Monday October 21, 2024
5:32 a.m. My Room at the House
Port Dickson, Malaysia
(4,149 words)
I’m thinking about going to the Paklang Kopitiam when they open at 8 a.m. The first thing I was going to do was settle into my corner table and write about the events of the last couple of days. However, I got out of bed a bit earlier this morning, so I figure I might as well have a cup of coffee and do some rambling here in my room.
On Saturday, I had plans to get my bike worked on, and that’s what I ended up doing. In fact, it took pretty much the entire day, and it was an exhausting day in its way. Plus, I got very little done. It all ended up being mainly a waste of time. That always happens to me. I don’t set out to spend so much time on a tiny, trivial task, but that’s what ends up happening. In this case, the trivial task was welding my old kickstand back together. I never would have bothered trying to fix it if I thought it would end up taking days of work. It’s not that important. However, I thought it would be a simple matter to drop into a welding shop and have some guy weld the broken piece back on. I thought it could be done in five minutes. And if that were the case, it would be worth the effort. So I’ve been looking for a welding shop for a long time and going to a bunch of places and asking people about welding shops. And that has been pointless. I haven’t been able to find any welders.
There was one shop I remembered that I wanted to try. One day, I happened to spot a corner shop that appeared to specialize in repairing outboard motors. Just from glancing at the place, it looked like they could do anything there. I didn’t specifically see welding equipment or signs of welding, but you’d think that a guy who makes his living repairing engines and boats and ski jets and household appliances would occasionally have to weld something. So on Saturday morning I went there on my bicycle. I also had spots marked on my pannier racks where I wanted holes drilled. I had done some testing and experimenting to figure out how and where I could mount tripod ball heads, and I put a small yellow sticker on the places that I thought would work.
My original idea was to go to a bicycle shop around the corner to get the holes drilled. That was actually my main goal for the day. I brought along my kickstand just in case I stumbled across a welder. However, as is often the case, I was too early and the bicycle shop was closed. From there, I rode to Big Sista and had some wanton mee. I figured I might as well have breakfast as I waited for the world to wake up around me. After the wanton mee, I rode my bike to the boat repair place. There wasn’t a lot of activity when I showed up. But I did see one man sitting at a workbench. He was bent over a smartphone, as almost everyone is these days. And I spoke to him twice without him noticing or hearing me. I raised my voice even louder on the third attempt, and he finally looked up.
I was pleased to find out that he could speak a little bit of English. I knew that communicating my needs wouldn’t be easy, and even a small amount of a common language would be helpful. As it turned out, I’m not convinced he really understood what I needed, but he seemed to get the idea, and he said that he could do it for me. Right from the start, I was worried. I have no experience with welding, but I’ve been around it and I’ve seen it done, so I have a vague sense of what a person would do if they were getting prepared to weld something. And this guy wasn’t doing any of those things. In fact, he kept talking about glue. He even showed me a bottle of what looked like ordinary bargain-brand super glue. I knew that gluing my kickstand back together would be pointless. We’re not talking about putting the handle back on a tea cup or sticking the broken head of a porcelain swan back on. This is a piece of metal that will be under a lot of stress. However, he insisted on this glue idea, and he indicated that it’s not just glue. He would use glue and an orange powder. I’d never seen this technique, but he insisted this was as strong as welding. Of course, I didn’t believe that for a second, but I was thinking that maybe this was just the first stage. Perhaps his plan was to clean up the edges of the two pieces to be welded together and then stick them together using glue and orange powder just to hold them in place. And THEN he would do the welding. So I just let him get on with it.
These sorts of repairs are always difficult to manage when there is a language barrier AND you are dealing with someone who considers himself an expert. It’s difficult for me to communicate all the nuances of the job. For example, not only was a part of the kickstand broken, one screw was also rusted into place. I’ve never been able to remove the screw. No one has. However, it isn’t a problem. The screw is in the right place and screwed into the perfect depth for me to just put the kickstand on the bike. I never have to adjust it, so it doesn’t matter that it is rusted into place. I tried to tell this to the guy, but he concluded that it would be easier to work on the kickstand if he could separate it into two parts. And that required removing that screw. Plus, it seemed like a reasonable repair to attempt. I didn’t want him to do it, and I tried to tell him that it wasn’t important. In fact, it would be better for me if he didn’t. But I couldn’t communicate that, and he started trying to get the screw out. It wasn’t easy. He did all the usual things that a person would initially do. He tried to use brute force. That failed. Then he tried heating it up. That failed. And eventually, he went hard core and he got out a grinder and cut right through the screw. I guess he figured he could more easily remove half the screw at a time. He eventually was successful. He kept applying a lot of heat, and he used a tabletop vice and a massive set of vice grips. And I think he drilled out the rest of the screw. It seemed like a lot of unnecessary work to me, but I wasn’t able to stop him.
