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The weather was the nicest it’s been in months, so last night’s judo attendance was low. Besides me, the instructor and an older black belt were the only ones on the mat when we bowed in. Sensei didn’t have a lesson plan on hand with so few people: the black belts had been chatting about dogs for about ten minutes before the start of class (He said to me: “Now that you live in Ohio, you’re going to have to get a pickup truck and a second car that you put up on blocks in the driveway. That, and a pit bull out in the backyard.”) so it looked like it was going to be a fairly easy-going class.

We did ne-waza turn-overs, where uke is in a turtle position or flat on his stomach. He showed me three: from the side, grab uke’s far arm and pull in while pushing on uke’s torso with your shoulder; from the side, grab uke’s belt with one hand and push down his head with the other, to force a butt-over-head flip as you move past uke’s head; if uke is flat on his stomach, from the side, grab the far leg from underneath the near leg with one hand, grab the near shoulder with the other and pull-push. The idea behind first and last techniques is to twist uke at the waist so that the top of his body isn’t aligned with the legs (attacking the top or the bottom, respectively). The second technique is more a pain compliance one. A variation is to do a nelson on the near arm to get pain compliance on the back of uke’s head. There are possibly Japanese names for all these that likely use metaphors of rolling boulders or crashing waves, but no one mentioned them to me.

At this point, one of the bigger brown belts (a nikkyu?) shows up. Yay! Randori! I took a break while the brown belt warmed up. I asked sensei if I could dry run through my upcoming test. Sensei asks if I’ve filled out the written questions yet. Nope. He asks me which throws am I supposed to do off the yonkyu list in addition to the gokyu ones. Ippon seionage and the put-your-stomach-on-uke’s-face pin. OK, kamishiho-gatame.

After everyone was warm, we bowed in, and sensei says that we might as well do the test now. So, sensei calls off hiza-guruma, de-ashi-barai and ogoshi. For ippon seionage, do the throw and then go immediately into kesa-gatame. Since you’re on the ground, show me kata-gatame and then kamishiho-gatame. OK, what year was judo invented? Uh, late 19th Century? Hmm, 1882. What’s the name of the founder of judo? Uh, Kano. What’s his first name? I don’t know (Google tells me Jigaro). How long do you plan on doing judo? Until I can’t do it anymore? OK, that’s the right answer: you passed. Bring in your general knowledge part of the written test as well as this form for the USJF and the $10 testing fee; I’ll get your green belt later.

The whole test took about five minutes. It was just like that part at the end of Eizan-ryu tests where sensei decides that she hasn’t seen enough judo throws and has the testee do a bunch of called out throws. Except the testee isn’t battered and exhausted. And gets to fit in once before each throw. The other kyu tests are more or less the same, except with a more extensive technique list, as well as showing that you can do the throws with progressively more motion.

I did ne-waza randori with the brown belt for the rest of the class while the black belts chatted (I didn’t hear what they chatted about: possible more about dogs). The turn-overs I saw at the beginning of class didn’t really work at all: he’s outweighs me by about fifty pounds, all of which are muscles (I was told by a sankyu who was sick and just watching the class that he had the nikkyu in kesa-gatame and the nikkyu more or less just got up to break the hold, even though the sankyu weighed over 200lbs at the time). He did show me a few more roll-overs including one where you hook uke’s arm with one of your legs, fall back and put uke into a scissors thing with your legs. Also, it’s permissible to push uke’s head to one side with your elbow and body weight to get a hand in on uke’s collar to start a choke. No turnover necessary for that.

I’m told that a post-test tradition is to give the new kyu rank a red belly: the testee lies face up on the mat while the rest of the class take turns slapping him in the stomach. Fortunately, there weren’t enough people on hand to make this worthwhile.

Here’s a Wiki that compiles a listing of Cleveland Wifi Hotspots. This list distinguishes between free and not-free spots and at least has a verification column. It might be better if they had a “date verified” column, as the status might change (I’ll email the maintainer with that suggestion).

This was from the Cool Cleveland weekly newsletter.

Courtesy of this Lifehacker.com link, we have this browser security test that scans for browser vulnerabilities in IE, Firefox/Mozilla and Opera. I just upgraded Firefox to 1.0.2, but the scan did find that I was running a vulernable version of Java.

