The power of Blurb.com

Upon our return to UK, both Si Phong and I were gainfully un-employed just long enough to put all of our photographs and blog posts from the travels in to a book. What started out as a quick photo/text dumping exercise quickly turned in to a bit of a labour of love.

You can view it here:
http://www.blurb.com/books/1931111

It comes up a bit small at first glance, but you can zoom in via the "View Fullscreen" button on the bottom right and get a full sized view of the book if you have a large enough screen!

This is my first experience of using www.blurb.com and the possibilities blow me away. Now, everyone can be published! Write your book, put it up on blurb, share with your friends via facebook and blogspot...its a perfect example of how the internet is allowing all of us to create and to have an audience, no matter how big or small.

My first attempt is pretty amateurish (and so it should, its just a collection of blogs) but there are some spectacularly good books which have been produced by others on blurb. I'll be making more books in the future; there's nothing more pretentious than the strategically deployed Coffee Table Book. Well what could be more pretentious than one that was authored by yourself!!!

In creating the book, I went through the thousands of photo's that we took and came to the conclusion that I'm a lousy photographer. There were very few photo's from our travels that were of genuine publishable quality. The good news, however, is that even mediocre photographs can come to life with some considered page design. That said, I'll be doing more to develop some photography skills before the next project as I'd rather drop a few diamonds than polish a multitude of turds.

I've also written about our last few stops on the travels. Will put these up shortly.

Back in UK, a long overdue update

Apologies for the lack of updates…since Sydney we’ve been to Melbourne, Singapore, KL and inevitably, back to the UK. The wheels came off the blog updates as when the end came in to sight. At some point, I’ll probably write up our experiences in these places.

In the meantime, I’ll also be using the blog to document our battle against clinical depression as we adjust to life back in the British winter.

Thanks for reading!

Ming