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Journal

Day 1: about 16 minutes of cardio work.

13 minutes on the treadmill mainly at 7Km/hr with 2 x 1-1.5 minute bursts at 9Ks (1.5km total)
2 minutes doing ab and shoulder excercises
3 minutes in the excercise bike

I managed to do all of that with Bec milling around and wanting to use all the equipment and chatting the whole time.

I\’m still too short of bandwidth for the month, so I can\’t watch any of the video podcasts.

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Journal

New Beginings

The time has come to start looking at how I live some parts of my life and to make some healthy decisions while I\’m younger and it is a bit easier.

Over the last 2 years or so, I\’ve really let my fitness slide. Doing Tae Kwon Do in my teens, through playing Indoor Cricket, Basketball, Netball, Soccer, Tennis and Volleyball in my twenties, I was pretty fit and rather healthy. I never ate really well, with a fair bit of junk food, but you can\’t have everything.

Since hitting thirty, I seem to have let the busyness of life get in the way of playing sport and staying fit, though I\’ve recently started playing tennis again to kick the process off. To really kick things into higher gear though, we\’ve set up a gym at home in the guest room (never fear, there is still room for guests).

We have a new treadmill we bought off ebay, a Totalgym 1000 that I bought out of the Trading Post 4 years ago (and have hardly used) and an old Exercise bike given to us by Bernie\’s brother Paul. The other thing in the room is an old PC to watch and listen to stuff on while we excercise. One of the reasons I\’ve never been interested in things like the excercise bike or a treadmill is the complete waste of brain power while the body is working.

I\’ve solved that problem in the car by burning CDs of podcasts and getting a fill of tech news as I drive, so I figured I\’d do the same with excercise, but instead use all those video podcasts I never get time to sit and watch. At this point I should say a special thanks to Wil Harris for this week choosing to launch Channel Flip, a series of 5 minute daily video casts aimed at males 18-30 something.

The new plan is:
Drink 1 litre of water every day before I drink any alcohol.
Excercise 4 times a week:
3 x 20 minute session (works out to 2 episodes each of Play:Digital and Unwired)
1 x 60 minute session (The average length of an episode of diggnation)

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Links

Colour Names

I found this great site that not only gives you all the appropriate hex codes for various colours, but it even names them.

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Links

let them sing it for you

While WWILFing* the other day, I came across a site that will take a bunch of typed text, and sing it back to you using words clipped from songs.

* that feeling you get when you\’ve been aimlessly surfing the net for a while, and then think What Was I Looking For?

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FAQ

Telephone Cabling Standards

It\’s always nice when there is a standard, at least up until Microsoft then attempts to create their own, competing one.. I keep wondering what the standard is for a few cables, so I\’m documenting them here..

With the clip at the top, telephone cables from left to right are: Black, Blue, White, Red.

All this and more is available from Access Communications

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Journal

From the mouthes of babes

A conversation I had with Liz at 7:30 this morning.
Liz: Where’s Mummy
Me: Out
Liz: Where, at Tennis?
Me: No at the gym.
Liz: Oh getting littler.

How cute is that!

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Journal

The big Questions & Answers

Bern (to Mark): How do I find who our upper and lower house representatives are?

slight pause while I try and remember which department is in charge of elections..

Bec (from the Peanut Gallery): Look it up on a website!

we had a good laugh. The final answer was to look at www.aec.gov.au

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Journal

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~Socrates

Who knew it was so hard to die? Today was my second attempt at acting (the first attempt was to play Jesus, and that was 33 years ago in a nativity play)  and it is hard work. I had a tiny  bit part in a scene that runs for about 40-50 seconds.

The scene involved my witnessing then attempting to stop a kidnapping and getting a knife through the chest for my troubles.

Later on, as a joke we chalked my body out   \""Chalk

I think there were about 6-7 shots I was in, some of them we did up to 8 or 9 takes, plus 4-5 rehearsals.

There were also two other scenes shot on the day (in other locations) In total we worked for about 10 hours (7am – 5pm) for a total of about 2 – 2.5 minutes of finished film. It will get better as we get into the heavier dialogue scenes.

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Journal

1st Shoot Day

Today is the first shoot day for the movie, and the first scene involves me playing a bystander who gets stabbed in the chest.

We then head to the back of Lilydale Lake and Coldstream Airport to round out a full day of shooting.

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Journal

Teething

Liz is getting her 2 year old molars, so it’s been time to drag out the good old Bonjela. Lizzie is a bit confused with the name though, and keeps calling it John-Bella, which is so cute.