Taxes are all done except the mailing. I was able to E-File the Federal return, but have to mail in paper copies of the Ohio and New York state returns, because partial-year residents can’t E-File. As usual, there’s a Federal tax refund — mortgage interest deductions and all that — but I was surprised to get a New York state one. We have to pay a bit more for Ohio, mainly because of contractor earnings and whatever end-of-year dividends come from the mutual funds.

We used H&R Block’s TaxCut software, and have been using it since Intuit’s C-Dilla product activation debacle from the 2002 edition. This is the first year I’ve had to call product support because of some glitches I found: nothing with tax calculations per se, but a weird thing where a couple fields became linked:

We imported our information from last year’s file. This nicely fills in our address, social security numbers, old W-2 info, and so on. However, the city/state fields in our Background information form became linked somehow to the city/state fields of my employer’s W-2: changing the city/state in one place would cause it to be changed in the other. This became an issue when we had the Background information corrected, but the company’s locale made Taxcut think that all the local taxes were being paid to Ohio instead of New York. This lead to a huge tax rebate for Ohio, thousands of dollars more than what we’ve actually had withheld for Ohio. Correcting the W-2 fixes this but causes the Background information to be wrong.

TaxCut offers a few ways to talk to tech support. I used the free phone call, and, on a mid-March Sunday night, only had to wait about five minutes before speaking with a human being. It took about ten minutes for him to understand the problem — he couldn’t replicate it because he didn’t do an import from an old return — and fix it, basically by going into the Forms display and blanking out the data in the city/state fields re-entering them manually. Not a bad tech support experience by any means, and I got a resolution while still on the phone.

The Ohio paper return was four pages, plus an Excel worksheet to show how we calculated the proportion of Federal adjusted gross income that was earned outside of Ohio. The New York return was 17 pages and was significantly more complicated because of a change-of-residency form we had to fill out that required us to list the income earned in New York or derived from New York sources, broken out by salary, interest income, dividends, etc. Annoying. Anyway, given the brevity of the Ohio return, we may just do the paper forms next year instead of bothering with downloading the TaxCut Ohio State package. Not sure what I have to do for New York next year, though.

Anyway, it’s off to the Post Office now.

Here’s a page with Really Useful Software for Nikon DSLRs. The main piece is a JPG extractor for pulling out the JPG embedded in Nikon’s NEF files. This saves a little bit of space on the camera, as you can shoot just RAW instead of RAW+JPG, saving about 15% on the CF card. No need for Nikon Capture or View software to be installed on the laptop, also, as preview files can be generated by the extrator. The page about the program notes that you can just leave a copy on the CF card, so you can run this on any machine.

The author also has a FixNEF tool that supposedly does a better job than Nikon Capture in correcting the White Balance when shooting RAW. In the discussion, Capture apparently applies the camera’s stored WB value, and then follows with any WB adjustments from Capture. A badly white-balanced photo can’t be fully adjusted back to neutral, then. FixNEF apparently lets you muck directly with the stored WB settings, writing out a NEF file so that the original isn’t changed.

I’ll give these a whirl in the next few weeks.

This morning, we woke to NPR’s obituary and discussion of George Kennan, father of Cold War containment. This piece began by noting that Kennan regretted the costs of containment and establishes his genius by reviewing the Long Telegram and its place in history. NPR notes that this was a “relatively tough” policy against the Soviets, but that Kennan was against spreading American beliefs around the world. It was also argued that Americans, with a modest foreign policy, would understand why other countries did what they did, and would therefore be less likely to go to war. The clear implication is that Kennan — established as a tough wiseman of foreign policy — would be against the Iraq war and current American policies in the Middle East. I don’t doubt it.

David Adesnik in an Oxblog piece has a more detailed understanding of Kennan’s thinking. Fundamentally, Kennan was a realist, from the same school of thought as Kissinger and Morgenthau. Kennan would have been opposed to democracy promotion — he advocated that America embrace right-wing dictators because they were anti-communist and because their subjects were seen as unready for democracy — because the realist mental picture has states as billiard balls: the composition of the billiard balls matters less than their positions in relation to each other. Stability of the state system would have been paramount: sovereignty should be mutually respected to reduce the chances of violence:

Thus, no matter how cruel or authoritarian a government is, serious realists such as Kennan insist that the United States should not attempt to reform it. Certain idealists might respond to such an argument that it is immoral. And it is.

But the far greater flaw of this sort of realist analysis is its failure to recognize how often the United States can best enhance its national security by also promoting its values. Even though the occupations of Germany and Japan demonstrated that point quite conclusively in the 1940s, Kennan was unable to grasp this simple fact.

