Hitting People with Sticks

December 27th, 2002 | 01:28

Post-X-mas class. Only the crazy people showed up, so we had just green-belt on up. The tai sabaki warmups actually included some of the extra exercises that they do on Friday’s advanced class (close-the-window entry, ippon seionage entry, step to the middle, but not kotegaesh-10 entry). The main focus for this class was using the stick as a supplement to technique.

So, for example, on straight-punch, you can step to the outside and strike with the stick across the lower rib cage, then use the stick to aid in the kotegaesh (with the added bonus of hitting uke in the face while swinging the stick into the kotegaesh position) — the emphasis is of course still on the throw. Somewhat less nice is the step-to-the-side and strike the side of uke’s forward knee with the stick. The stick can be used to aid close-the-window against roundhouse, of course, but can also be effectively used as an extra lever to pull the elbow back, if close-the-window didn’t work. The lever effect comes from angling the stick horizontally, so that the stick runs against uke’s neck. Uke can protect himself by grabbing the stick in front of his neck, but it doesn’t matter too much. The stick is used as lever, with the elbow as fulcrum and the defensive hand or neck as the load being moved. Either the elbow will move, or uke’s head is forced back, both of which will quickly break balance to uke’s rear. Turning the hip helps with this.

Another straight punch technique strikes the stick across the middle of the chest, and then uses the back of uke’s elbow as a fulcrum, with the chest as the far load. The resulting armbar can be used to bring uke down, but there might be a tricky hand position switch as the stick moves from the striking grip to the one used to control uke.

Defending against uke’s attempt to grab the stick mainly involves rotating the stick around uke’s wrist while stepping out of the way. I’m not sure what happens if uke grabs two handed, and starts rotating the stick before you do.

X-mas in Bayside

December 27th, 2002 | 01:03

This past Wednesday was the first white Christmas in the Northeast in many years. A noreaster blowing through the region dumped a bit more snow than expected: northeastern Queens picked up about half a foot, and the Bronx got ten inches; the forecasts has called for two to four inches.

We actually were snowed in for the night, at my mother’s insistence. I think the Civic, with its front-wheel drive, could have made it slowly back to Manhattan. An early trip by my brother and Grace in my parents’ Volvo to pick up my cousin ended disasterously, as the rear-wheel drive car fishtailed all over the place. They had to abandon it in an empty Auto-Zone parking lot on Northern Boulevard and wait for rescue. (Doesn’t Sweden get a lot of snow? Wouldn’t the design of the Volvo reflect this?) My brother had wanted to take his Toyota Corolla, also a front-wheel drive car, which shouldn’t have had that problem. He also has a lot of snow-driving experience, having worked for a number of years upstate.

Here’s a shot from the day after, with my brother and me clearing snow from the Civic the day after.

We actually don’t celebrate Christmas — it’s primarily a day when no one has to work, and we can get together to have dinner. My brother wanted to cook a turkey, which he did, very well. His trick was to use some of the technologically advanced plastic oven bags. You put the seasoned bird in, slit the bag in a few places, and let it cook. The bag retains sufficient moisture so that the bird cooks quickly and retains moisture. There isn’t so much moisture that you steam the bird, so the skin comes out crispy. Also, the bag retains all the juice, so, after you take out the bird, you snip the bag in the corner and pour out the juice into a saucepan to make gravy. Few drawbacks; the only obvious one is that the juice may not be quite as tasty with carmelized bits, since you don’t deglaze the pan. But as a labor saving device, the bag works wonderfully.

We also made wasabi mashed potatoes. I made wasabi paste to mix with the potatoes during the mashing, but I think it would have been better to have a more liquid wasabe paste by mixing the powder with, say, the cream being used for the potatoes. The wasabi should be better distributed. Mixing the typically clumpy paste into the potatoes, I was afraid I was leaving a wasabi land mine deep in the mashed potatoes, ready to blow out the sinuses of an unlucky diner. Perhaps a warning label about breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth was necessary.

Photos at Last

December 27th, 2002 | 00:53

Here are photos of the car at last. Unfortunately, my brother, while sitting in the back seat on a drive uptown, peeled off the godawful tint in the back. It was necessary: we couldn’t see out the rear unless there was bright sunlight or the cars following us had their headlights on. At dusk or in rain, we couldn’t tell who was following us. In any case, imagine that tint on the passenger and rear seat windows. The big muffler-that-doesn’t-muffle (an amplifier?) isn’t visible, either, though the spoiler is. Note that the drill holes for the spoiler leak; we have to get some silicone.

