February Highlights

February was a hectic month. There were a lot of good things happening, but my thoughts were mostly with my father, who was taken to hospital. He is home now, recovering, but looking back I realise how distracted and concerned I was for most of the month.

So many of the skills I use on a daily basis I learnt from my father. Even the high-tech iMusic event saw me drawing on the basics of wiring, soldering and speaker placement. I’ve already written a fair bit about iMusic (here and here) and it still stands out as a major highlight for me – my first live music gig in Hong Kong, my first radio station spot in Hong Kong and my first involvement with a SoundCloud global meetup (you’ll even find my picture on SoundCloud’s meetup day highlights).

Those same hands-on technical skills were in play as I worked on the sound installation for the new Fuel Espresso store in the Landmark building, here in Central. This is a big project (I alluded to it some months back) and the first such work I’ve undertaken in Hong Kong. There’s still some fine-tuning to go and when it is all finished there will be a blogpost examining the project and what went into creating the sound there.

Sadly, I was not able to complete the RPM Challenge. A few good demos were recorded, but it was clear halfway through the month that I wouldn’t be able to make it. However, I’m going to bundle up the music I was able to create a small EP release. I’m treating this as test project to help me setup an offer page on this site In fact, I spent a lot of time in February thinking about Ian Rogers’ presentation, Getting Practical: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building an Online Marketing Plan That Works and this will be a first step towards putting that into practice.

I’m a few films off the pace for my goal of seeing 150 films in the year. However, with the Hong Kong International Film festival coming up I should get ahead of the target by the end of April. Back when I was an academic, my side interest was in film theory and I was even close to writing a book on film and globalisation.

So, I’m excited to announce a new collaborative project in development that will allow me to continue to explore film in a serious way. More details to come before the end of the month.

Traffic on the blog has picked up lately and I’m thankful to see that the reviews of the Hong Kong Arts festival events and the latest instalments of my top 25 favourite things about Hong Kong attracting a fair few readers (20-16 and 15-11). I’ll be completing the top 25 this month and there are reviews for the New York City Ballet and Elvis Costello coming in the next few days.

Interestingly, the most read blogpost of the month was also the simplest. A solid image and a quote, from the Zen of Creativity by John Daido Loori. It’s been a quiet few weeks on the photographic front, but I have signed up for an April workshop with the guys from lightenupandshoot.com and I’m going to blog through the preparation and experience of that.

Finally, I’ve made a few fairly major revisions to the look of this blog. I’m back to a white background and a radically different front page (anyone remember the old multicolour sliding windows theme?). This is something of a halfway stage to what I want the blog to look like and, as always, I welcome comments on the design.

Things are starting to calm down a little now. March promises to be quite full, in a different sort of way, with lots of time in the music studio. Come April there will be more travel, more photography and some more exciting new projects to announce.