This entry will contain no interesting or useful information. It is the product of my desire to post something and my desire to put off going running as long as possible.

I ordered some clothes for my trip today. I got a catalog from Travelsmith which had convertible nylon pants on sale. I look online and of course they don't have my size. They did have some that weren't on sale, so considering the trouble I've had finding convertible pants with a long enough inseam for me, I ordered them. Another thing to cross off the to-do list.

In other news, I taught myself Flash this weekend. With ThereGoesJohn.com nearing completion, I'm getting started on HireJohn.com to help find me a job when I get back. I want to do the whole thing as a Flash animation. I was tempted to do it in Adobe LiveMotion. I use After Effects all the time for work, so I know the interface, but LM just is nowhere near as powerful as Flash. So I set about learning the impossible program.

Flash is hard. For somebody coming from a television world, it's completely counterintuitive many times. But I finally got the timeline figured out and was able to put build my comp and start animating a few things. I think it'll be ok. I just need to work on keeping the file size down. It was half a meg at one point before I even started animating! (I wasn't compressing my audio.)

And turning to other news... the student ID situation seems to be getting easier. I'd originally planned to enroll at a local college to get an ID I could use to get the International Student ID card. That's the thing that gives you decent discounts internationally. Turns out they're not even checking your college ID to send you the ISID card. You just have to carry your own college ID with it. So I'll just make a fake college ID to go with it and we'll be all set.

Shifting our attention now to other news... I found a guy online who's leaving on a similar trip about the same time as me. He's going to Southeast Asia first and leaving a little over a month before me. He has a similar site where he'll be posting journal entries. It's interesting to find someone in a similar position. He's at www.terrystrek.com.|