How Simply Changing Hotels Turns Into a Planet Doug Odyssey

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

I lost track of the time, and I was unable to rebook my room at my hotel. So I had to move to one of my other regulars. This behind-the-scenes podcast is all about the tiny adventures that move entailed plus stories of my ongoing struggles with the technology of the modern world. And I threw in some Planet Doug and other YouTuber stories for good measure.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to Planet Doug, behind the scenes for Friday, January 16th, 2026. I really had to think, what month is it? What day is it? What year is it? I think I got that straight. And I’m sitting in Planet Doug Studios, aka my hotel. I’m just sitting on the bed and I’m doing something a little bit different. Not to dive into technology right out of the gate, but I’m shooting this with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II camera. So, if it looks different, sounds different, anything like that, that’s why. I’m not shooting this with my GoPro. And that, of course, is because I’m back in Malaysia and I was reunited with a bag that I kept in storage here. And in that bag, I put my Olympus camera and my three… I have three Olympus lenses right now. I didn’t want to bring it with me to Indonesia because it just makes my bag so much heavier. But since I was reunited with my bag in storage and the camera is sitting right there, I thought, hey, why not break it out and play around with it a little bit. It’s a bit of a beast of a camera. Again, not to go too far into technology right out of the gate, but Olympus at the beginning was very much a photo-oriented camera system and it could shoot video, but it was not a priority for them. Like the original OM-D E-M5 came out, I think in 2012, and that camera could shoot video, but it wasn’t really designed to do that. And then in the Mark II, which is the one that I have, they added a bit more features for shooting video, but the menu system and the focusing system, everything about the camera didn’t really dive into video too much. And the video settings and the photo settings are all kind of mixed and matched, and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. If you jump up to the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III, then they really came to grips with video. They added phase-detect autofocus. And I’ve never had one. I’ve never even used one of those cameras at all. I’ve never even had a chance to test one, but I’m told that video settings and photo settings are more separated, so you can kind of remember what’s going on. With this camera, I just get confused all the time. It takes a long time to figure out how to use it.

So, I’m back in Malaysia, back in Kuala Lumpur. And when I got here, I was originally staying at the Hotel Raja Boat, which is a perfectly acceptable hotel. It’s in the Chow Kit district of Kuala Lumpur. Very interesting neighborhood. I like it here. And the Raja Boat has the best prices that I can find anyway. Maybe you can find a better price if you dive all the way down into one of the really horrible backpacker hostels in Chinatown. They’ve been around for decades and you can occasionally get a single room at one of these places that might be a few ringgit cheaper. But yeah, look at the reviews. You know, if you want to go and you want to have some fun, go to Google Maps or Agoda and look at the backpacker hostels in Chinatown, the ones that have been around a long time, and look at the reviews. Look at the one-star reviews, and they can be a bit of a hoot. But yeah, they’re not great places and they can be quite uncomfortable. So, in terms of places that are reasonable, the Hotel Raja Boat seems to be the best option that I’ve been able to track down. So, I stayed there for a few nights, but then I forgot how popular that hotel could be. And then when I went to renew my room to stay longer, all the rooms were gone. Every room was taken, booked in advance. So, I had no choice but to move out. And in this neighborhood, another big choice for me is the Crossroads Hotel. So, I booked a room at Crossroads and I moved in here yesterday. No, day before yesterday. Yeah, the entire day essentially was gone because moving from one hotel to another hotel, that can kind of take up your entire day. So, I just spent the morning editing videos and doing YouTube stuff. And then you have to check out at 12:00, but then you can’t check in until 2:00. So, you got 2 hours where you’re just sitting in the hotel lobby. I mean, you could go to a coffee shop or something, but there was no point for me to do that. So, I just hung out at the Crossroads lobby for 2 hours until I could move in. And then you’ve got to unpack and settle in and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, the whole day was basically just changing hotels and working on YouTube videos, things like that. And I feel bad in a way telling these stories about the hotels that I stay in, but I don’t know. I just I’m focused on systems and procedures and customer service and moving into a hotel like the Crossroads is always a lot of fun. So, it’s a bit of a hoot. So, I have some stories to tell related to moving into this hotel. The one story relates to, well, I guess just arriving because again, if you really want to have some fun, go to Google Maps, click on the Crossroads Hotel listing, look at the reviews, but just select the one-star reviews. And there are a lot of them. And when you go through the one-star reviews, they’re quite funny. All the horrible things that people say about this hotel. But what I know from my experience staying here, it really depends on circumstances like which room you get because some rooms here are really, really nice. And people who get those rooms, they leave a two- or three-star review like it was pretty kind of nice. You know, they don’t get upset about the place. But if you get one of the bad rooms, it’s a big drop down and it really is a matter of chance which room you get can color your experience of staying here. So, there’s that. And even a room like this, the one I ended up with is okay. You know, it’s a really nice room. I’m comfortable here, but it depends on what your expectations are in terms of low-budget accommodation. If I wanted to, I could go around this room and take pictures of everything that’s dirty, everything that’s broken, everything that’s covered in mold, the paint has torn off, there’s dirt in the corners, you know, I could really take pictures to make this room look awful if I wanted to. And the mattress itself, I mean, it’s… I don’t know how old the hotel is. I don’t know, 20, 25 years old. But this mattress has been here for all 25 years. And you know, you sit down on this mattress and it’s like, “Oh, yay.” You know, how many people have slept on this mattress because it’s just sort of collapsed the springs and it’s a very saggy kind of mattress. I sit down on one of these mattresses and I don’t even notice it because that’s what I’m accustomed to. But if you came from a really nice hotel with firm, new mattresses and then you sit down on this one, you’d be like, “Holy cow, what’s going on with this mattress?” So, you could come away thinking that, yeah, it’s not such a great room. Even getting in through the door, they gave me a room key, like a card, a room card, and a key. And I don’t think I’ve ever had that before at this hotel. And the front desk clerk was trying to explain to me what was going on with that, but his English isn’t that great. He doesn’t speak up. He doesn’t make eye contact. There’s no real… he’s not really trying to communicate that much. So, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I thought, “Okay, what is this key for?” I thought maybe there’d be something in the room, a wall safe or something. Yeah, I didn’t know why I got a key, a card and a key. So, I come up to the room and I’ve got the card and I’m going beep because there is a scanner on the outside of the door and I go beep, you know, and the door’s not opening. And the door’s not opening. And I’m like, so now I have to go all the way back down to the lobby and get them to reset the card. Like, ah, right out of the gate, there’s a problem. But then I kind of looked more closely at the door. And underneath the key scanner, there’s like a black, like a very dark circle. And what the heck is that circle? And you kind of get down on your hands and knees and you’re peering into this circle and it’s an old-style key slot, but it’s so recessed and it’s so dark in there it doesn’t really jump out at you as a key slot. But I look in there, oh, that’s where the key goes. So, I thought maybe I’ve got to take my card and my key and do them in combination like beep beep and turn the key or turn the key and then beep and then do the handle. I don’t know. It’s like you’re breaking into Fort Knox or something. But first, you got to get your key into that keyhole and you can’t see it. So, you’re doing it blind essentially because you’re putting your key into this hole and then you’re feeling around for the slot, you know, like where is it? Where is it? Now, you got to get down on hands and knees and get out the flashlight on your phone. You’re shining it in there and you finally get it lined up and get the key in there. And then I didn’t know what to do because, you know, I’m turning the key. Okay, I’m opening the door. Now, I go beep beep and I turn the door handle and the door handle has collapsed. It’s like hanging down like this. So, I’m like, do I have to lift it up to the top or lift it up and then go down? Anyway, I could not get through this door using the card and the key and the handle. It was so complicated. And I finally figured out that even though the key card is beeping and the scanner works, it has no function. It’s just broken. And even though it has a door handle, it is also broken. It doesn’t do anything. It just flops up and down. So, all you need to do to get in the room is the key. So, you turn the key and push on the door and it opens because the key opens the door and then you push it in. It’s like, ah, you know, it took me forever just to get through the door and then I finally got inside and yeah, that was my very… was one of my first adventures. So, I can see someone coming from a five-star hotel, and I think this one is listed as three or four stars, and they might think, “Oh, three-star hotel, and you look at the photos of the rooms, and the photos look really, really nice.” So, you think, “Oh, wow. This must be a pretty nice hotel.” And look at the price, it’s a bargain. So, people coming here with those expectations and then fighting with that door are not going to be happy. And then they get in and they sit on this mattress. And then they go in the bathroom and it’s got this vent up there, right? The exhaust vent and it’s just black. It’s just jammed with dirt and grit that has accumulated for years. So like when they come in here to clean the room, they kind of do a perfunctory cleaning of the sink and the floor and the toilet. But the cleaning staff in 20 years, it’s never occurred to anybody to look up and go, “Oh man, maybe we should dust off that vent, you know.” So people coming in seeing all of that could have a very negative impression of the hotel. And it begins from the beginning. I’ve talked about this hotel in the past where they used to have a lobby on the main floor. So when you go in through the front doors, there’s a desk and that would be where you check in. But the desk has been completely abandoned. It doesn’t do anything anymore. There’s no staff there. And the check-in desk is on the what they call here the first floor, not the ground floor. But you have to go up one level to get to the desk. And then you’re trying to figure out, well, how do I even get into this place? Because the front has all these various buzzers and beepers and pads and things, and you don’t know which one is connected to the hotel. Nothing is clearly labeled. It’s hard to tell you’re even at the right place. But of course, I’ve been to this place before, so I know that there’s a doorbell and you press the doorbell and then someone up there will open the door for you and you