And once the screw was removed, he set about applying his glue and orange powder technique. When he was done with that, he handed it back to me. I was still hoping that the actual welding would start now, but he insisted that welding wasn’t necessary. All I could do was take him at his word. I couldn’t force him to weld. I didn’t even know if he had welding equipment or knew how to weld. Then I asked him to drill the holes in my pannier racks, and that went relatively smoothly. He was the type of mechanic who doesn’t worry that much about precision and prep and looks. If you want a hole drilled, he’s happy to do it, and he will just grab the nearest drill and start drilling. I gave him a bolt that I needed the hole for. I assumed he would carefully measure the bolt’s diameter and then choose a drill bit to match. But that wasn’t how he worked. And he just drilled a hole with whatever bit was in the drill. And then when that turned out to be too small, he used some kind of weird cone-shaped bit to do something else. But the holes were still too small. So now he changed the bit and did it all again. He eventually got the job done, but he drilled each hole three times. He got there in the end. He just took the long road to get there.
Once all the work was completed, I asked him how much it would cost, and he said it was free of charge. He wasn’t going to charge me anything. I hopped on my bike and rode back to the house. And I was quite eager to put on the old kickstand. And here I made a mistake. I was so eager that I quickly removed the new kickstand. I guess I had this idea that I wanted to set the old kickstand in place to make sure that it still fit. And I had to remove the new kickstand to do it. So I removed the new kickstand and its multiple bolts and parts. But then things went off the rails, as I expected. I picked up my old kickstand to examine it up close, and I bent it just a little bit with my fingers, and it snapped in half. The part that he had super glued together just snapped off. I barely applied any force at all. I just twisted a little bit with my fingers, and it snapped right off. It was laughable. It drove home for me that sometimes you have to trust your own instincts. I often find myself in the position of dealing with so-called experts. And I often have the feeling that I know more than they do. I’m no genius, but even I have lived long enough and had enough experience in this world to know that you can’t reattach broken pieces of metal for a bicycle with super glue. It’s not going to hold. But the expert kept insisting that it would work, so I had no choice but to let him do it.
In the moment, I decided to go back to the shop. I had spent so much time on this job that I was in the mood to see it through. I figured since I was in the thick of it already, I might as well just hop on the bike and go back there and show him that his super glue job had already broken. He’d already done the work of fixing all the rusted screws and he’d cleaned up the edges. So, 60% of the job was already done. All he had to do was fire up the welder. But when I got back there, the shop was empty. I didn’t bother waiting around. I looked around the place carefully this time, and I didn’t see any welding equipment anywhere. So I concluded that he couldn’t do any welding anyway.
I rode my bike up and down the main street for a while, and I dropped in at a couple of car repair places, but none of them had welding gear. One man said he knew a place, and he gave me directions. Of course, that worked out pretty much how you would expect. He didn’t know the name of the place and couldn’t really pinpoint it for me on Google Maps. But I rode my bike there anyway, and I did find the used car lot he told me about. And this welding shop was supposed to be behind it. All I found behind it was a wooden shack of some variety. But there were a couple of men there doing mechanical things, and I asked them about welding my kickstand. But as soon as they understood that it was aluminum, they said they couldn’t do it. As I knew myself, it requires special tools and techniques to weld aluminum.
A funny thing is that while I was trying to find this shop, my bicycle’s seat collapsed. I had been adjusting the height earlier, and I hadn’t tightened the seatpost bolt enough. And the seat collapsed to its lowest point. And now I was reduced to riding around on this bike like it was a clown bike. It was so ridiculous. And simply riding around that part of Port Dickson was exhausting. There was so much traffic and so many one-way streets and barriers. I figured while I was out, I might as well get something to eat, so I dropped by my favorite rojak and cendol place. But it was packed. I tried a few times to get a table, but I failed each time. I was getting more and more stressed out and irritable. I decided to just go to 7-Eleven and get some cold milk. I thought I could sit inside in air conditioned comfort and drink some milk and feel better. But, of course, the two tables at 7-Eleven were also occupied. I was getting more and more annoyed with life. I was annoyed with myself for wasting another day of my life on something as stupid as trying to fix a kickstand. How is it that 90% of my life ends up being devoted to trivia and pointless tasks?
