International Noise Day

If any day of the year should be crowned the inaugural International Day of Noise (aka International Noise Day), it should be today. Only because I was woken by the neighbour grinding some metal for a construction project, a courier coming to the door, someone mowing their grass, the 2 old men next door talking loudly to one another (hearing aide’s, anyone?) and the gardener using a leaf-blower. Mind you, this was all around 9am on a weekday, so I have no issue with any of it & I’m not complaining – people are just doing their jobs. And I should really be going to bed before 1am, which seems to be the trend for me lately, given I’m on annual leave.

But I must say that I’m getting a bit of work done. Day 1 was cataloguing tonnes of footage from our Mardi Gras shoot earlier in the year – sorting through it and renaming it. Day 2 was creating the intro for the piece, and Day 3 (yesterday) was doing other client work, as I’d had a bit come in over the past few days, and I was sorting it all out + a client coming over for some audio mixing in the morning. In between all that were gym sessions, cleaning the house, baking bread and writing a blog for this site. So far, I’m enjoying my holiday – even thought I’m still theoretically working (for myself), at least I can attempt to clear my growing to-do list.

The other day I was updating my gym spreadsheets and analysing my progress over the last few months. I even shocked myself a little when I did the maths and worked out that in just 13 weeks, I’ve gone from lifting 9.27 tonnes/week (9,274kg) to 14.6 tonnes/week (14,604kg). The 14th week was actually down because I’d changed my exercise strategy a little – lift less, but lift more of it. So instead of 30 (3 sets of 10 reps) dumbbell shrugs with 15kg on each dumbbell, do 21 (3 sets of 7 reps) with 20kg on each dumbbell. The latter is heavier on a per-shrug basis, but less weight lifted overall when you do the maths. It shortens the workouts, but I’m yet to see if it has an other effects – but as usual, I’ll monitor and adjust the strategy as required.

One spot of good news that came to me in the shower, of all places, this morning – was a name for the Mardi Gras documentary I’ve been working on. It’s been bugging me for days and I was so lost for ideas that I’d merely built a title-screen in my video editing software with the words “Insert Title Here” in place of where the real title should be – simply so that I could keep building the intro without stalling on one point to long. Basically, the doco will touch on the past and then look at the future – its gone from a simple demonstration (where 50-odd arrests were made) to a protest, to a party… and now, with quite a number of companies / corporations becoming involved (ANZ, Ikea, Salesforce, Pump, etc), is it becoming promotional? Is it indeed becoming too commercial, and loosing its roots?

Actually, I came up with a few ideas for a title – but I’ll run them by some friends and see what they think is more sufficient – of course, please contact me if you feel one is better than the other and you wish to make a suggestion or recommendation. So far I’ve got… “The Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras – Party time or Promo tool?” or “The Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras – Celebration or Commercialisation?”. I think the latter is too much of a mouthful, which is why I currently prefer the Party time / Promo tool one – but as I said, feel free to make suggestions or comments

Anyway, that’s all for today – I’ll finish my cup ‘o green tea, have a protein shake and then get on with some more video work.
Until next time… be good, check out my latest Random photos, and talk soon