got to listen and you got to run open the door and then you take the elevator up to the first floor. But then when you come out of the elevator, for some reason they must be really hard-pressed for cash because they turn off all the lights and it’s like dark in there. You feel like you’re going into some sort of an abandoned warehouse. It’s so dark. And on my previous stays here, I talked about how there’s one hotel clerk who has no facial expression at all. Like customer service levels are at below zero. And I joke that it’s sort of like he kind of struck me as like a serial killer and that’s what I called him at the time. But there’s another hotel clerk who is roughly the same in terms of customer service. Very, very poor, but at least he makes eye contact. And I got a little bit of a smile out of him, but I can see somebody showing up. Can’t get through the front door. And then they don’t know where the check-in counter is. And they go up to the first floor and it’s pitch black up there. It’s so gloomy. You know, you’re like blinking your eyes like, “Am I in the right place? Is this place empty and abandoned?” And so gloomy and dark and then if you go up to the front desk and it’s the serial killer desk clerk who doesn’t even look at you, doesn’t acknowledge your arrival, you start to think wow what kind of a hotel is this, right? So I can see how people would get kind of a negative impression. And they have some other unusual systems that you sort of need to be aware of. So they do want a 50 ringgit deposit but you don’t get anything in return. So, most times when you give a deposit, you get a little receipt or something. You know, here’s your 50 ringgit receipt. But here, they just take your money. And every time I’ve stayed here, I always get the deposit back. But, of course, that means there has to be somebody at the front desk when you’re checking out. But luckily, there always has been someone there when I’ve checked out. So, I’ve become accustomed to the system, but another guest might find that a bit startling. And they usually have a cleaning fee, which always annoyed me, five ringgit cleaning fee. But this time they didn’t charge me the cleaning fee. So maybe it’s gone or maybe they just forgot to do it. Or maybe the guy decided to be nice to me because even though it was the nice hotel clerk, the one who gives you a little bit of a smile, I gave him a little bit of a hard time. And the funny thing, it was him that brought the subject up. I wasn’t even going to mention it, but he made such a big point about it that I kind of replied. And the thing is that when I booked the room on Agoda, you know you choose your dates and then it says choose your room. So choose room and I’m looking at all the rooms and there was a standard queen available and you look at the pictures and it looks very nice. It has a nice window. It has furniture. It has this. It has that. Those are the pictures of the standard queen on Agoda, which is the room that I normally get. So, I knew I may not get that room because I’ve stayed here in the past, but I mean, that’s what the photos were of. And I just booked that room. And then when I showed up and I showed the guy my booking and he looked on his computer, he kind of panicked a little bit because he knew me. We’ve had discussions in the past where they gave me this deluxe queen room that had a window, but it also has a connecting door to another standard twin or no, a standard queen room. So, there’s a standard queen and a deluxe queen with a door that connects them. And then when I got the standard queen, I couldn’t stay in that room because everybody in the neighboring room just smoked day and night. Just so much smoking and all the smoke came through the connecting door and poured into my room and it was just awful. I had this really strong allergic reaction to hotel cigarette smoke. So then I eventually got the room with the window and the people in the other room were still smoking, new neighbors, but they were also smokers. And the smoke still came under the door into my new room, but because it had a window, I could open the window and then some of the smoke would get out of the room. So I kind of, you know, we had this discussion in the past about how I would like a room with a window. Anyway, so I show up at the hotel two days ago and then the guy looks at my reservation. Then he looks up, “Your room has no window. There’s no window in your room.” Like, you understand? No, no window. No window. And then he told me that there was some sort of a big event going on in Malaysia right now in Kuala Lumpur, which doesn’t surprise me because there’s always something, a summit, a conference, an international exhibition. There’s always something going on and they always say our hotel is fully booked because of this event. And he said to me, you know, oh, you you booked a room with no window. And he kept making that point that it was my mistake. You you booked a room, no window. You booked a room, no window. And I’m like, yeah, relax. You know, I’m I wasn’t even thinking about it. Now I am thinking about it, but I just needed a room. I don’t really care that much about the room. But he made such a point that I made a mistake and oh, you should have booked a room with the window, but you didn’t. And he was being apologetic because he was saying, “I can’t upgrade you because our hotel is fully booked because of this big event.” But he made such a big deal about it being my mistake. I thought I would push back a little bit. And I said to him, “Well, on Agoda, my room has a window.” And then I show I called it up on Agoda on my phone and I said, “Yeah, this is the room I booked. Look, look at all the photos. Photo, window.” So why doesn’t my room have a window? And he says, “Oh, that is the deluxe queen suite. Like that is their most expensive room. Those are what the photos are of.” I’m like, “Well, yeah, but so now it’s actually your mistake because you put the wrong photos on the listing. This is the room I booked with the window. Look, you can see the picture. That’s the room I booked. And then of course they do they start the blame game. He said, “Oh, no. That that’s Agoda. That’s Agoda.” And again, I wasn’t going to give the poor guy a hard time. I honestly wasn’t. But now he started making excuses. And I hate it when people make excuses that aren’t logical. Just apologize and we can move on. But don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes and tell me that it was my mistake. Oh, no, no, it was Agoda’s mistake. So, I was like, “No, no, no, no. This is your Agoda listing. You can change it. If you want to, you can go into Agoda and make sure the photos match the room.” And then he… No, no, no, no, no. Don’t, don’t give me this nonsense about how Agoda did this to you. This is your listing. You control it, you can change it. And he kept saying over and over, he kept saying, “No, no, no, Agoda.” And that kind of annoyed me. So, I kept pushing back a little bit with a smile and with a laugh, but I just really didn’t want him to get away with it this time. And then he finally kind of caved in a little bit because he knew I was not going to give in this time. And then he decided to switch the blame to the boss. And he said, “Yeah, I I told the boss. I told the boss because we’ve had this talk in the past and yeah but the boss you know the boss the boss. So, you know, first it was my mistake, then it was Agoda’s mistake, then it was the boss’s mistake, you know. Anyway, so at that point I just sort of let it go and but yeah, like I said, I wasn’t even going to bring it up, but he made such a big deal out of the room having no window and and you you you oh, you made a mistake, you know. So, I thought, “No, no, no, no, no. I did not make a mistake. Your hotel made a decision to deceive customers. And I know it’s obviously a strategy. Why not put the nicest photos on every room? And then people will book the rooms because they look at the photos and they look really nice. And then by the time they book the room and they get here and they realize they’re fake pictures, well, it’s too late. You’ve already got their money. And my theory about this is that hotels are always fully booked. I don’t know why that is. Why don’t people just stay home? How can there be so many people in the world on the move all the time that all of the tens of thousands worldwide, hundreds of thousands of hotels are all fully booked every night, right? So it I don’t think there’s any incentive for hotels to do a good job because they’re going to be full anyway. No matter what the Crossroads does in terms of their Agoda listings, no matter how many customers they annoy, no matter how many one-star reviews they get, every night, every room is full. So it’s a good business to be in. That’s my theory anyway. I never see people in the hallways. I never see hundreds of people checking in and checking out. It’s like a ghost hallway out there. But whenever you look online, you can see if you try to book a room, say at the Raja Boat for tonight, you’re too late. You know, all the rooms will be fully booked. So, yeah, it’s a good business to be in. So anyway, the front desk clerk then he says, “Well, I can’t upgrade you to a window room now. But in two days, you know, because I’d been giving him such a hard time, he’s now trying to be nicer to me, giving me better service.” And he said, “In two days, I will I will upgrade you to a room with a window.” And I wasn’t… I didn’t really care that much about it. Most of the time I prefer a room without a window because then it’s darker, quieter, and you’re normally… Yeah, it’s just I don’t need a window. It’s not like I’m standing there gazing out over the plaza. You know, all I’m going to be looking at is a busy street of traffic and or an alleyway or something. It’s not like there’s gorgeous… I’m not in the Swiss Alps here, so having a window doesn’t offer anything. It can only offer bad things. The only reason I like the window room here is if it’s connected to a room where everybody is smoking, then I can open the window and get some of that smoke out the window. So, that’s the only reason I would like a window to begin with. And the rooms here with the window are the deluxe rooms. So, chances are you’re going to get a working refrigerator and a working kettle and a working hair dryer in the bathroom. They just look nicer. They’re their best rooms other than the suites, which I’ve never seen. But anyway, he said he could upgrade me. And I kind of went, “Yeah, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe.” It depended on what my room was going to be like because a friend of mine stayed here a long time ago on my recommendation because I’d only seen the Queen Deluxe. So, he saw the photos of my room and thought, “Wow, actually, that’s not a bad looking place.” He booked another Queen Standard room, but he got like one of the worst rooms I’ve ever seen. It was an awful room. And so I was thinking, well, if I get that room then, okay, I’ll upgrade, but maybe my room will be good. Who knows? So they gave me this room and it has the weird door. It has some paint falling off. It has the dirty air vent. It has the weird, very lumpy, saggy mattress. But overall, no, this is a great room. I prefer this one. And when I got in here, there’s no Wi-Fi. Again, Wi-Fi never reaches me no matter where I go. So, there’s no real Wi-Fi in this room. There’s like a trickle, just the tiniest little trickle. But for some reason, mobile internet is like super fast. I’m deep in the building with concrete all around me, but somehow a mobile internet signal reaches my phone. So, when I first moved in here, I had all kinds of mobile data. I had like 2,000 gigabytes of data and I just turned on a hotspot and I run everything off my phone, so I don’t even need the Wi-Fi. But yeah, I mean, it’s a big room. Air conditioner is powerful. There’s lots of furniture. There’s electrical outlets everywhere. Nice bathroom, hot water, mirror. So, yeah, it’s a great room and I’m very happy here. And I realized that even if he did offer me an upgrade to the window room, I don’t want it. Like if I had to choose between window and connecting door to annoying neighbors or no window and