A book review on Slashdot to keep in mind for future use, in case we have to or want to set up wireless in the combined apartment, since I don’t want long cable runs going through the living room/hallway/dining room, etc. There’s also supposed to be a new wireless security protocol that’s supposed to replace “unsafe at any key length” WEP coming down the line.
It was yesterday. It went well.
There were actually few surprises, since we’d seen a number of sankyu tests before. The parts of the tests were: kata and bunkai; wrist and lapel grabs; various open-handed attacks, including defense when lying on the ground or in a chair (The chair was something we hadn’t done before. I think I sat too far back. Itai sat further up, and was able to get out of the chair more quickly for to do technique.).
At this point, while Itai and I were resting while other people demonstrated, Sensei mentions that it’s now for the fun part: defense against stick attacks, and then using the stick against uke (I have to work on the latter); defense against knife attacks (I think I was tagged about half-a-dozen times by Sempai Lee during this sequence); defense against live knife.
Then came free fighting, first against Sensei Coleman, and then against one of the sempais. I got Sempai Jenny, and Itai got Sempai Lee; I had the easier task, since I outweigh Jenny by fifty pounds. Itai’s lungs gave out at the end of this. After free fighting came multiples, two sets: the first set had three ukes, the second had four. My legs ran out at this point, and I resorted to pushing people around instead of doing technique. Everything goes to hell at this point. But it was over.
So, Itai and I have our brown belts and hakama, which we don’t know how to fold or put on. The test went well; it was a good ending to this long month.
I have a couple bruises on my forearm that I hadn’t noticed until a coworker pointed them out to me. My left hand is a bit sore, the right one, which was sore last night, isn’t. The pinna on my right ear is a bit sore for some reason. I don’t have a bruise on my right arm where the stick hit. Besides that, I’m just tired, legs in particular. I should have concentrated more on conditioning the legs over the past few weeks.
Grace took some photos with my point-and-shoot digital camera. For some reason, the Sony thought to make some of the shots very yellow; I’ve done some color correction. Here they are:
There should be some video tape, also, though that may take a few weeks to get a hold of. Scott was there with his digital SLR, and took a lot of (I’m told) good pictures. He’ll send me a CD by the weekend, and I’ll put those up.
The probe for my Pyrex Digital Thermometer died this morning. I was making yogurt this morning, and found that the thermometer kept telling me it was 110 degrees, even though I had dunked the probe into cold water. Thankfully, I realized this before the milk was out of the microwave; the yogurt was made “blind”, in the sense that I just guessed at the temperature: too hot would have been worse than a bit cold, since that would have killed my yogurt starter. Anyway, we’ll see how it turns out.
Apparently, the probe dies frequently and is a cause for complaints. I perhaps should have picked up another model, but I think this one was on sale at Amazon. The customer reviews up at Amazon right now are actually helpful: one reviewer said that his probe died, but he sent it back to the manufacturer, Robinson Knife Company, and got a replacement within a week.
The most useful piece of information was the name of the manufacturer (fed into Google): I just got off the phone with Customer Service, and they said to mail the probe back to them, no RMA required. We’ll see how quickly they get a replacement back to me.
A couple ideas for b2 hacks to file away until I have time in a month or so:
This time around, I will properly version control everything.
These were taken from the car a couple of weekends ago, a little past the “golden hour” near sunset.
As a stress relief from the horrors of VBScript, I’ve been working on trying to get file uploads to work again with the b2upload script, now that register_globals=off has been configured. This script wasn’t written to accomodate this new configuration.
The changes were ultimately somewhat minor, especially after finding this piece of documention on the PHP site. Basically, the $HTTP_POST_FILES (or $_FILES) array had to be used to explicitly set the file name variables. Also, the allowed file types array had to be redone to conform with entries in /etc/mime.types, rather than relying on the filename suffix.
Found in today’s New York Times:
Time: 40 minutes
1 1/2 pounds spinach
12 ounces firm or extra-firm tofu
2 tablespoons butter or oil
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 tablespoon minced garlic
3 dried chilies
2 tablespoons garam masala or curry powder
Salt to taste
1/2 cup yogurt
1 1/2 cups light cream or half-and-half.
1. Trim and wash spinach; do not dry. Chop leaves in one-inch pieces. Cut tofu in two horizontally and wrap in paper towels. Put it under a couple of plates.
2. Put butter or oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. A minute later, add ginger, garlic and chilies and cook, stirring occasionally, until garlic begins to color.
3. Stir in garam masala or curry powder and a large pinch of salt and cook, stirring, for about 30 seconds. Add spinach and cook, stirring, until it wilts, then add yogurt and a cup of cream. Pick out chilies and discard.
4. Cook mixture over medium-high heat; liquid in spinach will boil off. When mixture is nearly dry, cut tofu into half-inch pieces and incorporate. When tofu is hot, add remaining cream and cook for another minute or two, stirring. Adjust seasoning and serve.
Yield: 4 servings.
Spinach sauce: In Step 4, omit tofu. Purée mixture with 1/2 cup remaining cream. Add squeeze of lime juice. Serve with grilled meat, poultry, fish or vegetables.
Found a Perl regex reference when trying to figure out how to capitalize the first letter of every word.
The way to do the capitalization involves using the right-hand term as a perl expression:
$string =~ s/\b(\w)/uc($1)/eg
So, the Perl uc() function is invoked on the pattern match buffer from the left-hand side. Clearly, the “e” modifier is useful for many other things.
This is the last week before the test on April 28.
For work, we have a project due on the same day, so this week will be busy. It’s possible I won’t be able to go to class as much as I’d like.
On Friday, I discovered that the prescription sports goggles I own were broken in half. I guess they broke after some years of wear and tear, and, Thursday night or Friday during the day, they were at the bottom of the gym bag, wedged underneath a hardcover book, with the judogi on top of it. It snapped just where the lenses join. Perle Vision says it might be able to get replacement goggles to me by Saturday, though there’s a chance I won’t get them until, oh, April 30.
On Sunday, I fell while doing hari goshi on Itai and strained his shoulder and arm. From this, I found out that it’s safer to grab uke by the head instead of scooping the body from under the armpit, since the head waves around much less than the arm, and won’t get strained, at least in that way.
He says he feels fine, but I see the Worst Case Scenario for the sankyu test developing, like a storm on the horizon:
I get to take the test by myself, half blind, without any extra training on scenarios or kata.
Minor enhancement to the b2print.php script, which creates a printable version of a post. I’ve modified the make_url_footnote function found in b2-inc/b2functions.php to generate BR-ized output, with URL footnotes at the bottom. The modifications were minor, basically taking out a line that did a strip_tags() on the content, and putting in some formatting on the footnotes. Also, the preg_replace regexes were changed to be case-insensitive, because of Amazon constructed links.
I wanted to get footnoted URLs in the printable version because, well, you’re presumably printing it, but losing the hyperlink information on links when you put the posting on paper.