The early bird

Blurg. I was at work at 5am today for an ungodly shift that isn't even the earliest one possible. It didn't end up being as bad as I'd feared, but there was lots of noise in and around my building last night and I didn't really sleep longer than a couple of hours without waking up. We have this problem where the snow removal vehicles that head down the major artery on which we live park outside our building while they clear this section of the neighbourhood. I don't even know how much they clear before moving on, just that it takes way longer than it would if they were doing only our corner. So we get a giant diesel truck rumbling, plus the plow-type truck that backs up (with that annoying high-pitched beeping) to dump the snow into the back of the first truck. It was terrible last year with Ottawa's near-record snowfall, and I can now predict pretty accurately what amount of snow leads to that noise at 2am (not that I expect them to be out during the day, but can't they start at 11pm? Instead of 1am?).

I did get out my microphone to record the sound, but by the time I convinced myself it could be weeks before I have the chance to record it again, the trucks had started to move off. I managed to catch the sound of the truck rumbling by though. It's so bad that if it happens while we're watching tv, we can't hear the sound. If it happens again tonight (which looks like, judging by the snowbanks that are still hanging around), I'll post the sound here. I don't think people believe me about how bad it is.

Back at it tomorrow. The shift is quite fun, so I'm looking forward to having a few more days to get to know it. Part of what I enjoy about freelancing is that I get to play with different forms of media.

And your (somewhat) daily dose of media study...Chris Waddell from Carleton University was on CBC Radio's All In a Day to talk about the death of newspapers. I thought one of the interesting points he made is that people still read newspapers, but they mainly do it online and nobody will pay for online content, so that's part of what's wrong with the model. I'll update with the link if it goes online.