have no connecting doors in a very quiet room with no cigarette smoke, I’m going to stay here. Especially since I have the good mobile internet. So, I was worried that now this guy was going to go on his computer and move things all over the place where I have no choice but I have to move to the Deluxe Queen and I don’t want to. So, I went and I knew this was going to get me in trouble. Like the rule of thumb really is don’t do anything. Don’t try, especially when you’re overseas. Like if you ever try to do anything, you’re just going to end up in trouble. But I don’t know. I really wanted to make sure that this was clear. So I go down to the front desk. The same clerk is there. So this is like yesterday. Yeah. Yesterday I made this decision. And I went down there for another reason that I’ll talk about in a minute. And so when I was down there, I said to him, “Oh, by the way, my room that I’m in, I want to stay in this room. I don’t want to move. I want to stay in that room.” And this guy again, he doesn’t really listen. So he looked up. No, no, no move. No move. It’s full. Full full. So he’s pointing at the computer. Full. No, you can’t. You can’t move. And I know that that’s what I’m telling you. I want to stay in that room. I don’t want to move. He said, “No, no, you you can’t move. Can’t move.” Oh, no. I get it. I That’s what I’m telling you. I want to stay in this room. I don’t want… Oh, I just I just wanted to slap him around. And it really wasn’t a language problem. His English is more than good enough to deal with these things, but he’s like distracted, right? Everyone is so distracted if they’re bad at their job. He’s on the phone looking at his phone. He’s on the computer. He’s doing this and he’s sort of looking up at me and he’s just not paying any attention. And I’m trying to tell him, “Oh, good news. I don’t want to move. I want to stay in my room.” And his instinct is just to deny whatever it is I’m saying. No, no, no move. It’s full. Full full. Can’t move. I’m like, “Dude, that’s what I…” And I just shook my head. He said, “Okay, whatever.” You know, and I just had to leave because he was not going to focus and get the message. And I was a little bit annoyed because of the main reason why I went down. This is a little complicated, but stick with me here. So, I was using mobile internet with a data package which was working well, but then my data package expired. So suddenly, oh, I’ve got no internet access because my data package ran out. Well, it didn’t run out, but it expired. So now I needed to buy more data. But in order to buy data, like mobile data, I have to have Wi-Fi. And I hadn’t connected to Wi-Fi. So now I’m here in the room and I’m trying to buy data. Oh, no, no, I have to get Wi-Fi first. So now I’m looking around like what is the Wi-Fi password and there’s this little table with a glass top beside the bed and I noticed underneath the glass top there is a piece of paper and I looked at it and the paper has the Wi-Fi password. I took a picture of it. I’ll put the picture up on the screen. And as you can tell from that picture, it is a multi-generational photocopy. Like maybe in 1965, somebody made a photocopy of this piece of paper and then made a whole bunch of them and then use scissors to cut them out. But then those wore out or something and they made a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. And of course, every photocopy of a photocopy, the text gets less and less and less clear. I mean, if you look at the top of that thing, can you even make out the name of the hotel? It’s supposed to say Crossroads Hotel up there, but it’s just a bunch of squiggles because they’ve made so many copies of another copy of another copy. So, the password itself is in tiny lettering. With my unaided eyes, not a chance. Even with my glasses, I couldn’t read it on that piece of paper. They’re so small because they’re so badly reproduced. They’re just you can’t make them out. So, I’m staring at that thing and staring at that thing. I couldn’t make it out. So, I had to take a picture of it and then enlarge the picture so that I could see the Wi-Fi password. But even when I made it big enough to read, like I have a photo of it and I can zoom in. Now I can’t figure out what the characters are. I mean, they’re very unclear because of the photocopy of a photocopy, but it’s also filled with something like here’s my rule of thumb. You know, if I had my own universe and I could make the laws in my universe, one of my laws would be for hotel Wi-Fi passwords, you don’t have to make a complex password full of numbers and letters and special characters. Nobody is stealing your Wi-Fi anymore. Most people don’t even use Wi-Fi in hotels, I don’t think. Only YouTubers do, as far as I can make out. Everybody else just has mobile on their phone and they’re not plugging in a laptop, a tablet, three phones, and you know, so people don’t even use Wi-Fi much anymore. Everybody has access to the internet. Nobody is stealing your Wi-Fi. So if you’re going to have a Wi-Fi password, it should be one simple word. It can’t be two words because once you have two words you’re wondering oh is there a space with an underscore or is it together? You also can’t have proper names because as soon as you introduce a proper name you start thinking oh is it capitalized the first letter or not? So like if you said Crossroads Hotel as the password, now you’re wondering oh should the C be capitalized or not capital or lowercase? So no spaces, no two words, no proper nouns of any kind, no names. Just pick a simple noun of some kind, anything at all. Pick puppy. There’s your password. Everybody can read it. Puppy. And then you enter it and you’re done. And there’s no confusion about underscore, capitals, or again, you cannot, again, if I made the rules, you cannot use the letter I. You can’t use the L, you can’t use the T, and you can’t use a zero or an O because they all look the same. Right? The very first one here, it goes… I finally figured out it’s C R H W and then something something. And I’m looking at that. Okay. Is that a capital I? Is it an L? Is it the number one? And then the circle after that, is that a zero or is that a capital O? So this could be capital I zero. Could be capital I capital O. It could be L0. It could be L capital O. It could be the number one zero or the number one capital O. Right? There’s so many combinations. And then after this line with a and a circle, there’s another line with a circle, then a four, then another line, and then a seven. It’s like they chose this to be the most incomprehensible password imaginable. And I tried every combination I could think of. I was sitting here in the room going, “Okay,” making a list trying to figure out all the possible combinations, and it just wouldn’t work over and over. I’m going through every possible combination like I’m trying to break into a safe or something and trying every combination one by one. You know, there could be 100,000 possible combinations and you start at 0000001, you know, and you go through all 10 million of them until you stumble across the right one. That’s what I was doing. But even then, I had no confidence that that would work because for all I know, this could be an outdated password. Who knows? Maybe they haven’t. They’ve changed it to a new one, but they never bothered to change the notes in each room. So, eventually, I just gave up because I couldn’t connect. So, I went down to the front desk, same guy, and I showed him the photo and says, “Oh, I’m trying to connect to the Wi-Fi. Can you tell me what the Wi-Fi password is?” And then we ran into another problem. And this drives me crazy at hotels. They do this all the time. They’re trying to be helpful and then when you say like, “What is the password?” They will ask for your phone and then they take your phone and then they enter the password. Oh, here you go. But now you don’t know what the password is because they entered it on the phone. But now I want to enter it into my laptop and into my tablet. But there’s no way to get the password from your phone. You know what I mean? So I don’t want them to enter it. I want them to tell me what it is and I will write it down. And I just I said to him, “Yeah, I can’t, you know, do you know what the password is?” And he’s like, “Oh, give me your phone.” I’m like, “No, no, no. Just tell me the password.” He said, “No, here I’ll do it for you.” I’m like, “No, no, no, no. Just tell me what it is and then I will do it. And then he just kept insisting over and over, just give me your phone. I’m like, dude, you know, okay, now you’re giving me customer service. You’re trying to help me, but this is customer service I don’t want. You know, you got to learn these things. And then finally, he told me that the very first one was an L, a lowercase L. So now we got into this whole thing again where I’m trying to tell him that there’s a problem that you guys should fix. And I pointed out that can you see how old this is? Like a photocopy of a photocopy. It’s impossible for anyone to tell if that’s the number one, an L, or a capital I. Like it’s impossible to read. And then he said, “Oh, L.” I said, “Yeah, like what I’m saying is the way you’ve put it on this piece of paper. It’s too small. It’s too old. It’s too faded. And using L’s and ones and things is very, very confusing. I can’t figure out what it is.” And it’s an L. Yeah, I know it’s an L. You told me it’s an L. We’re done with that topic. Can we move on? I’m trying to give you an idea. Here you are at the front desk with hours on your hand every day. Why not take the initiative and recreate a brand new one, bigger, easier to read with clear… like maybe you can’t change the password. That could be the boss, but hey, you know, maybe it would be a good idea to get somebody to make this more legible for your customers. And it’s an L. It’s like I know it’s an L. Anyway, I finally figured out, okay, it’s an L, but then of course I still don’t know whether that’s a zero or a capital O. But yeah, so it’s C R H WL then 0 1 0417, you know. Yeah. So, that was my experience moving into the Crossroads. And what I’m thinking about doing, I may do it just because I’m passive-aggressive that way, is I think I’ll make my… I was daydreaming about this about making my own card. Like take this Wi-Fi card that’s illegible and then recreate it on my laptop and then bring it to a print shop and just have them print it out on an 8 1/2 by 11, you know, four on each page, you know, to make it twice the size that it is now and just make 30 or 40 of them, cut it out myself, and then just give it to the guy at the front desk. Here’s a stack. Like, what do you think? Maybe you could help all your guests out and make it easier for them to read the Wi-Fi. I mean, obviously, if I were working at this hotel, I would do that my very first day. You know, the first customer who came to me and said, “Oh, I I can’t read the Wi-Fi in my room.” I would go up to the room with the customer and like, “Oh, what?” Like, “Show me what you mean.” And I would look at that, go, “Oh, yeah, look at that. Yeah, that’s… No, nobody can read that.” So yeah, let me fix that. That day I would not go home until I had replaced it in all of the rooms. To me, I don’t know. You want to do a good job, right? And then you got time on your hands. What are you going to do? Just sit at the desk all day and do nothing? I like to work, you know? I love having projects. So, yeah, I would do it on my very first day on the job. And I’d probably be up here cleaning the vent as well. Well, I’m going to clean the vent myself before I check out of this room. I mean, it’s not that hard. Anyway, little things like that. So, anyway, here I am at the Crossroads Hotel and I’m very happy here. I’m happy in this room. I like the neighborhood. The price is too high for me, but I just came here from Sumatra where in Sumatra you got much nicer rooms for like a third of the price. So it’s like… I always feel a little bit annoyed here when I’m paying these higher prices getting less and then you have to pay the 10 ringgit tourism tax on top of that. That’s my my age-old problem, you know, coming back to Malaysia. But anyway, the story of moving into the Crossroads.

