Hey guys, I wanted to touch-base on what’s been going on way over here in Malaysia. I could end this post pretty quickly just by saying, “Not much.” I don’t think though that would be very interesting for you, and not very therapeutic for me. So sit back and buckle up because I’m going take you on a very slow methodical rant about my last few days. :)

So the day is getting close to when I leave KL and I’ve got that stuck in my mind like a day of execution, “Only ten days left, only eight, it’s the 30th only one week to go, oh crap I’ve got to get ready to leave and I wanted to take some photos.” If you get what I mean, it’s like this cliff that I’ve been walking towards and now I’m about to jump. :) Okay, now I’m being dramatic. I knew I was going to leave some day and I honestly believe that I’ve stayed too long as it is, and there have been some times that I’d get excited about finally going home. I just know that there is going to be a lot of work to get back into a stable life once I arrive.

Professional development has kind of stalled for me lately. I was working on the book almost exclusively– there were times I’d pop open Premiere and start playing with some footage trying to get a direction that I could go with it, but I seemed to just slow down a little. I did start a new intro for a video about Singapore. I had some footage of a guy dancing on green screen so I wanted to see if I could get that to work in some way. I came up with something kind of funny, and although I like it now (kind of) I don’t know if it will make it into the final product.

I have been trying to clean out my hard drives the last week or two. It’s been a mind-numbing process that I hope I don’t have to do again for some time. I mentioned in an earlier post that I have 11TB of data on six external hard drives, well I don’t know what I was thinking but I’ve found the same folder sometimes in most of the HDs. Most of these duplicates are images and footage so I don’t want to just delete them without checking to make sure that it’s not the only copy. To give some context to the magnitude of this, I was partitioning a 1TB drive (the smallest I have) that was about two-thirds full,and it counted about 1.2 million files on it. Geez! 1.2 million files. Even if just 10% of them are actual real files that I need to check before I delete them, that leaves 120,000 files I have to look at. The last few nights I’ve been working on the drives until about 2am, and I’ve pretty much burned myself out by now. Even with the software that I use to check for duplicates it may be months before the drives are cleaned out.

Well, the time is finally here and I think that I have completed the long awaited book that I’ve been working on. The same book that I’ve been going on and on about for the last month or two. I’m proud to say that I’m done with it. At least I’m done with it when it comes to the public. I still have plans to get a few copies hard printed for myself and others. For now though I can breathe a little that I’m through with it.

So if you’re reading this and for some reason you don’t see the link on the home page of my site, there is a link to download either the ePUB or the interactive PDF. For the time being it’s completely free to anyone that wants it. I am thinking about selling it soon, just so I can see if what I’ve created is actually worth anything. When it comes to the format, I’ve gone back and forth on what would be the best for most people. Initially I felt that the pdf would do the trick, then I read an article that said basically, interactive PDFs are dead, the next wave is ePUBs. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s not a big headache to offer both formats for download. There you go, your choice to spend an hour or two living vicariously through my travels. Send time feeling like a complete newbie as I visited so many countries. I hope that you download the book and even more hope that you let me know what you think.

So it’s Sunday night and I feel as if I didn’t really even realize that the weekend was here. I did though, I think I have so much on my mind that time just slid by me, (can time slid??). I think you know what I mean, it’s Friday night and then in a blink of an eye, it’s Sunday night.

So I’m considering “the book” to be done as of today. I’m at the point where I’m fiddling with it and if I’m not careful I’ll make some change and cause a huge problem and not realize it. Later on, I’ll notice that the page numbers are missing or something like the table of contents doesn’t work, or alignment of the photo captions on even numbered page is off… there’s no telling what disaster I could create just by “playing around” with it. I could also decide to do something large and basically change the whole thing. I don’t want that to happen, so the book is done. Mostly.

