi is unreliable or if the laptop was unreliable, but the two of them would not stay connected to each other.
It was a very frustrating experience, but eventually the laptop seemed ready to do something else other than download updates, and I started to download DaVinci Resolve. I won’t go into the long and frustrating details but that was extremely difficult to do. Every stage of the process was a disaster and the laptop kept disconnecting from the WiFi, and I had to start all over again. And it was impossible to know if the laptop was doing anything. It would just sit there. I’d think nothing was happening, but if I waited long enough, it might suddenly come to life. I finally managed to download the ZIP file for DaVinci Resolve. And then unpacking the ZIP and installing DaVinci Resolve was another nightmare. I didn’t run a stopwatch or anything, but I’d say it took 2 hours to finish installing the program. I was at ZUS for 4 or 5 hours in total just to install DaVinci Resolve. And in the end, the program wouldn’t even launch or load. It kept telling me that it needed to install all kinds of other programs in order to be able to run. It presented me with a long checklist of them, and I had no idea what any of them were. But I guess this laptop was so old that it was missing all kinds of essential bits and pieces. And after 5 hours of work, the program wouldn’t even load. So it was all a waste of time.
There is a slim possibility that the VivoBook could run a smaller video editing program. But I doubt it. I tried to do just simple things like surf the web using Google Chrome, and it would take the laptop five minutes to complete a single search and then open a website. It basically can’t do anything. I wasn’t even able to play my GoPro video files. It would play the audio but it said that it couldn’t play the video. It didn’t have the proper codecs to handle H.265 video. I went looking, but apparently I would have to purchase codec packs. And there is no guarantee that any of them would ever work.
Anyway, as grateful as I was to Lim for the offer of this laptop, it was pretty much a dead end right from the start. I think anyone with video editing experience would have known that just by looking at the laptop. But the average person just doesn’t know. When Lim’s son first turned on the laptop, he instinctively clicked on Windows Media Player, because he assumed that is the program I would use. When he thinks of video, he thinks only of playing it with Windows Media Player. So in his mind, as long as Windows Media Player will run, then I should be able to edit video. But, of course, that’s not how it works.
My laptop troubles and experimenting with other laptops has actually led me to truly appreciate the amazing qualities of my broken MacBook. For one thing, the Retina display of the MacBook is awesome. I didn’t truly understand how good it was until I played around with laptops like this Asus VivoBook. It’s true that the VivoBook is quite old. Lim’s son said it was probably from 2017. So the LCD screen is suffering badly from old age. But even when the laptop was brand new, it probably was very dim and colorless and lifeless compared to what my MacBook offers. I couldn’t believe how bad the screen on the Asus looked. I guess I had gotten used to the MacBook screen and just took it for granted.
The other big news is that Port Dickson has no water. In a funny twist, my landlords were trying to tell me something about water the other day. They were saying that there might not be any water in the shower room in my room, but I could still take a shower in the bathroom behind the house. I asked my landlord some questions to try to figure out what he was talking about, but I couldn’t understand anything. He would never listen to my actual question and answer it. He was pointing at all kinds of things around the house and yard and talking about a pump and pipes and switches. I had no idea what he was talking about. I eventually just let it go and figured I would figure it out as I went. But it turned out the situation was much more serious than I thought. Water service was going to be disrupted for three days across nearly the entire city of Port Dickson. I had no idea it was so serious. When I was at ZUS coffee, it appears I was lucky to even get a cup of coffee. A lot of the items on their menu weren’t available, they said, because they had no water. And life became difficult because all the bathrooms were closed. None of the bathrooms in the city had water, so the toilets couldn’t be flushed. And then when I went out looking for dinner, my usual restaurants were all closed. I had never seen them closed like that before, and I assume it was because they had no water. Back at the house, I discovered there was no water. Luckily, I had planned ahead to the point of filling up two large bottles and one large bucket with water. So I had enough water to dump some water on my head and take a shower to cool down.
I have to say that with all the problems I’ve faced recently, I was feeling quite low yesterday. I was exhausted and I felt like time was slipping away faster and faster and no matter how hard I worked, I never seemed to make any progress on anything. I feel like I’m running at a thousand miles an hour but staying in exactly the same place. And my laptop breaking down, the inability to apply for a visa for Indonesia, working an entire day on a different laptop and getting nowhere, having no water, having trouble getting food, etc, all wore me down. AND on top of all that, the neighbors decided to do some renovations. And that of course means that the jackhammers come out. And all day yesterday and now all day today, I’m been suffering under the thunderous noise of jackhammers. The problems just never seem to end. I was exhausted last night, and with everything going on, I wasn’t able to sleep. And in the background of my life, I’m still posting videos from Vietnam, and no one is watching them. They are complete failures. My entire reason for even coming to Port Dickson was to have an inexpensive place to live while I finish editing those videos from Vietnam. And, so far, it has all been a giant waste of time. The first house where I lived was a disaster, and then I got kicked out anyway. And now this second house has no WiFi and barely any mobile internet signal. And no water. And no bathroom. And jackhammers. I might as well have selected all the hundreds of gigabytes of video from Vietnam and deleted them all. I’ve just been wasting time and spending money by editing and posting them. Nobody cares about them or appreciates them. All the work and time that went into them was pointless and useless. So, I feel like I’m really coming apart at the seams. I hope things improve.
I also end up thinking about landlords. I’ve been in places like this a lot in my life, and it always feels like I give too much and get too little. Landlords want their money. Hotels want their money. Businesses want their money. And they will charge you for everything that they can. Yet, when things go wrong, it’s not like they ever give you any money back or give you a discount. I’ve talked about this in relation to hotels many times before. They often post a list in your room of all the money you will have to pay them if you damage anything in the room. But what about the other way around? What about the jackhammers going on all day long for day after day? Shouldn’t I get a 25% discount for that? Now there is no water. Shouldn’t I be compensated for that?
It’s mainly my fault, I guess, because I never stand up for myself. I don’t make demands. Even when I moved into this room, I spent my own money to make it livable. The showerhead was broken. So I just went out and bought a new one and installed it. It seemed easier to do that myself than try to talk to my landlords and then have them traipsing in and out for days and disrupting my life. There was a clothes rack in the room, but no hangers. So I bought my own. There is no mirror in the bathroom, so I bought my own. There were no hooks in the bathroom, so I bought and installed my own. I do that all the time. And I guess in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking that since I’m being so nice to my landlords, to the hotels, to the business owners, to my employers, when the time comes when I have a problem, they will reciprocate and they will help me. But, of course, they don’t. They never do. They just want their money, and they will never cut you a break.
Luckily, for whatever reason, the water disruption hasn’t affected me this morning. There was water in my shower room. I had water in buckets available, but I didn’t need them. I don’t know if that means the water is back permanently. It might disappear again. But it was a nice break to be able to take a normal shower and have water pouring out of the tap. The water was quite brown, as it turned out. I heard that the water was turned off because they needed to clean the water reservoirs. And I’m thinking that a lot of sediment and other dirt got into the water supply, and the water will be brown for a while. But that’s okay. I’m not drinking it. Just taking showers and shaving.
And I think that is it for my stories this morning. It is time to try to apply for a visa for Indonesia.