Not surprisingly, I have other problems with the modern world that I want to rant about. This was when I was back at the Hotel Raja Boat. I’m sitting there in my room doing my thing and I got an email notification. You know, I don’t have sound turned on, but it’s oh, I got an email. I open it and it was an email from Lazada Thailand that said, “Someone has logged into your account.” You know, it’s one of those notifications. Someone has logged in with an unknown device. Was this you? You know, if this was you, fine. Of course, it was all written in Thai, so I couldn’t read it anyway, but I got the gist. And then I looked at it and my first instinct was another one of these annoying scam emails because it didn’t say anything specific about me. It just said hi, and then the message and it had links, you know, something like Lazada scam notification. And it wants me to click on these links. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t obviously I don’t click on links in emails, just as a rule of thumb. But if it was a real email, I figured it would say dear and have my name or my email address at the very least something that identifies me because my name and address and phone number is in my Lazada Thailand account. So an official email, wouldn’t it specify something? And this one just said, “Hi.” So I thought, “Ah, it’s a scam.” And I just ignored it. And then later in that day in the evening, I started thinking about it, you know, and I thought, well, why don’t I just double-check just to be safe and I was going to log into my Lazada Thailand account and just see what’s going on because I had this Lazada account during the pandemic when I was living in Mae Sot in Thailand. And I remember using it because back in those days I was ordering little gadgets for my GoPro cameras and things like that, little adapters, like tiny little things. I remember using Lazada Thailand. And then I thought, where is my Lazada Thailand account? Like where is it? What is it? So, I went onto my phone and there’s the Lazada app and I thought, “Okay, so I have an app here and I clicked on it to open it, but it’s my Lazada Malaysia account.” So, I’m looking at that going, “All right, that’s Lazada Malaysia. Do I have a separate Lazada Thailand account?” I must have because all of those orders I placed from Thailand, they weren’t listed in this Lazada account. So I thought, okay, I must have a separate Lazada Thailand account, but where is it? You know, I’m going all over my phone. I don’t have a separate app. And I’m like, and Lazada has always confused me in this way. And I did a whole bunch of research. You know, my AI buddies helped me out here. And they explained to me, ah, the way Lazada works is there’s one app but that one app accesses different accounts. So if you want to go into your Lazada Thailand account you have to log in… whatever country you’re in, so it automatically opens Malaysia, but then you go into the settings and you change the country. It’s like ah. So I went into Malaysia Lazada, went into my menu settings. So I looked around, looked around and I found it. Oh, country. And I changed my country to Thailand. And that logged me out of Malaysia Lazada and then said, now you have to log into your Lazada Thailand account. So that requires a different password. So I thought, oh, do I even have a different password? Luckily, I use a password manager. So yeah, without that password manager, it’s a… like a one that I pay for, one of the premium ones. Without that, my life would have ended years ago because my life is so complex now. I can’t possibly keep track of all of my login credentials, all the information I need on a day-to-day basis. I let the password manager take care of that. So I opened up my password manager and I typed in Lazada and yeah, I got two listings. Lazada Malaysia, Lazada Thailand. Two different passwords. Ah, okay. It’s all making sense. So, I logged into my Lazada Thailand account and I looked at the orders first thing. I mean, it was good that I was able to log in to begin with because you think if somebody gained access to my account, the first thing they would do is change the password or something and lock me out, but I was still able to log in. And then I went to the orders because if somebody had access to my account and if there was some sort of a payment system in my account, they’d be ordering tons of things, getting them for free and charging it to my credit card or bank account or whatever. But I went into the orders and there were no new orders. Nothing ordered, nothing delivered, nothing received, nothing, you know, waiting to be packed. The only items were things I recognized that I ordered years ago during the pandemic. So I thought, huh, okay, so it must have been a scam email. And then I remember and I was really worried about a payment system because I thought, wow, I’d never thought of this before, but that if you have an account in a country that you abandon, like a ghost account, maybe you should keep on top of these things and delete them because if you linked a payment card, now that account is sitting there for the rest of your life and anybody who gets into it, some sort of a hacker, they have access to a payment platform. So I was trying to remember like what did I… did I have a credit card, a bank account… like how did I do it? And then I went into my orders and I remembered, ah, I didn’t have any kind of a credit card attached. I used 7-Eleven. So I would order and then say I will make a payment in cash at 7-Eleven and then they give you a barcode and you go to 7-Eleven, they scan the code and you pay them in cash. So I was like, ah, so nothing was at risk in terms of credit cards or bank accounts or debit cards or anything like that. So, I’m thinking, okay, everything looks good. But then roaming around the menu system, I stumbled across an item where I can look at like where are you logged in? What devices are currently logged into this account? I thought, ah, okay, that’s the smart move here. And I clicked on the button and my smartphone, this Samsung S10 Plus, it was listed because I just logged in. But there was a second device, another mobile phone called an Infinix is also logged into my account and it logged in that day. So that’s why I got the notification. It was real. That email I got from Lazada that said, “Hi,” it was a real notification from Lazada Thailand telling me that somebody a new device had logged into my account. So obviously I logged that device out and I didn’t even know what Infinix was. But since then I’ve learned that an Infinix login is almost a clear sign of a hacker network because an Infinix is like one of the cheapest phones you can get. So all these hackers and bot systems around the world, they’re using, you know, thousands of these Infinix mobile phones to try to log into anything they can. So I logged it out and I was still really really confused because the password, as I said, was not… I don’t you… I don’t use password as my password. I don’t use 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. I use a dedicated password, an individual one for every single account. And they’re all created by the password manager to be as complex as possible because I don’t need to remember them. The password manager does. So, there’s no way anybody out there guessed my password unless they were using a supercomputer to run through every one of the trillions of possibilities. But then I looked at the settings again and it said SMS login. So somehow or other, they used an SMS, like a one-time security code to log into my account on Lazada. And I’m like, well, how in the world could that happen? And I think what happened, and again, I could be wrong. I think I ran into this endless problem that I face that every time I’m in a new country and I have to open an account. I have to use my mobile phone from that country to open that account and get the security codes. But then when I leave that country, that phone number, that Thailand mobile phone number expires. It gets recycled and then somebody else gets assigned that number. So, it could be that somebody innocently just got a new SIM card and they happened to get my old phone number because it had been recycled and they had this phone number and then they used it, I guess, to open a Lazada account and sent… and the Lazada connected that phone number with my Lazada account. They can’t use that number to open their own account because it’s already being used for mine and they just said, “Oh, send me the security code.” So, you see what I mean? Even though I had an unbreakable password and security measures, they could get around all of it because they had access on their phone to my old phone number from Thailand. So, it’s another security problem I have to deal with. You know, it’s really quite something once you dive into this stuff. There are so many issues to worry about. And a problem here is I can’t change anything. I thought, okay, I’m just going to delete that account, but I can’t delete it because they have to send me a security code. It’s a two-step process where I say, I want to delete this account, turn on two-factor authentication, change the password. Well, what I wanted to do was delete the account or change the password, and then they send you a message, a six-digit code to your email, which only I have access to. So, I got that. I entered it, and then it says, “Okay, now we need to send a code to your phone number.” And I can’t get it. I don’t have the phone number anymore. This other person in Thailand will get the security code to change my password. Right? So, I’m locked out because it’s a two-step process. Email, then phone number, and I don’t have the phone number anymore. So, basically, that Lazada Thailand account is just sitting there for the rest of existence with my name and there’s nothing I can do about it. But I guess I don’t have to worry about it because it’s not connected to a credit card. It’s not connected to a bank account. But still, you know, it’s annoying that I can’t do anything about it. I can’t delete it. I can’t change the password. I can’t do anything. So, that was the other struggle with the real world that I had recently.

Yeah. There’s one more… another struggle with the real world because I use Digi. Celcom Digi is my mobile provider here in Malaysia. I’ve had this phone number with Digi for years now, which is nice. I haven’t had to change it, but while I was in Sumatra, I got a message from them saying that their Digi app is being abandoned, is being replaced with a new one. So, please upgrade to the new version of Celcom Digi app. And while I was in Sumatra, I didn’t dare do it because I thought doing that, they’re going to have to send me all kinds of security codes and maybe while I’m in Indonesia, that wouldn’t work. So, I just left it alone. But now that I’m back in Malaysia, I thought, well, in January, they said they’re going to stop supporting the old app. It just won’t work anymore. So, you must upgrade to the new one. So, I thought, okay, now that I’m here, it’s safe to do it. So, I downloaded the new app, I followed their instructions, please download the new Celcom Digi app. I did, but it turns out that instead of replacing the old one, like normally when you upgrade, I expect them to delete the old one and just update the old one to the new one, but now I have both of them on my phone, and that’s kind of annoying to begin with, like why why do I have two of them now? Why can’t your system be smart enough just to update the old one? But anyway, I downloaded the new one and then of course I had to sign in, the login procedure, the security codes, all of that. Everything worked and then I opened the new Celcom Digi app and of course it’s worse than the old one. Why does that happen all the time? I mean, has anybody ever updated to the new app and then you look at it and go, “Whoa, they made it so much better.” They always make it worse. And in this case, why I’m saying that, and I think I’m not being one of these anti-change people. I know a lot of people hate any updates. You know, you update anything, their knee-jerk reaction is it’s worse than the old one ’cause nobody likes change, right? But this one is worse because, well, let me open up the old one just to make sure I’m not completely out to lunch. I’m opening up the old one, Celcom Digi. There it is. And right on the homepage, the first thing I see is everything I need. It’s got how much money is in my account, how many ringgit, how much credit I have. It’s got my phone number. It’s got the reload button. It’s got the buy add-on button. And it tells me exactly how much data I have right there. It tells me I have nearly 2,000 gigabytes of data since yesterday, and I’ve used 16 gigabytes so far. Right there. Boom. Everything is laid out. Credit, phone number, reload, buy add-ons, how much data I have, when that data will expire. It’s all right there. Now, we go to the new Celcom Digi. It looks fancy. It’s got some nice blue colors. It’s all updated, the logo. And then you go there, and I don’t have my balance. That’s the main problem when I’m looking at the screen. I can’t see my phone number. I do see my… Oh, no. There is my phone number. Okay, I can see my phone number. I can see how much credit I have. And there is a reload button for money. And that’s it. I can no longer see how much data I have on the homepage. So, I’m like, well, where the heck is my data? And then I have to scan down the page. And what they’ve done is they’ve taken all that information and they’ve grouped it under buttons. So now you have to click on a button which opens up another window so you can finally get to the information you need. And there’s a button here called usage. I’m like what the heck is usage? And then there’s another one called check balance. Okay. And there’s a third one called my plan. So now I’m thinking well which one is which? What does my plan mean? What does check balance mean? And what does usage mean? And through experimenting, I turned out that I click on usage. And after I go to this page, I got to wait for it to load, of course. Ah, now I can see I have, you know, 1,983 gigabytes left. And it doesn’t tell me how much I’ve used either. And so now with the new app, the most useful information, the information I need most of the time and I want instant access to has been taken away from the homepage, put underneath a button that is labeled in a weird way. I can’t quite figure out what the labeling means. And even when you go there, it gives you less information than you used to get ’cause on the homepage with the original app, it told you how much data you had, how much data you’ve used. I like seeing that number. It’s like, oh, I’ve used 189 gigabytes of data over the last 7 days. You know, I like that information. But now they don’t even show you that anymore. And while I was editing this video and looking at the screens, I noticed another big difference where if you look at the original app where it tells you how much data you have and it tells you how much data you’ve used, it also tells you when your data expires in days and hours. So in this example, my data expires in 7 days and 2 hours. I love that because I’m often timing my data expiry for a specific time of day and I know right down to the day and the hour when I have to reload with more data. But if you look at the new screen on the left, that information is now missing entirely. It just says valid until and it gives you a date. But now you have to calculate. You have to think, oh, what date is it today? How many days are left? And you have to do all this mathematics. And it only tells you the date it expires. It does not tell you the hour either. Not only did they hide the information underneath a button in a different menu, they took away most of the information that they used to provide. So, they made it worse. And I think I know why they did it. It makes sense because the homepage is where everybody goes first. You have to go there. And then I’m sure somebody in the genius marketing department said, “Well, you know what? We’ve got all this real estate on the homepage. We got all these eyeballs. It’s like the attention economy, right? The most valuable thing in the world right now is our attention. And while we’re looking at the homepage, they have our attention. So, let’s put ads there. Let’s not put useful information because we know we’re holding them hostage. They have no choice. Our customers have to look at this page. So, instead of putting useful information on that page, let’s put advertisements there. They will be looking at the ads and now they have to go to another page and let’s put more ads on that page. Sell them more services, sell them more items, things like that. So, basically, yeah, that’s my other problem with the modern world that I was thinking about this morning. Every time they update an app, for some reason, they make it worse. And I have this fantasy that someday I’d love to be able to go into all of these tech offices around the world, Google and YouTube and Microsoft and Celcom Digi and just find the person who made the decision that made my life worse and I just want to go up to their desk and say you you were the one who did this, you. And they’ll say no, just slap them around a little bit. You deserve that. And then I’ll go on to Microsoft. Okay, who made this change? I love to be able to just give them a little slap in the face, a little bit of payback for making my life more complicated and more stressful.