The only thing I accomplished on Saturday was getting the holes drilled, and I figured I might as well at least do a test with mounting the 360 camera. I had been shooting video the whole day on my GoPro recording some of these events, and I thought I would finish the video by actually testing the new mounting system. I wasn’t in the mood anymore and I had no energy, but I had started the video, and I needed a conclusion. I took my bicycle and mounted the invisible selfie stick on the back and rode up and down the road outside the house. Then I moved the selfie stick to a couple of different positions. The test was relatively successful. The biggest problem was that with the selfie stick fully extended, it was pretty bouncy and the camera bobbed up and down a lot. I would like to have a firmer selfie stick.
While I was doing this test, I rode by my old house to see if Nizam was sitting outside, and to my delight, he was. I pulled up on my bike and joined him for an hour. I had a cup of instant coffee and we chatted. I found out that he and KY and another friend had gone on a 3-day road trip to somewhere on the east coast. Nizam mentioned a bunch of names of places, but I didn’t recognize any of them. Nizam happened to be gone on the exact same days that there was no water in Port Dickson, so he missed all the bother and excitement. He didn’t even know about the water service disruption.
Sunday was not an eventful day. I was somewhat tired and stressed out about the events of the last little while, and I found it difficult to summon the energy to do anything. I had a bunch of 360 videos from my tests that I needed to reframe, and most of the day was spent doing that. Reframing 360 video and copying other video files always takes so much longer than you’d think. It’s a task you think you’ll accomplish in a minute or two so that you can then move on to something more important. And then it ends up requiring the entire day. Part of the problem, as always, was the size of the video files. I really have to forget about shooting in 4K. I don’t have the equipment to handle it. I’m thinking that even if I do manage to pull off this Sumatra cycling trip, I will shoot video in 1080p the entire time. I’m so tired of the 4K difficulties. It’s a waste of time to spend entire days just copying video files.
In my mind, the Sumatra trip is getting bigger and more and more focused on cycling. I’m tired of being a YouTube-style tourist. Nobody cares about the videos I shoot anyway. So I might as well just do what comes naturally and turn this trip into more of an expedition. The idea I’m developing is to NOT get bogged down exploring any one place. I’m thinking about cycling to Lake Toba, then to Sibolga, and then maybe even to Takengon. Sibolga and Takengon have both been on my radar for a long time. I’ve just never summoned the time and energy to go there.
9:06 a.m.
I’m at Paklang Kopitiam now. I’ve been here for just over an hour, and I’m happily sipping on an ice-cold cham. To my surprise, my tasks have gone relatively smoothly. I came here mainly so that I can connect the VivoBook to WiFi and sign in to my various online accounts, such as my Google account, my Microsoft account, WhatsApp, and other things. I was anticipating running into roadblocks and deadends almost instantly. I just assumed that they would ask for some kind of security verification that I would be unable to complete. That often happens. However, I was able to sign in to Google with just the usual username, password, and security code. And then I did the same thing with my Microsoft account. The one difference is that I was prompted to allow the system to use a Passkey, which is essentially a PIN or Face ID or fingerprint. I don’t really understand all that, but I figured I might as well. I’d already added my fingerprint to the reader on this laptop, and it worked well. Again I thought my attempt to set up a Passkey would fail, but it worked. I have to say that I am a bit confused about things in general. I have gotten so used to working in a world dominated by Google, Android, and the MacBook that suddenly swimming in the waters of a Windows laptop feels odd. I’m not always sure about what is going on. For example, this laptop still had a Local Account on it in the name of Lim’s son, Sean. It was his laptop long ago. Of course, I have changed the password and I have added my fingerprint. I am making the laptop mine. And then I signed in to both Google and Microsoft. Yet, the name Sean keeps popping up because that is the name of the Local Account. And I don’t know what a Local Account is exactly. How is it different from my Microsoft Account? Is it necessary to have one? Can I delete Sean’s account and then add my own? I figured out that I could just change the name, so I did that. And now there is only one Local Account on this laptop, and it is in my name. But I don’t really understand what I did or what is going on.