The events and analysis since 9/11 should have demonstrated that the peace of the Middle East state system was, as Gerald Baker put it, that of the mass grave; the calm before was the silence before the detonation of the suicide bomb. This state system — its illiberalism and backwardsness — is the “root cause” of Al Qaeda and its ilk. American policy is now geared to shaking this state system up: whatever falls out must be better in the long term than what we will have if we leave it alone.

So, what we have in this NPR obituary is the self-described liberal using the selected parts of the legacy of a realist — isn’t Kissinger anathema? — to cludgel America’s current efforts at democracy promotion. This is the questions I’ve asked before: what’s happened to American liberals that they oppose the spread of liberalism in the world? Would American liberals have backed Clinton or Gore if they had come to the same conclusions about the state of the world as the Bush Administration? What are the alternative polcies — real policies, not, “Let’s all try to get along and understand each other”? And there are many questions I have along these lines.

I’ve gotten my papers for a judo gokyu test (green belt; there’s no yellow belt). Interesting, there’s a written section where I have to describe the slogans, principles, etc., of Kodokan Judo. Thank god for Google, as the written part is a take home test: the WWW is my textbook.

For Gokyu, I have to demonstrate, in kata quality, the following:

• Osoto-gari
• Ogoshi
• De-ashi-barai
• Hiza-guruma
• Kega-gatame
• Kata-gatame

I’m told I should also be prepared to show a couple of yonkyu techniques: a seio-nage (ippon, I’m told) and (because a blue belt was showing this to me during ne-waza last night when I asked what might be on the gokyu test) kamishiho-gatame.

Anyway, I have about a month to prepare. The main trick is the “kata quality” part: the yonkyu throws are all ones we’ve done before (tai-otoshi, uki-goshi, ko-uchi-gari) with great frequency (though the ne-waza techniques are new territory for the most part), as are at least half the sankyu throws for that matter, but probably not with the Kodokan formalism they’re looking for.

Hey, look at that! Judoinfo.com has WMV videos of the throws in the Kodokan syllabus now. This is somewhat clearer than the animated GIFs they had before.

Oh, there’s also an aikido testing date coming up at the beginning of April, but I’ll be out of town for that. I guess I’ll be in aikido for around a year before I get around to testing for 6th Kyu there.

I got there a little late for Cleveland’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, apparently the last down Euclid Avenue because of expected construction of the Euclid Corridor Project later this year. I missed the head of the parade, but found a good perch on a first floor window sill at the under-reconstruction U.S. Court House on Superior and Public Square and started taking pictures.

I haven’t been to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, actually, so this was my first such parade. It was bigger than I expected, lasting about two hours and with marchers that seemed to included every high school marching band in the county, as well as every civic organization that was even vaguely Irish, various local businesses (Weedman, superhero of lawn care; Segway of Cleveland; the city opera; local pubs; and so on), and, of course, the usual politicians. Interestingly, the county commissioner was driving an old version of the Bat Mobile and a car towards the end had a Batman hood ornament. I’m wondering if the Drew Carey Batmobile episode inspired this or was inspired by this.

The PD article noted there were some 300,000 people on the parade route, which is a significant fraction of the city’s population. Everyone knows that the New York parade is big, but I’m not sure what fraction of the city shows up for it. Interesting, a lot of the firetrucks on the route had FDNY markings on them with 9/11 references on them, even the vintage truck.

Lots of kids got the day off, either as marchers or as spectators. I’m not sure how they convinced small children to do Irish dancing on a float for the whole parade route, though.

Anyway, it was a nice parade. The weather was good and I got to play around with the 80-200mm lens.

It’s the last week of the semi-annual NPR pledge drive, and one thing I’ve noticed is that, over the years, the asked for pledge amounts have increased drastically. I remember when NPR or PBS would ask for $20 pledges as a first level. Granted, this was many years ago and inflation would have increased this amount, but the local NPR here more or less starts off by asking for “dollar a day” pledges, i.e., $365. All conveniently drawn on monthly installments off the credit card. Gone are the days when the NPR coffee mug or PBS umbrella was touted first; now it’s barely mentioned. The $365 pledge gets you a Radio Shark, which is sort of like Tivo for the radio, at least in a time-shifting sense. A $500 pledge gets a Tivoli Radio. These are clever gifts, aimed at enhancing the radio-listening experience.