On the positive side, I did have kind of a small technological modern world success related to this Olympus camera. I mean, this Olympus camera is a real hybrid of really good things and really annoying things because as I said, it sits in between old Olympus where they didn’t care about video and new Olympus which puts more effort into video. So, this one is sort of sitting in the middle and there’s a lot of frustrating things about it. So, for example, when shooting video, it has a 29 minute limit. So, unlike a GoPro, like if I’m shooting this with a GoPro, I just hit record, boop, and it just records forever. Though, of course, the problem with the GoPro is even in an air conditioned room, it overheats and shuts down. So, even though it could run forever, in real terms, it still shuts down because it always overheats. But this Olympus has a baked-in time limit of 29 minutes 58 seconds. So if I’m sitting here telling stories, it gets to 29 minutes 58 seconds and then it just stops recording. And again, the annoying thing is Olympus wasn’t really thinking about video. So there’s no feedback of any kind. Whenever you’re working in video, there’s no tactile feedback, no beeping sound. So, I’m here. This has already happened to me three times this morning as I’m recording this where it reached the limit and then it just stops recording, but it doesn’t beep. A light doesn’t flash. You have no idea. So, here I am talking and talking and talking and then I realize it’s not recording anymore. So, I have to keep track on my phone. I have a 30 minute timer going. So, that’s one of the annoying things. And then I always have to stop and if I don’t catch it in time, it’s really annoying because I don’t remember I don’t know when it stopped recording. So now I have to play back the video at the very end and then remember where I got cut off so I can go back and pick up the story again. But you can’t scroll through the video. There’s no bar where you can just zoom through to the end. You actually have to play the entire video to get to the end. And you can go a little bit faster, like high speed playback, but it still takes forever to get through 30 minutes of video. The highest playback speed, the fast forward is still really slow. And I’m like waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. And if you happen to miss it when it gets to the end, it goes back to the beginning and you got to do it all over again. The good thing about the GoPro is it just has a I forget the name of it now. I love that feature. It’s got a scroll bar and you just open up the scroll bar and you can zoom zoom back and forth through the video. Go to any point you want and hit play and then it just starts playing from that point. And every video camera should have that feature, but this one doesn’t. So, it’s a very slow process and I always have to monitor the 30 minute recording limit and the batteries don’t last that long. So, I don’t have enough batteries even to get through a normal recording session because my batteries also for the Olympus, they all swelled up and they don’t fit inside the camera anymore. So, I had to get rid of them. And I only had two older batteries left that still fit, barely fit, and they don’t hold much of a charge. So, if I’m going to use the Olympus a lot more, I thought, well, let’s bite the bullet and buy a couple of extra batteries. So, I did online because you can’t buy these things in stores. You can’t buy anything in stores anymore. So, I decided to order a couple of batteries online and have them delivered. And I was really nervous about that because the last time I did that, I ordered my tripod, the one I’m using right now. I love this. I love having this tripod. And because the hotel door was locked and there was nobody at the front desk at the Raja Boat, they couldn’t get in. So, they just abandoned the delivery and then I got into this we had to wait forever for them to retry it. It was a huge hassle trying to get something delivered to a hotel. So, I didn’t want to do it again. But then when I found a website that sold the battery for the Olympus, they had collection points. I was like, “Ah, hallelujah.” Because when I ordered the tripod, that store didn’t offer collection points, but this one did. And you have a whole list of them. And I was able to pick a Mailboxes Etc. location here in Chow Kit. And I said, you know, I changed my address. I said, don’t deliver it to the hotel. Deliver it to this Mailboxes Etc. place. So once they do, then I can just go pick it up. That is the theory anyway. And I’d never done this before. So, I was curious how this would work. And in the end, it worked. So, I do have new batteries. I don’t have one to show you because one of them is in the camera and the other one is already recharging. But I did get them. But the one unusual thing about it that I didn’t like is that even though I changed the delivery to collection point, the language in the app didn’t change. So it felt like I needed to be physically present. Like I was expecting since I chose collection point, it would say, “Okay, your item is out for delivery. We will drop it off at the collection point. You will get a notification and then you can come pick it up when you’re free.” Like something not not something so wordy, but I thought the language would change. But in the app, it didn’t. It just said, “Oh, it’s out for delivery. We’re bringing it to your address now.” And I started panicking. Said, “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t bring it to my address because the address I have listed is my hotel.” And I thought, “Ah, here we go again. We’re going to I now I have to wait all day at the hotel waiting and figuring out when it’s going to show up.” I did. I don’t bring it to my address. Bring it to the collection point. That’s what I put in. But the message said, “We are delivering it to your address.” You know the it has been assigned to a driver and it is out for delivery to your address. And I thought, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. When is anything ever going to work?” But then eventually I got a notification that it had been delivered. It had been delivered to your address. And I thought, well, that’s I ain’t I ain’t got it here. Hopefully they, you know, back at that time, of course, my address was still the Raja Boat. So I was thinking, oh, for Pete’s sake, they delivered it to the Raja Boat. But it sounded like the delivery was successful. So now I’m going to have to go back to the Raja Boat to pick it up. But then I dug deeper into the system and it was actually at the collection point. But again, it didn’t say which one. It said it is now at the collection point. But this was deeper in the menu system. The original messages were all we brought it to your address. And I thought, ah, so I thought they had made a mistake, but it was at the collection point, but by this point, I didn’t even know what which one it was anymore. Like, I picked it from a menu list, like which one would you want? I picked that one, and now it said, oh, it’s at your collection point. I’m like, which one? Like, where is it again? So then I had to dive back into the system and remember which one I had selected and hope they brought it to the right one. So, even though I could use collection point as my delivery, it still said, “We’re bringing it to your address,” which freaked me out. And then it didn’t tell me where to go. Like, where is this collection point? So, the whole app system for Lazada doesn’t seem to be very sophisticated even when you’re using collection points. But I do have the batteries and it turned out they’re supposedly they have more power than my originals. Like even my Olympus is like 1,200 watt hours and the new ones I got are like 1,700 watt hours. So maybe they’re better. I’m using them for the very first time today. And so far, they don’t seem to last any longer, so we’ll see how they go. But anyway, now I have two new batteries thanks to Lazada and a collection point.