The main motivation for signing in to my Microsoft account today was to gain access to the Microsoft Store. I needed that access because every time I tried to play a video from my GoPro Hero 12 on this laptop, I was told that it couldn’t play. This laptop doesn’t have the codecs installed to play H.265 (HVEC) videos. And apparently, I could buy the appropriate codec from the Microsoft Store for 4 ringgit. But I don’t think I’d ever done that before. I have the Google Play Store set up with automatic payments. But I don’t have that for the Microsoft Store. And I found myself unclear about the differences. What is the Google Store for as opposed to the Microsoft Store? When do I need one and not the other? As I said, it’s been a long time since I’ve swum in the waters of Windows and Microsoft.
I assumed that once I had signed in to my Microsoft account, I would have automatic access to the Microsoft Store. I thought it would just appear and I would be logged in. But that didn’t happen. And to be honest, I wasn’t even sure where the Microsoft Store was. I eventually found it on the Taskbar. But when I launched it, I wasn’t signed in. Signing in to the Microsoft Store was separate from signing in to your Microsoft Account. So I did that, and I think it worked. And then I wasn’t sure about how to get the right codec or codec pack. Eventually, I realized that when I clicked on a GoPro Hero 12 video file to play it, I was given an error message about the missing codec and a link to the Microsoft Store to download the appropriate one for 4 ringgit. I did that, and then I had to pay for it. I was nervous about adding my credit card details, but I saw that I could also use Digi and my phone. This was brand new territory for me, and I decided to do that. At first, I was confused because in my head, I mixed up Touch’n’Go with Digi. I simply entered my Didi phone number and PIN and thought the payment would go through. But I forgot that the Digi credit was not the same as Touch’n’Go credit. And I had zero credit on Digi. It’s impossible to keep any credit there because the Digi system just takes it all. Whatever you leave there just disappears over time, and I never know what happens to it. So what I needed to do was move some money from my Touch’n’Go account to the Digi account. And then once the money was there, I was able to use Digi and my phone to pay for the codec pack on the Microsoft Store. And then it was downloaded and installed. It took a surprisingly long time to complete the download and install, and I breathed a sigh of relief when it finished. But then I realized that all this time, I was trying to play these video files with Windows Media Player. And I would normally never use Windows Media Player. I would use something like VLC. I just hadn’t thought about or downloaded VLC yet. And for all I knew, VLC didn’t even need these codecs. Maybe it was only Windows Media Player that was missing the codecs, and VLC had them built in already. In any event, I had already purchased the H.265 codecs. And then I downloaded VLC and got it up and running. And then I downloaded and installed and signed into WhatsApp.
Having done all that, I would consider this to be a very successful cham session. I’m still bothered by the fact that Sean appears all over this laptop, and I don’t know how all accounts work. I was just trying to set up Microsoft’s One Drive, and it kept asking me to sign in, which I did. But then it wanted to store my One Drive files in User Sean’s folder. And that bugs me. So then I was wondering if I needed to delete Sean as a user. But how do you do that? Does it matter? Perhaps I should take the time to do a complete factory reset on this laptop and start from scratch with only me as a user. Then perhaps things would make more sense. But I don’t know how that works with Windows. Can I just do that? Or do I need login credentials for Windows? Anyway, I made some progress, and I’m very happy to be typing away on this laptop. And overall, I’m happier in this Windows environment than I was in the much more limited and confusing world of the MacBook. Everything is just so much easier to do and more intuitive. Everything makes sense to me as I try to do even simple tasks, such as move files from one folder to another.
And I guess that is it for now. My other big task for today is to withdraw some money for my Sumatra trip. I want to have some Indonesian rupiah in advance. There’s a chance that when I arrive in Tanjung Balai, they won’t accept my visa. And then my only option will be to buy another VOA at the dock. And for that, I would need some cash. Also, the ferry boat staff used to check to make sure you had enough money to buy one a VOA. That has changed now that you can get an E-VOA, but they might still ask to see some money. I just have to walk down the waterfront to the Maybank and try to withdraw money. Perhaps I can also change money.