theMediaman.com

Well, I’m back up for air following over one full month of late nights, weekend hours, and two overnights at work. It feels like every moment outside work has been filled with wedding plans. Aside from the business surrounding my 32nd birthday and sleep, I really haven’t had an hour to do anything but work or plan.

After three days off from work, I managed to catch up on (almost) all the personal To-Do’s outside of work and the wedding. It feels really good to be nearly caught up.  I even managed to set aside some time to beat Guitar Hero III on medium, and get a few stages further in Mario Galaxy. Yes, part of my personal To-Do list was to chill out and play video games. I still have WipEout Pulse, God of War, Darkstalkers and Ratchet & Clank on my PSP to start-and-finish.

As for the wedding, the venue’s been picked and the date is set - September 14, 2008. Following a successful weekend, the band and bridesmaid dresses have even been secured. I need to get moving on the tux’s now.

First, we have to meet with a photographer/videographer studio.  Simone’s the expert in photography, and I’m the video guy, so we decided to split up those duties. However, our first choice for video and a top-three for photography is the same place. Hopefully we can spin enough of a good package deal to justify the cost.

We sat down with all the paraphenalia from the Wedding Show we went to at the top of the year, and systematically went through each website to watch the demo reels. Some ranged from Woodbridgian, MTV-generation, seizure-inducing music videos to sappy documentaries featuring the bride and/or groom doing a voiceover of “why I love him/her so much tee hee”.  I’m serious. An uncomfortably large number of video houses fit into one of these two classifications.

The one we’ll be going to visit tonight is so damned good, our eyes were damp following the first demo reel. That’s a pretty emotional response considering we didn’t even know the couple in the video!

Simone will be taking the TTC up here in order to visit this company. The car’s battery is dead, and I’m worried that the car is going to go into another long stretch of expensive repairs. I’ve already spent over a thousand bucks on it in the last few months, but a new car will cost several thousand a year.

Hopefully I can pick up one of those sleek 2009 Matrix’s (Matricies?) from this year’s Tim Horton’s Roll Up The Rim To Please Play Again.

Several years ago I took a trip to Japan and wrote almost daily on my web site. At the time, I wasn’t even using the word ‘blog’… it was an “online journal”. It was only after that when I decided to start writing a regular blog of my thoughts, frustrations and other innane topics.

While I was there, the only thing that astonished me more than the horrible colour schemes in the billboard ads, were that very few of them had imagery. Aside from logos and a telephone wingding, they were almost always just text. For many years I just chalked it up to cultural differences, until I read “The Death of a Copywriter?“.

As Copywriters are prone to do, the situation is initially illustrated as more dire than it truly is. However, the first half of the article does have a valid point in how Canada’s multiculturism and “new Canadians” require more visual cues in ads than are required in Japan.

In Japan, I remember seeing a lot of Japanese, and little else. In 2001 when my life in Toronto was measured in months, I could still remember living in Barrie, where my high school graduating class had less than a dozen people who were not white. However, even Barrie felt culturally diverse when compared to Osaka.

It would seem that Japanese language-only billboards exclude a very, very small percentage of the population, even less than performing the same action in a white-bred, redneck city like Barrie.