As for Planet Doug video stories, there isn’t a whole lot to talk about right now since I got my Olympus camera back in my possession. I did get quite interested in shooting a different type of video because for most of my life, I’ve always been a picture taker. I don’t like to say photographer because that sounds very very official, a little bit too professional for what I do. But I like to take pictures everywhere I go. And I’m accustomed to the form factor of a real camera. When you hold a camera like this one, this Olympus, and you take pictures with it, your brain shifts into a different mode. You’re recording what you see around you, and you see it in a different way. It does something to your brain. And then when you’re using like an action camera and you’re vlogging, your brain shifts into a different mode because it’s just a completely wide angle. Like it just covers everything, which is what you want for vlogging, which is what I like. You hold it right here and gets me in the frame, everything around me. You turn it around and it basically records the entire world and everything is in focus. It has basically infinite focus. So that’s kind it’s a very simple way of capturing any kind of an image. So let’s say you get food delivered to your table. You don’t really have an instinct. Oh, I got to get out my GoPro and then take some nice video of my lunch because it just looks terrible. I mean, you move your GoPro close to the food, it’s out of focus and it’s just like a big big wide angle shot of everything on the table. So, you’re vlogging with this camera and you’re thinking in a different way about capturing an image. As soon as you have a real camera and you actually have different lenses, too. I have a in terms of like full-frame equivalents, I have a 24 mm, a 90 mm, and a zoom lens, which is 24 to 70. And as soon as you have the ability to change the focal length, you can get closer to things, then yeah, you start thinking differently and you look around at the world differently. So when I got out the Olympus, I put on my 12 to 35 mm lens, which is this one. It’s a Panasonic, just an amazing lens. It’s not a doesn’t have a big telephoto reach, but it’s 12 to 35 in micro four thirds terms, which as I said is 24 to 70 in 35 mm equivalent. And yeah, you can zoom in and out. And it also has like a digital punch in which is a bit confusing on this camera because it works differently in photo mode as opposed to video mode. It’s a little bit confusing, but basically you can get closer to things and then zoom and zoom out and zoom in and then you just sort of become a little bit more cinematic. You become more aware of things around you and you’re more focused on filming what’s around you in individual vignettes, individual scenes rather than just boom, here’s the world, everything all at once or boom, here’s me and the world and everything all at once. So, I like the way that feels, which is why I made the investment in buying two new batteries because the batteries don’t last very long. So, anyway, I went out the other night. I wasn’t intending to post the video at all. All I wanted to do was relearn how to use this camera. It’s a very complex beast. So, I put this lens on at the 12 to 35 and I went out at during the day I did a little bit, but mainly at night I went out into the streets around my hotel here in Chow Kit and I just shot little video clips of restaurants, people preparing food in the night market, loading trucks and unloading trucks with produce, anything like that. A little bit of the Petronas towers and then coming down to the streets and that sort of view. It would never occur to you to do that with the GoPro. You know, you see the KL Tower above the skyline and it’s not like you’re going to, oh, let’s capture the KL Tower and then come down to the street. You’re just not going to do that with the GoPro because as soon as you hold the GoPro here, boom, it captures the KL tower and the streets. It’s everything gets captured all at once because it’s such a wide angle perspective. So yeah, it was nice to walk around with the Olympus and then when I look I wanted to look at the video on my editing program on my laptop and I kind of liked what I was seeing. So, I just sort of took all the clips, put them together, added some music, and I was actually just going to send it to a friend of mine because we had been chatting about cameras and camera lenses, and I was just going to send it to her as an example. Yeah. Okay. This is what KL looks like. But I liked it enough that I thought I’ll just put it up on the channel. So, I uploaded it to Planet Doug. I haven’t checked this morning. I guess I posted it posted it yesterday at like 5:00 in the afternoon and I haven’t looked at it since then. So, I don’t imagine it’s going to be burning up YouTube as they say. Oh, I’m on the wrong account here. Switching to Planet Doug. And so it has Yeah, it doesn’t even have 750 views yet. Like less. It has 746 views. So, to be honest, in terms of the time that you put into even making a video like this, it’s not even worth it. You’re basically paying to make videos. If you make a video like that, people on YouTube are generally not that interested in things like this, but I enjoy making them. So, to be honest, I’m probably going to make more of them. And maybe I can make videos that are more popular. And I can also make videos like this that I enjoy making because I miss it. I miss the old days before I started shooting, you know, vlog style video. We’ll see how it goes. So that’s I also Oh, actually I also shot an e-wallet video because when I was in Indonesia, I was using the GoPay e-wallet and I shot a video about how it works. Well, I shot a whole bunch of videos. I shot one about how does Touch ‘n Go work in Indonesia. Then I switched to the Indonesian e-wallet, GoPay. How well does it work? Tested a whole bunch of things. And now that I’m back in Malaysia, I went out and I tested GoPay, the Indonesian e-wallet. Does it work in Kuala Lumpur? And I already shot that video. I did it over the last few days. I did a lot of testing and then I finished that video and I’ve edited it edited it already and uploaded it to YouTube but I just haven’t made it public yet. I I probably I think I want to post a couple of videos specific to Kuala Lumpur kind of get that mood going and then post this e-wallet video because I shot so many e-wallet videos in Sumatra. I want to have a little bit of space between those and another e-wallet video, but this one will basically be about does GoPay work in Malaysia. So, if you are Indonesian and you have an Indonesian e-wallet and you come to Malaysia, does it work here? Yes or no? And that’s the question I wanted to answer in that video and I’ll post it in a few days from now.

The other thing that happened with Planet Doug is a bit funny because I’ve noticed in my lifetime in terms of my self-image, I guess I would have to be honest and say that I’ve always thought of myself as a relatively intelligent person, right? I’m academic. I read. I breezed through school with practically zero effort. I didn’t even have to work that hard. So, yeah, you know, I’ve always thought of myself as relatively intelligent, but I can be so dumb. Like the most obvious things in the world I don’t pick up on. So there’s like a blind spot in my brain sometimes. And I came across one very recently. And this blind spot is so ridiculous and it involves commenting on YouTube video comments and what I have been doing for years. So I’ve had this blind spot for year after year after year and I didn’t even know of course it was a blind spot. But my methodology is if I post a video and there are a bunch of comments. What I do is I like a comment, you know, like and then I’ll reply to the comment and then if the comment is really in-depth or really interesting or really speaks to me, it gets a heart. And I always thought, well, okay, that makes perfect sense because I’ve seen so many YouTube channels where the YouTube creator gives a heart to every comment. There could be 200 comments and it’s just like heart heart heart. All of them. And I always said to myself, well, that’s ridiculous because if every comment gets a heart, then none of them do, right? It makes it a pointless gesture. If you give all of them a heart, then none of them are getting a heart. So, I always thought my system was so much better because I had well three tiers basically. I liked your video. That’s the the basic one. You know, I read it. You didn’t call me a complete [ __ ]. Then, ah, nice comment. Thank you for commenting. I like your comment. Then I have I heart your comment. I love it. And then I have reply to your comment. You said something interesting or you asked a question and I reply to it. So in my mind I’ve got different levels of acknowledgment. And I’ve thought about this constantly. It’s come up in my mind all the time. And I thought I had really come up with something good. But then I was chatting with American Hobo. He has a he’s the the vlogger that I a cycling vlogger that I met here in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and he’s now in Indonesia. He cycled through Sumatra and then he’s now in Java Jakarta right now. That’s where he is and we’re in contact a lot private messaging and he has a public Telegram group and I’m a participant in the Telegram group. I leave a little comments and Daniel the American Hobo he was he posted something about comments replying to comments what to do with them how to acknowledge them and I gave him my system thinking I was offering something really really special. So, hey, what you should do, what you could do is if you like the video, yeah, give it a like. And then if you really like it, give it a heart. And I love having that distinction. And I offered that up as an idea. And then Daniel said to me, “Well, no, that doesn’t work because when you like a video, they don’t know it’s you that liked it.

So dumb, you know. Who’s dumb? Who has two thumbs and is really really dumb? This guy. That never occurred to me. All these years I’ve been liking comments thinking that the person who left the comment can see, “Oh, Doug liked my comment.” And they get some acknowledgement. I just assumed they knew the like was from me, right? But I don’t think they do that. That’s what Daniel was saying. And I think he’s right. Well, if you like it, sure, they see one like on their comment, but they it didn’t come from you. They don’t get a notification. Doug liked your comment, do they? I don’t think they do. But if you give them a heart, they get a notification. Planet Doug hearted your comment and then they get some acknowledgement. So now it makes sense that these YouTube creators who heart every comment, it makes sense because it actually acknowledges the work that that person gave, they they took the time to watch your video, absorb the information, and write a comment about it. So you acknowledge them that effort, you give it a heart and they see, oh Doug hearted my comment. Ah, thank you Doug. I thought when I liked the comment, they also got a notification. But YouTube in its wisdom, I guess, doesn’t have that as part of the system. So year after year after year after year, I thought I was liking people’s comments and people knew that I clicked like on their comment. And it turns out I was completely wrong about that. And I had no idea. Like I said, I have these blind spots where the most obvious things in the world, I get it wrong. And I’ve done that many many times in my life. So it keeps my keeps me in check. Makes me realize that yeah, I can be really a dummy sometimes or perhaps often.

Moving on to YouTube stories. The first one that I watched recently that really stuck with me is a documentary. And I assume this documentary was sponsored or paid for or someone came up with the idea to make it because 2026 is Visit Malaysia year. I’m pretty sure we’ve had previous Visit Malaysia years. So I don’t know how often they do these, but 2026 is a special year for tourism. It is Visit Malaysia year 2026. And on this one of my favorite YouTube channels is called Free Documentary and they just posted a documentary about Malaysia and it’s called Malaysia, the whole of Asia in one country. It’s 44 minutes long and yeah, I watched it twice actually and really enjoyed it. And they highlight a bunch of small places around Malaysia and they highlight personal stories. So it’s, you know, it’s highlighting the, you know, Malaysia in general. It’s a beautiful country. They highlight the multicultural aspect of Malaysia, of course, which everyone does in their documentaries, the Malay, Chinese, and Indian living peacefully together. So you do get some history and some culture on Malaysia as a whole, but then they focus on these little towns and they have a drone, which is nice. So you get beautiful drone footage of these little fishing villages and then they give a little snapshot of this village. A lot of them were in Perak State and along the coastline and in the mountains, I think. And then they focus on the village and the fishing industry, the rice growing, rice harvesting industry, salted egg industry, whatever that village is famous for, they focus on those things. So while I was watching the video, I made a mental note of every one of these villages because they look so interesting. But again, everything from a drone looks amazing, right? Particularly if it’s a fishing village right at the mouth of a river and you see all the docks and the boats and everything. It looks amazing from up in the air. So I saved all of those towns in my Google Maps. So you know assuming I finally get on my bike and go riding up the coast or down the coast wherever I go I can visit these little villages for myself. And after they highlight what makes that village special, then they actually interviewed people but not really like question answer. They put people on camera and then people spoke told their life story, the story of their fishing boat, their salted egg industry.