Here’s a close-up of the infamous blue LEDs in the windshield fluid nozzles, and a (blurry) night shot with the blue LEDs in action (they almost blend in with the Xmas lights down the street):

Test of thumbnail resize

December 23rd, 2002 | 23:32

Let’s try this:

Specifically, I used the code posted here, as well as a few supplemental bits further downthread to make it work with b2 version 0.6.1. I have to set up CVS for this, just to record the changes I’ve applied. b2 version 0.7 will come out sooner or later, after all.

A bunch of Oracle HOWTOs

December 20th, 2002 | 16:07

This looks useful at first glance:
http://www.dbasupport.com/oracle/ora9i/solutions/howtos.shtml

New stuff tonight

December 19th, 2002 | 23:24

A couple of new or not-recently-done techniques to remember:

1. Two-handed lapel grab: a sort of heaven-and-earth with uke’s elbows. If uke turns to regain balance, tai otosh to uke’s (newly facing) front.

2. Push to lead shoulder: without moving the position of the feet, lean back and twist to let the push pass through; “ta da!”. The leading foot, closest to uke, gets in uke’s way, in a sort of stationary ko soto gari. Uke is pulled forward, and possibly whacked upside the head on passing to put more force into the downward throw. Hold on to uke to force a breakfall.

3. Lapel grab: this is sort of a katana nage to the rear. Step with the rear foot past the forward foot of uke, while sweeping up with the rear arm into the armpit of uke. Hitch step into katana nage to uke’s rear far corner, breaking balance in that direction. A switch up here is to not go into katana nage but to do a shoulder throw, since we have uke off balance with the first step.

New Toy!

December 19th, 2002 | 12:30

I just got a Sony DSC-P51 digital camera. There was a good writeup in the Times a few weeks ago on small cameras. This Sony isn’t that small — it’s considerably bigger than the crappy Umax maybe-it’ll-do-old-VGA camera that I had years ago. That Umax was credit card sized and a toy. The Sony has heft, and isn’t. It’s sort of my first digital camera, since I don’t count the Umax for anything.

The main attraction was actually the Memory Stick storage format. I can swap MS with Grace’s Clie, and my brother has an MS-based camera, too, so we have spare sticks lying around. The batteries are also standard AA NiMH, so I can pick up extras at Radio Shack. In a pinch, alkalines can be used, but I think they throw off the battery meter on the camera. Lastly, the movie mode isn’t restricted to 30-second clips, but will run until the available storage is exhausted. Since I sold my camcorder to the dojo (really, it’s only been used to record jujitsu tests anyway), this is a nice feature to have.

Here’s a useful, how to do things review of the camera. I’ll probably look at this a few times, since I won’t carry the instructions around with me everywhere.

I also should put in a b2 hack for thumbnails, since I’ll be doing more photo uploads. Prior to this, it’s been shoot-with-SLR-then-scan. A bit slow, but I like my Nikon.

Oh, last note about these digital cameras and such things as ISO, f-stop and shutter speed: it’s a pain in the ass the configure these from menu, especially since I’m used to simply and quickly turning dials on my totally manual Nikon (I got it a few years ago, mainly to learn about such things as ISO, f-stop and shutter speed. I’ve upgraded the lens to a 50mm/f1.4 and it’s served me well, especially for low-light shots.). Oh, well: these consumer-grade digital cameras are fundamentally snapshot cameras anyway.

Auto manuals

December 17th, 2002 | 07:57

We might have to get manuals someplace, since the car didn’t come with any. Aftermarket owners manuals can be found at Helminc.com.

Re-Reading again

December 16th, 2002 | 00:43

Over the past few months, I’ve actually read honest-to-god novels. This flourishing of fiction is a departure from what I’ve tended to read over the past few years: a steady stream of the NY Times, the Economist, a miscellany of periodicals, the occasional history book. Yes, there were works of fiction in there, but they tended to be trashy science fiction novels or trashy science fiction short story collections, but it’s rare that I read more that couple in a row.

The odd thing about the recent set of books is that they’re ones I had read a long time ago, or should have read a long time ago, and I’m seeing these in different ways. Yes, the books from my youth are science fiction and fantasy books, but they are classics; they’ll be read decades from now, whereas the books I had been reading will be forever out of print in a few years.

Most recently, I read Dune for the first time. It’s a classic of science fiction. Why didn’t I read this when I was fifteen instead of wasting much of my time reading Conan stories? I guess the Conan stories point towards the reason: I had tended to read fantasy, and, though I had read much Asimov and Clark, I had never gotten around to Herbert before I starting reading other things.