Quite possibly, NPR and its affiliate stations did market research on their audience and realized that with a relatively wealth listener base, it’s more effective to go after the big fish for a lot of money — compare the pledge amounts to how much you pay for broadband or your daily Starbuck’s consumption and you’ll see how much of a bargain the necessity of NPR is — than to cast a wider net with smaller pledge amounts. I can’t argue with this thinking, though it appears to make an assumption that the audience can’t really be grown from its relatively narrow base. Fund-raising strategies may also change with different NPR affiliates: a station based out of a college town may aim for poor students and smaller pledge amounts rather than wealthier suburbanites and their fatter wallets.

Micky Kaus, in a short piece on the MOMA vs. NPR fight, has included a few links on NPR’s financing and compensation structure. Our pledge dollars at work! Though the amounts probably aren’t out of line for an organization with $120M in revenues, one always had the impression of relative poverty in public radio. Perhaps it was the semi-annual begging. WCPN has about $17M a year in revenue, but is running a small deficit.

The main PC in the house had been making whining noises for the past few months. This morning, it became sufficiently annoying for me to open up the computer and poke around itside to see if anything was loose. The noise wasn’t coming from the case fans. It was definitely coming from the CPU fan, which I tapped a few times to see if it could knock it back into some non-whining state. I didn’t have a flashlight, so it was a matter of squinting and hoping the tapping would work. The noise did quiet down, and I put the cover back on the computer, but there was a lingering dust odor (as usual, the insides of the case were filled with dust bunnies). After a few minutes, the monitor went black and the machine POSTed as it shut down abruptly. Yes, the fan got quiet because it stopped running.

I opened up the computer again and pulled the case out further from underneath the desk. The heat sink was hot to the touch, and, surprise, there was a gap in the CPU fan blades: one of the blades actually came off and was not jamming the fan. I found the screwdriver and pulled out the fan assembly, broken blade and all. I needed to replace this today.

I actually went to BestBuy, because it was close and because we have a left over gift certificate to use up. BestBuy had a few 80mm case fans — LEDs in the spinning parts and all — but no 70mm fan for the heat sink assembly. The sales guy there did say there was a computer parts store a few blocks down the street on Ridge Road, near Pearl. This turned out to be Computer Surplus Outlet, but the proprietor (a surprisingly older guy: it was a little grandmom-and-grandpop store) didn’t have Athlon heat sink assemblies, just a pile of Intel slot types. He suggested a place called Quest Technology a few minutes away on Pearl (“across the street from this big Catholic Church”). I thought of going to the Circuit City near the BestBuy, but decided that I’d have even less luck there: of the big box stores, only CompUSA tends to stock random computer parts for DIY upgraders.

I didn’t find the place on Pearl before I hit W. 25th Street and decided to go home for lunch and a more thorough Internet search for the little computer stores in the area as well as finding the nearest CompUSA for the worst case. I did find Quest Technology on Pearl Road in Parma, though not near a Catholic church. The storefront was tiny and I almost missed it, even though I knew where it was on the 2nd try. I called them before leaving and found out that they did have CPU fans. I won’t be able to find the needed fan on its own: I’d need to buy the whole assembly. (While there, I also picked up a generic USB 2.0 card, since I had the case open anyway. My thinking is that this will help existing file transfer from the CompactFlash card, and will let me hook up an external hard drive on the computer, so I have a place to put the Alaska photos that we’ll take in a few months.) Anyway, a big thumbs up for Quest, because they’re the kind of computer store that I like to know about, in case some small part goes out of whack and I need to replace it in a hurry.

There’s still a vibration noise coming from the PC even with the new fan in place: something else around the heat sink is loose. But at least the Athlon isn’t shutting down from a critical overheating condition now.

(A few years ago, I was watching the sysadmin of a big financial services company trying to get a bunch of Sun Ultra 1s working. He’d have them on their sides, because of work-area considerations (everything was a mess because this was after a couple of weeks after 9/11, and I was there helping them recover the backup tapes and drives for that particular unit; we were all in ad hoc quarters in Jersey City with computer parts strewn all over our appropriated cubicles). After booting the machines, they’d spontaneously shut down. This went on for a few cycles until I noticed that, when he had the boxes on their sides, the cooling vents were on the bottom and therefore were being blocked by the desk. They ran fine propped up on their other side.)