Rice harvesting. Oh, the first one that I saw, I think the video started with this one, which is fascinating. Where is it? Oh, yeah. Kuala Sepatang near Taiping. So, it’s on the coast just west of Taiping. And there they have a huge mangrove forest. There’s a big mangrove park that you can visit. But the local people there have a history of making mangrove charcoal. And I guess it’s called sea coal. And this film crew making the documentary, they went out with one of the boats into the mangrove forest on a boat and then getting cutting down mangrove trees. And they explain they have a very strict policy about how much they can harvest to keep it sustainable. They’re not like clear cutting the entire mangrove. It’s like they’ve divided it into 30 sections and I guess they can harvest one section at a time and then they can’t touch it for five years or something and they move on to the next 130th of it something like that so that it’s sustainable and then I’d never heard of this before but apparently mangrove is a very special type of wood and if you make charcoal out of it it’s a very sought after charcoal for cooking and for other purposes. It can even be used as like a medical filter and things like that. And in this village of Kuala Sepatang, they actually have a big section, like a big neighborhood, nothing but these big warehouses filled with kilns, giant brick mud kilns, and that’s where they fire the mangrove logs and turn it into charcoal. And the film crew got permission to go in there and film it all and yeah it’s absolutely fascinating and this documentary also focused on Malacca and they focused not so a little bit on the history but most of the time was spent looking at these rickshaw drivers in Malacca they’ve become very famous for decorating their rickshaws similar to what they do in Georgetown in Penang and they’re very vibrant And they told the story of one guy who was coming up with a new theme for his rickshaw all about unicorns. And he spent like $1,000 US outfitting his rickshaw with a sound system, a light system, with all kinds of car batteries and electronics and mounted stuffed unicorns and artwork and and now he’s there in Malacca, you know, earning money driving tourists around in his it’s basically like a disco, a unicorn disco on wheels and and that’s yeah, so that was interesting and the documentary focuses a lot on the Malaysian Coast Guard because of the Malacca Strait and they talk about all the pirates that are still active in that area. And the Coast Guard is always patrolling, making sure everything is okay and checking up on fishing boats, making sure they’re real fishing boats and not pirates. And if they see like a big ship out there and they’re not answering the radio or they’ve been sitting there for a long time, they’re worried about them, the Coast Guard will go out, board the ship, and just make sure that everything’s okay. And in the documentary, they do that one time to check up on a ship. So that was all very, very interesting. So I enjoyed that documentary very much called Malaysia, the whole of Asia in one country. Continuing

on with YouTube stories, I’m still following Usfan from the Let’s Go Cycling YouTube channel. And he’s currently cycling in the Philippines. He did ride his bicycle all through Malaysia, like starting in Thailand, then all through Malaysia, then Sumatra, Indonesia, and then back into Malaysia, and then from there to the Philippines. So, he’s currently, according to the videos, still in the Philippines. And this is the latest two that I watched. Video 75. He’s numbering his videos is called What’s After Manila, the road to a new destination. Yeah. And he’s he’s kind of a hard guy to follow keep track of his journey because he does jump ahead quite a bit because the video before this one, video 74, he was actually 200 km away from Manila. So he still had 200 km to ride when that video ended. So after that video ended, he rode probably for 2 days to get to Manila. He probably stayed in Manila for quite a long time. Who knows how, but he had to cycle through Manila and then all the way to the north and then the very next video starts when he’s way north of Manila. So, he skipped that entire section. He was 200 km south of Manila when the video ended. And then when the next video started, he’s like 200 km north of Manila. And that whole period of time, that entire section of the journey, he didn’t document it at all. He doesn’t even mention it. Most of his videos just start and stop and there’s no summary. Like there’s no introduction and no conclusion. The video just stops. you know, doesn’t seem to work to hurt his view count in a way. People love his videos. He also has really poor audio. And I noticed that a lot. Like to be honest, I don’t really watch his videos because I find them so interesting. I’m more interested in them from a logistics point of view. I like to see how other people are traveling. How they deal with visas and border crossings. And if they’re cycling, how they deal with their bicycle and spare parts and tools and camping gear and repairs, all that kind of stuff. Luggage, how they load up their bikes with all their gear. And then as a YouTuber, how they film, what cameras they use, what microphones they use, all that kind of stuff. I’m interested in the behind-the-scenes logistics. So, this is what I focus on. His videos are entertaining anyway, despite anything I might say about the logistics because the audio is also just terrible. Most of the time I can’t hear what he’s saying because he’s only using the built-in mic on his on his action camera. I think he’s using a GoPro unless he changed. He has some kind of a GoPro, maybe a Hero 11, and he holds it on the end of a selfie stick. So even when he’s riding his bicycle, he holds the selfie stick in his hand braced against the handlebar. So all the vibration of the wheel and his against the steel of the handlebar like that vibration gets transferred to the GoPro and then he has no microphone. So when the when the GoPro is far away, you can’t hear him. And if he turns away, yeah, so muffled, so quiet, I have no idea what he’s saying, but nobody seems to mind. Like I look through the comments and I’m waiting for someone else to say, “Hey, dude, you know, we can’t hear anything you’re saying. You want to invest in a Rode Wireless Go microphone or something like that?” But no, he’s just gets along. Nobody worries about it. So, in video 75, which begins far north of Manila, so I have no idea what he did when he was in Manila, he crashed, which is interesting. Rainy conditions, kind of a curving mountain road, I guess, and he went he wasn’t running a camera at the time, so his tire tires slipped out from under him and he crashed. And I got the impression that he hit pretty hard. But then after he crashed, then he took the time, which I appreciate as a YouTuber, he took the time to get out his camera, mounted on a tripod at the side of the road to show his bicycle, you know, lying on its side, and one of the pannier bags had flipped over to the other side completely. And then he walked back to his bicycle and said, “Yeah, I crashed.” And then he, you know, showed picking the bicycle back up. But yeah, he didn’t capture the crash on video, but yeah, it could have been a bad one. I almost never hear of cyclists crashing. It’s very rare. So, I do wonder how fast he was going, whether he went around a corner. And his bicycle does seem to be overloaded. I don’t I wouldn’t be comfortable riding his bike the way it’s loaded. It seems to be really heavy when he’s off the road, like with a driveway going up to the road. He never rides the bike from a low area up to the main road. And I think he does that because he just can’t. His bicycle is way too heavy that if he had if he try he doesn’t have a low enough gear to be able to get up and then you can just see him when he’s handling his bike. It just seems really heavy. And he’s not he’s definitely not a minimalist. So he’s got tons of bags, like lots and lots of bags on his bike. And he has these Ortlieb waterproof pannier bags, which are really high quality bags. They’re really nice. But one thing you can do with the Ortlieb, you basically stuff them from the top, which means you really take advantage of the volume. You can really jam them all the way to the top. And then if you just buy more stuff, like you’re going down the highway and oh, there’s a bunch of bananas, your front pannier bag, you just unroll the top, dump the bananas on top, and then roll it back down again, and the bag can just get taller higher and higher and higher. And in this video, at one point, he stopped where some people were selling honey, like locally made honey. And again, in my case, if I went by, I wouldn’t buy any honey because I’m not that concerned about food. But if I did buy honey, it would have to be a pretty lightweight plastic bottle, but they were selling it in glass bottles. And it was like a liter of dense honey in a glass bottle. And then he buys it and he just sort of unrolls his pannier bag and drops the bottle of honey in there, rolls it back up again. I’m like, you know, that’s a lot of weight to add to your pannier bag. And I don’t know this for sure, but I have a feeling that his bags are heavier than they need to be. I get the impression he never really unloads them because when he sets up his tent at night to go camping and he gets out in the morning, you can see his bike is just lying on its side. He just basically dumps it on the ground with all the pannier bags still attached. When I’ve I don’t do a lot of camping when I’m cycling because it’s so difficult. But when I do when I have gone camping, I always like to bring everything inside the tent. So I unload the bike completely, all the pannier bags, and I bring them all inside the tent. And usually I unload all of them. So when I’m packing up in the morning, it’s sort of a repacking all of my bags. But I have the impression that his bags rarely get completely unpacked. So, I have this idea that these top loading Ortlieb bags, he’s got like a layer of junk in there. It’d be like an archaeological dig going down into those bags and you find all kinds of stuff down there. Heavy items that maybe he never uses or completely forgot that he even has because you pull things out from the top and the things below it just sort of settle more and more down to the bottom. And until unless you empty the whole bag, you never know what’s down at the bottom. Everything just settles and gets lower and lower. And anyway, he seems to have a very heavy load. So when he was going downhill, going around the corner, maybe the heavy load and the fact that his bicycle is top-heavy means his wheels skidded out from under him and maybe that’s why he crashed. And he has a lot of broken spokes, too. He always seems to have broken spokes. So he’s often riding along and then he’ll say something like how, oh, my bike is having problems again. He never specifies what the problem is, but each time then at the end of the day, he looks at his bike and he one, two, three broken spokes. So, either his wheels aren’t strong enough for touring or he’s carrying way too much weight on his bike or which is probably what really is the case that I find with any kind of a wheel, they’re really precisely engineered in terms of tension. The tension has to be perfect all the way around and very very even. That’s where the strength of the wheel comes from. The force is distributed evenly over every spoke. And then if for whatever reason two or three spokes break and you bring them into a local bike shop to have them replaced, usually the person who replaces the spokes isn’t a wheel builder. So they basically remove the old spoke, put the new spoke in, and tighten it up and you’re and they think they’re done. But usually the new spokes you they haven’t really tensioned the whole wheel. So now the weight is unevenly distributed. And then once spokes start to break, they just can they just keep breaking. They’ll break and break and break because the wheel hasn’t been tensioned properly. So I think that might be what’s happening in his case. I’m not really sure. Yeah. In this video, the one where he’s like 150 km north of Manila, people called out to him, “Merry Christmas.” So, when you’re trying to figure out where he is and when he was somewhere, you have to do this. You have to look at road signs. So, I saw a road sign that he passed by, the name of a Barangay, basically. And I typed that into Google Maps. And because I did that, it’s like, “Oh, you’re 200 kilometers north of Manila.” Oh, that’s where you are, right? You have to be like Sherlock Holmes to figure these things out. And then in terms of when it is, he never says. So if somebody called out, “Merry Christmas.” Ah, then I know this video was filmed back in December before December 25th, you know, in the days leading up to Christmas. So that was video 74. No, video 75, sorry. And he was on his way to Baguio. And I found that interesting because I’ve been there. I spent a lot of time in the Philippines in the past. And one of my very first backpacking trips before I was cycling was in northern northern Luzon in the Philippines. And this was, you know, way back in the ’90s. and you go up to Baguio and I’m blanking on the names. There’s a bunch of these smaller mountain towns, mountain villages up there that are very that were very famous with backpackers because they have all the beautiful rice terraces and so everybody headed up there and I went up there by bus like local. I had a backpack at the time and I went up there by with a local bus. Not like when I say bus, don’t think 2026 bus. I’m talking about 1997 bus in the Philippines. That’s a whole different thing. Like it looks like an old broken down school bus, you know, a hundred years old banging and crashing and you can climb out the window back in those days and you can climb onto the top of the bus and you sit on the top with all the bags and then you can look at the