Dune is fantastic, living up to all the press on the back cover of my copy, picked up years ago at B. Dalton’s (remember them?). Reading it now, there are inconsistencies that I may not have noticed if I had read it in my youth (daggers in a space-faring civilization? advanced manufacturing in the desert? the abruptness of the ending?), and there are spooky overtones that would have been merely exoticisms as late as a decade ago, because of Dune’s Islamic flavor and visions of a universal jihad. But, despite this, Dune is fantastic. I have Dune Messiah on order. I’m under the impression that the second book is more a coda to the first one, and doesn’t stand on its own.

Just prior to Dune, I re-read the Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin. The first three books were as how I remembered them: young people’s adventures (even more obviously so, now that I’m no longer around the age of the characters), wonderfully written with touches of epic and mystery. Themes of morality and responsibility, which I probably didn’t pay much attention to when I first read these books, are clearer now, and add great depth to these slim books.

Tehanu was a revelation. I know I read it when it first came out, but apparently have no memory of it, none at all. I think I might have been disappointed with it, prehaps blotting it out of my mind: it’s so different from the first three books, and is an old people’s story. But now, the themes of regret, decline and passing are ideas for which I have a better appreciation. It’s a wonderful book, and fully worthy of standing with its predecessors, no matter how different it is. I was very pleased to find that Le Guin has written two more Earthsea books — a collection of short stories and a novel. As with Dune, I’ve ordered the next book. The novel is out in hardcovere, but I’ll wait for the paperback early next year.

Going a couple of weeks further back, I was re-reading Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; the movie was coming out, and I had read it in high school, for my Gothic literature English elective (unlike most high school grads, I didn’t read The Great Gatsby until much, much later). This was before The Silence of the Lambs was a novel, much less Anthony Hopkins’s rocket to fame. It was much better than the movie. Francis’s story is far more detailed and understandable in the book, as usual. The major change was the role Lecter played: in the novel, he as more a symbol of the possible evil that may lurk in Graham, and not as the apparently source of Graham’s ideas. The intuitive Graham of the novel was far more interesting.

The starting point for my past few months’ reading was Harry Potter. I read the first one on a whim, and liked it a lot. It’s a kid’s book, but it was entertaining. And the series simply got better, acquiring depth and darkness with each book so that it wasn’t quite a kid’s book anymore, up to the fourth one, which ends in a truly “ah! where’s the next book!” cliffhanger (but not a cliffhanger in the classical sense of, say, having Harry clinging by his fingernails to a ledge as Voldemort aims his wand, but close to what we saw at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, where the pathways into the future are many and varied, and shrouded in darkness, and you want to see where these pathways lead). Harry Potter is something I would have read in my youth, if it had been available. I’m envious of the youngsters who read it today — they’ll have their unclouded visions of the books, and may come back to them decades from now to see them with older eyes.

I had came back to Earthsea after this bit of literary bulimia with Harry Potter. I think I went on the Harry Potter newsgroup to look for information on the fifth book, hoping that Rowling had be chained to her desk to get it out sooner (alas, I found out the rest of the world was waiting in agony for number five), and ran across the usual which-is-better discussions, with Potter, Lord of the Rings, and, memories flooding back, Earthsea. Rowling isn’t as good a writer as Le Guin (who is?), and the Potter themes of valor, loyalty and friendship aren’t quite in the same league as Ged’s encounter with the shadow of his death, but the Potterverse is fun, and certainly in my case, it lead to me reading more, as good books should.

As a footnote, I read most of these on my Treo. Electronic books are the future: I carried all of Potter, Earthsea and Red Dragon in something not much bigger than a Motorola StarTac, which was the epitome of small cell phones a few years ago. The screen isn’t as good as the gorgeous screens on the Sony Clie PDAs, but it was serviceable. Of course, these aren’t official distributions of these books, but I like to justify my downloads with the fact that I either owned the paperbacks (albeit they’re at my parents’ house in Bayside) or could borrow them easily. I read Dune in paperback (which I had lying around for many years), mainly because of the complexities of the names: there’s no guarantee that the home-brew OCR job would have caught all the exotic spellings in a consistent way.

Bootable DOS CDs

December 11th, 2002 | 12:54

Here’s a kit to make bootable DOS CDs. There are options to make a CD with multiple boot images, and so on. I feel much better now about not bothering to install floppy drives in the last two computers I built.