Like the title says, I can feel that I’m starting to get a little burned out. I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m particularly burned out on. Is it making movies? Maybe, but I still want to make them. What about working on my book? Well, I am at a place that’s kind of boring, the editing and proofreading part. So that may be contributing to my reluctance to really dive into it. I could always fix some of the problems with my web site though. The problems there aren’t easy, at least now that the little things are fixed. It could take days to fix the responsiveness problem, maybe longer. I’m betting that I’ll have to redesign the whole site to get it up to being a proper responsive design. But anyway, it could be a combination of all those projects, or neither, it could be that I have just been spending too much time in front of the computer and I’m starting to want to do other things.

I don’t know what it is, but there are a few things that I have to get done. The first is my book. I’m so close to finishing it that I could have it done in two full days. I think that would be a really great feeling to finish it. Of course, after I finish that book, the process starts again with the next one. At least though I’d have that nagging feeling gone for a little while.

I’m getting a little burned out on being in Malaysia too. There are reasons that I can’t talk about right now why I’m still here. I think I can start the process of leaving in about a week, maybe two.

Another kind of strange, maybe sad thing that I found out tonight is that I have almost zero footage from at least one summer vacation. I still think that I placed it somewhere else because the idea that I could go almost three months in Greece, Spain, Monaco, and a few other countries and I didn’t take one video is sad, or maybe pathetic is a better word. I guess which summer vacation my next book will be about. :)

I added another video to my youtube page yesterday. This video was a little bit different from the others. This was an introduction to my channel and it’s really a quick, talk in front of the camera type of video with no graphics at all. If you’re interested in seeing it I’ll put a link in this post.  It is really strange to see myself talk on camera, and if it goes like it usually does, I’ll end up cringing on it in no time, like the hiking video that I redid recently. In the meantime though it is kind of fascinating to see the way I talk. You know, my expressions and hand gestured, and by general demeanor is really different than what I have in my head when I’m talking. So strange…

I actually made this video quite a while ago and at the time it was one of my better ones. There was some problems with it though and now that I’m back into making videos/movies I thought that I’d fix them. I didn’t want to change the feel of the video so I didn’t change anything of substance, just corrected some things that I felt embarrassed(cringe y) of. Except for the music that is, I just thought adding music might make the video better.

What I changed:

1. Where I could I rotated footage to be at the correct angle

2. Added Music

3. Removed a minute or two of me talking

4. Added a new intro.

5. Changed the icon.

Royalty free Music supplied by: www.bensound.com

I started about 6:30 this morning on my book. There were some things that I told myself that I had to finish today. Some of those things were dealing with the movies contained within. I also needed to resize some of them and to manage/normalize the audio.

The biggest thing I had to do though was I needed to work on the images so that they were basically prepped for an epub or interactive pdf. I won’t get into that much, but epubs won’t accept some of the changes that you make in your desktop publishing software, for example rotation. If I rotated the image in Indesign, when the epub was created, the image would be crooked as if there hadn’t been any rotation set. So if I wanted the images to look as they do in Indesign (software) I had to take every image that I made changes to into photoshop and redo them, then save, and then add them back into the book. I don’t know if it sounds like a lot of work, but I figured that for some of the bigger fixes like color correction and replacing the image with a higher resolution one, I spent about 10-20 minutes on each of those images, for the smaller fixes, simple rotation and stuff it was maybe about 1 minute each. At last count there was slightly less than 200 images and 24 movies. I worked on that until about 5, so for about 10 hours or so with breaks.

Then I ran into a huge problem. The file size is way too large. Doing some research on what is considered okay for epubs, there were differences in what I read, but it seems that the high is less than 100MB, my epub is 1GB, ten times that size. I never could find an exact number on interactive PDFs though, but I’m guessing my 1GB is still way too high. There are a few things that I can do, one is downsize the book. Instead of 155 pages, I can probably bring it down to maybe 110. I can remove or shorten movies. One thing that I thought about was not making any video longer than 20 seconds. That could trim 50-100MB off the size. Then I can remove some images and decrease the resolution on others. This will probably be the fix I go with. I don’t need print resolution for the images in the book unless I decide to print a hard copy…which I do plan on doing. So now the problem is I have to finish the book completely, save it for print, then go in and decrease resolutions on all the images, and then make my interactive digital book. Just a guess, but that will take at least an extra full day, something like 10-12 hours to do and with other work going on, that would probably end up being about 3 days.

Taking all this into consideration along with the stuff that I still have to do to complete the book like proofreading, editing, and going over the layout for inconsistencies, there’s probably still 2 weeks to go before I will be finished.

After I post this I’m going to start gather footage for my next video. I’m kind of leaning towards one of two things. The first is a channel intro for my playlists. Should be kind of short, maybe 30 seconds, but I want it to be somewhat sophisticated so it will take a few days to do. The other idea I had was to do Singapore. When I was stuck there for four days I took lots of footage that I think will make it kind of easy to put it together. It won’t be an exciting video because all I did was walk around a too video of things. I didn’t do any fun… not that I usually do anything exciting though. :)

Over the years there have been a lot of things that I just didn’t get into especially when it came to the web. Sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter are the bigger ones. I kind of always blamed my age on, ‘not getting it’ and maybe there is some truth to that. Well, I finally broke down and joined Twitter —I also joined Pinterest, but haven’t been back since signing up. I am trying to build a presence on Youtube and I thought that I could reach some people on different platforms. I’m testing twitter right now even though I don’t have any followers it’s kind of fun to read tweets from people or companies I like or admire, like Elon Musk and Boston Dynamics.

If you’re on Twitter you should follow me, and I promise I’ll follow you. Just no spamming of cat photos or photos of your children please.

@kacurtis16

Ever since the last time this site was hacked I had kind of lost interest in fixing the problems that it had once I got rid of the malicious code. I knew that there were problems but for some reason I just kind of gave up on it. There was a story that I heard one time, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the first web that a spider build is its best. If that web gets damaged or knocked down the second web will be okay, but not as good as the first. This continues until the web is barely a web. Like I said, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I sure identified with that spider. I just burned out spending hours on fixing the site and then to have some jerk come along and destroy it was de-motivational.

Anyway, it looks like the first entry to the blog is working on the index page, that was basically an easy fix. I actually just had to try to fix it instead of ignoring it.

The gallery pages are working now. I don’t know why, but the plugin for the gallery had just disappeared. All I had to do was to reinstall the plugin. So easy.

Now I have to update the videos on the front page, that may take a little longer. Each video is separate from youtube so I have prepare the videos for all types of browsers. If I remember correctly there are 5 different filetypes to work with.

Anyway, I’m just happy that the site is starting to make it back from the dead. :)