world. Nobody cares what you do. So if you want to lean out the window and climb to the roof, you know, you go up there. You just have to make sure you monitor the branches and the wires. Duck, so they go over your head. That was the old days of backpacking. It’s a little bit more rough and ready back in those days, I guess. So, I went up there and I did a lot of hiking through the mountains and the rice terraces and sleeping in villages up there. So, I know that area quite well. It’s really, really beautiful. And the roads at that time were really rough. So, I know where he’s heading towards. So he’s heading towards Baguio which is the big the bigger city there. It’s up in higher altitude and it’s like the local vacation city for people from Manila if they want to escape the heat of Manila. They go up to Baguio and it’s a big tourist town. Back in the old days, it was a tourist town for wealthy people and for foreigners and during the colonial days, you know, the colonial leaders would go up there. But now in modern times, it’s a huge tourist town for Filipinos themselves going up there. But yeah, very, very poor audio. I couldn’t really hear what he was talking about. And the video starts the same way as always. He gets out of his tent and you know, Wow. Wow. Nice scenery. And he makes a little he boils water in this little pot. He has like a burner and boils water and makes coffee and yeah, so he’s on his way to Baguio. One thing I noticed is that the thumbnails for the last two or three videos are AI generated of him. So it’s not like an AI generated thing to represent his journey. He actually uploaded a photo of himself riding the bicycle, but the background is fake. So I mean it has to be fake because for like the mountains around Baguio are it’s a very beautiful lush area, but there’s no way they look like the photo for his thumbnail. And I watched the video very carefully and I looked for that scene like because it’s a screenshot. It looks like a screenshot from his video, but at no point during the video did he ever have a background like that with the jagged high mountains, you know. And he told the AI to make him look happy. So, in I’m sure he never he doesn’t smile in his videos. Like I looked all the way through the video and he never smiles, but in these thumbnails he has this huge bright smile, like bright bright teeth and it actually doesn’t even look like him anymore. And yeah, so I think he told he uploaded a photo of himself and then he told the AI, “Take this picture of me riding my bicycle.” You probably removed the background with one of those tools that you can use and then take this and make it look like I’m riding on a mountain road with beautiful mountains in the background and kind of, you know, make me look happy. And I mean, the photo looks really good. And then one of them, as I said, doesn’t look like him at all because of the smile, the that the AI inserted all the teeth and did something to his jaw and the shape of his face. It doesn’t even look like him anymore. But the other ones do look like him, but it’s just sort of a bizarre like huge smile that doesn’t really fit the moment either. And again, he never really smiles like that to begin with. So yeah, AI thumbnails, which is kind of interesting. I don’t think he used them in the past to that extent, but yeah, maybe he’s testing the waters to see how it works out. Yeah, he seems to get sick a lot, which is interesting. In the latest video, he got into a campsite and he had to pay to stay there, but he said he was feeling very feverish and very sick. Which has happened quite a bit. I’ve in a lot of his videos he’s talked about being sick and then the video will just jump ahead. And that happened again this time where he set up his tent in this campsite and then he said, “Yeah, you know, I’m feeling really sick.” And then three days later he starts riding and he only knows it’s three days later because he says that he says, “Yeah, I stayed here for three nights and you know because I was feeling sick.” But again, I keep wondering what did he do for all that time? Like to me that’s one of the harder things about camping is you go according to the sun, right? You’re riding your bike and then the sun is going down. Well, it’s bedtime. You find a place to put your tent like the American Hobo does and he scouts out a really good place. He really knows what he’s doing and puts up the tent and then before you know it, the sun is down, it’s dark and it’s 6:30, right? 7:00 and then normally what you do as a cyclist, you just go to sleep and then you wake up at 3 or 4 and then you’re on the road cycling again before sunrise. That’s what I would always end up doing. But I’ve noticed other cyclists again like American Hobo and Usfan, even though they have to be setting up their tent at 7:00 and it’s suddenly dark and they’re inside their tent, they don’t start cycling until midday the next day, you know, 11, 12:00, something like that. And I keep wondering, I don’t know what I would do for all that time. I guess Daniel, he’s actually editing video on a daily basis. So, he probably stays up very late every night in his tent because he’s editing on his phone. He doesn’t need power to run a laptop. So, he’s probably awake until 2 or 3 every morning editing on his phone. So, then it makes sense. He finally goes to sleep at like 2 or 3, sleeps in until 10:00, and then he’s back on the road again. But with Usfan, he’s not doing that. He’s not editing in his tent. So, like he was there for three nights, two full days. And like what actually happened all that time? I’m very curious like how did he get food? How did he get water? Did he just lie in his tent for 24 hours a day? Just lie there doing nothing? Yeah. That’s where camping can be hard. I prefer, of course. I mean, if you can afford it, I’d prefer to stay in a cheap hotel. And then, yeah, the sun goes down, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. And also, security is a huge problem with camping. That’s probably my biggest problem with camping, that once you set up the tent and put all your gear inside or leave it on your bike as Usfan does, well, you can’t go anywhere. Like you can’t hop on your bike and ride into town if a local person says, “Hey, come to my house and meet the family and let’s have a cup of tea or something, have dinner with them.” You can’t go with them because you can’t leave your tent unguarded. You’re basically stuck there for the entire night. But at least if you’re staying in a cheap hotel, you can dump your bags and lock the door and then you can go out into the city and go exploring and go do things. So yeah, camping can be pretty tough from that point of view. But yeah, found he camps out all the time or it seems like he camps out all the time like I said because he only takes video when he’s camping. So the video usually starts with him getting out of his tent, but he might have been staying in like he might have stayed in Manila for 2 weeks staying in hotels preparing for the next stage of his journey, but I don’t know because he doesn’t talk about it and he doesn’t show it on video. I did notice that in a comment reply he said he was going to Nepal next. So he could already be in Nepal. Like maybe he rode he’s already been to the northern Luzon went back to Manila and then flew to Nepal. So he could already be there. Yeah. I don’t know though. Winter time, right? January, February. It’s pretty cold up there in the mountains. But at least it won’t be raining in the wintertime. Anyway, who knows where he is. Maybe he’s still in the Philippines. So, that is the story of Let’s Go Cycling for now.

Last YouTube story and I think the last segment of this video. I’m still following the Canadian with the YouTube channel Unamoto. He’s riding a motorcycle around the world. And in his last couple of videos, he just left Europe and started his journey through Africa. So, I’m sort of picking up with his story in Africa because I’m more interested in that than in Europe. And his latest video is season one. Is this season 1? Episode 129. Okay. So I guess season 1 is this journey. This whole journey is season 1 and this is episode 129 and it’s called things are getting sketchy fast in Morocco. And that title, you know, a little bit of clickbait. I watched the whole video and I didn’t see anything sketchy. There was one guy he met. He wanted to park his motorcycle near some sort of a historic site and then go look at this historic site and some guy came up to him and chatted with him and I guess there was the opportunity to hire him as a guide or pay for parking for his motorcycle something there and I guess that was the sketchy part. Anyway, because of the title I was waiting for something, you know, because Morocco does have a bit of a reputation. They get a lot of tourists from Europe, Spain and Portugal and France because it’s so close. And then of course you do get some crime and some scams and some touts. Things can get a little bit sketchy in the big cities. The famous tourist areas of Morocco. So I thought, “Oh wow, things are getting sketchy in Morocco.” But in his case, nothing happened that I could see. And the video itself, yeah, it was fine. I don’t think I really have anything to talk about because he rode into some countryside areas on his motorbike off-road. You know, he’s staying off the main highways just like Noraly does for the Itchy Boots channel. But he did mention one interesting thing is that he has a moderator, like a full-time moderator for his video comments. And the way he described it, it sounds like all comments are held back. So if you leave a comment on his video, it doesn’t automatically get posted. The moderator has to approve of every single comment because Unamoto, he’s a little bit sensitive. There was a time where he blocked, he turned off comments. And again, because a lot of people were giving him advice about how to ride his motorcycle. People were trying to be helpful from my perspective. But I think if you’re out there on a journey like that, doing the best you can, riding a motorcycle, packing your motorcycle, shooting YouTube videos with drones and cameras. It’s a lot of work. And you pour yourself into it heart and soul. And then you get hundreds of comments. And practically every comment is telling you what you should do. It can start to wear you down after a while, but the people I don’t think they meant the comments in a negative way. They’re trying to be helpful. They might be an experienced motorcyclist and they see something wrong in his technique, sitting on the bike or what gear he puts it in, braking, going around corners, the leaning, whatever he’s doing, and they’re trying to help him out. But I think after a while that wears him out where it’s like everybody’s telling me what I should do, what I shouldn’t do and he just got fed up with it. It was really getting to him. So he turned off comments completely and it was like that way for months and now it comments are turned back on but he’s set up a moderator and the moderator looks at every comment and makes a judgment call and then decides whether to make it public or not. And so yeah, he’s doing that now. The funniest thing in that video that I really enjoyed that to me that was the highlight of the video, he was in a restaurant and a cat came up to the table, like the local cat that lives at the restaurant or hangs out there. And I have that experience all the time myself. And I’m very friendly with cats. So if a cat comes up to my table, it’s going to get some food. You know, it usually gets the best piece of chicken. I can’t help myself, you know, if I’m eating chicken and there’s a cat that’s sitting at my feet, you know. Yeah. You know, yeah, I always give it some food. And then every time I go back to that restaurant, that cat comes back because it recognizes me and I make my own life very difficult because now all the cats, that cat and all its friends are coming to my table. So anyway, that happens a lot. And Unamoto had this cat come up to his table and he’s being very friendly with it, you know, hello kitty kitty kitty. And then he quickly regretted it because that was the most aggressive cat I have ever seen. It was unstoppable. I’ve never seen anything like it. This cat was trying to get at his plate from a chair and then when he moved the chair, the cat would jump onto the table and just dive at his plate and push and push and push. And he’s like pushing the cat away going, “No, no, no, no, no.” And that cat. Yeah, like I said, it was really funny. That’s the toughest, most aggressive cat I have ever seen. And basically drove him out of the restaurant, I think. You can’t eat with a cat like that, you know? It’s too much. Anyway, that was pretty funny. That should have been the thumbnail for me. And not things are getting sketchy fast. Unless he meant the cat. Maybe that was what was sketchy. But yeah, I thought that was pretty funny. That was the highlight of the video.

And with that, I think I’m going to wind up this behind-the-scenes video. As always, I went on far longer than I planned. I was hoping to just go through my stories quickly, but I don’t know once I start talking. So, this video is for people to play in the background. If they want to hear me talking, they need something to keep them company while they’re doing the dishes, they can play this video. And that’s my apology for making such a long video. I don’t expect people to sit in front of their computer and watch this entire video while looking at the screen. So that’s my excuse for making such a long video. I enjoy it. I enjoy telling these stories, everything going on behind the scenes. And tonight I might, if I still have the energy, I might take my 12 to 35 mm lens, put it back on this camera, and go out into the city again. Maybe shoot some street video in Chinatown, Bukit Bintang area, maybe places like that. We’ll see whether I have the energy to do that or not. We’ll see. All right, for now shutting down. See you in the next video.