I’ve been working on the download link for anyone to download it, for free of course, if they want. I don’t really expect anyone to download it, because I don’t think anyone actually goes to the site anymore. Ever since I stopped writing on the blog the few people that did check up on me stopped. Now, there hasn’t been any indication that any friends or family have visited in some time. Oh well I don’t blame them. :(

I’ve checked into a few places to actually try to sell it online. I’m leaning towards PayHip just because of the simplicity of it. I haven’t ruled out other avenues though, so I may try with a few other. Again, I don’t have any delusions that people will purchase the book, but you never know. Sometimes all it takes is a little luck and maybe good timing. I have no idea what I’d charge for it though, probably something very small, like $2.99 or something ridiculous like that. I could just make it really expensive just to make myself look more polished and professional. I know, $24.99, on sale for $2.99. :)

I guess that’s it for a recap of the weekend. I leave Malaysia in six days for Hawaii. I’ve booked a hostel in Honolulu for three nights, but I may end up being there longer. I just don’t know where I’m going to try to live in the US. I am leaning towards Lubbock though… I’m not sure why, but I think I’ve always had a soft spot for it for some reason.

I really wish that I had something important to talk about instead of just trying to fill in anyone who’s interested in what I’ve been up to. That is, dealing with my professional work, not personal. For this entry I’ll just do a recap of the last two days, mostly just today though.

Just like usual I started working on my web site early, about 7 or so. I like to do that after I’ve read the news, gone to twitter and to reddit. Basically it has become my routine lately, that and diving into the book after a shower. It’s a ritual that I followed this morning to a ‘t’ and didn’t stop until about 5pm. That’s a little misleading because I was doing other things while I was working on the book. Like freeing up some space in my external hard drives. I’ve got something like 11 terabytes of external storage, but only about 400 gigabytes free which is spread across 6 hard drives. That’s completely ridiculous. So I spent some time freeing up about 300 GB this late-morning. It felt good, almost like spring cleaning your house… :)

The book… ah, the book. Well, last night I was just kind of going over how to resection the page number in indesign and I started thinking that I had my layout all wrong. I seemed to put most of the text on the even numbered pages and the images on the left. It wasn’t that way throughout the book, but quite a few, maybe seventy-five percent. I didn’t think it really mattered that much just because most electronic publishing works pretty much on one page at a time (there are exceptions), but I wanted to feel that the final product that I produce is something that I feel confident about about.

The end result was that I went through and changed/switched pages of text with images on probably about 30 spreads(sixty pages). Then since it is completely a manual job, I had to go back through and make sure that I wasn’t off when I moved the text boxes. The positioning in Indesign is very exact, up to fractions of pixels. So that took pretty much a couple of hours of my afternoon. I’m still not done, but it’s basically where it was when I started. My changes are all okay, but the other elements on the pages need to be checked as well. I then had to change the caption locations and in most cases change the color too. I moved the captions of the large images onto the images. Before I had most of the on the facing page.
Doing all that and checking positioning of other elements was most of my day. It felt good though that I have been getting to the point where I am just mopping up and double checking elements. It’s pretty boring, but it’s also fun too. I guess it just matter what my mindset is at the time. A couple of weeks ago you couldn’t pull me away from Premiere because I was having a blast making movies, then I started with the web site, now mostly book.

Alright, I’m rambling and if I can tell that, then I think I should either delete this post or just say good night and click, “publish.”

It’s Sunday night and I thought that I would do a recap of what I’ve been working on or what I’ve been doing. Naw, I think I’ll keep it to the work stuff.

I’ve slowed down a little on some of the things that I was doing like making videos. I sat down yesterday to work on my Kenya video, and shortly afterwards closed it up for lack of interest. I did the same thing with my book as well. I wanted to start shortening the videos to bring the overall file size of the book down. As I mentioned a few posts ago, the book is way too large. It’s about 1GB and should be no larger than 100MB, having said that though, I’m not trying to get it that low. I think a fair size for a book that has 160 pages with so many images and movies, would be around 500MB. Since this is my first attempt at a book that unlike my other attempts may actually be worthy of publishing, I feel that the size isn’t as important as my next book will be. Like everything it’s a learning process. Besides, if I print hard copies then the higher resolution images will be needed.

I’ve been tweaking my web site a lot lately. I still haven’t dug into the responsiveness problem though. I also am starting to design my next site. I’m not sure if I”m going to go with my visualarts site that I started awhile ago, or start on a new design for kennethcurtis.com. I have to take into consideration that my life will be busy in about two weeks with traveling and finding a place to live in the US, so finding the time to work on a site or book or videos will be difficult.