My Wushu Blog

It has been 2 years since I’ve regularly practiced Wushu. The last class I attended was around Christmas 2009 when I took Caralyne, but I had stopped around early June of 2009 when most of the class left for China. Over the past year, my conscious mind has told me it really enjoys just going to work, and then back home, with no interruptions. It has told me that I’m not young enough, or good enough to continue with martial arts, and I might as well accept that and embrace my more passive hobbies.

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todo I’m excited. The best part will be going into work on the Friday saying “WHAT?!”

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todo Amazon recently announced their Cloud Drive, and I feel it is interesting for the following reasons: The ability to play the same music from my phone, my computer at work, my computer at home is pretty cool Everyone gets 5GB of space for free, and you can pay for more When you purchase (DRM free) mp3’s from Amazon, it does not count against your Cloud Drive storage The player is web based, and the tools to download purchased music are usable on Windows, OS X and Linux So, I uploaded some music, bought two songs from the comfort of my phone to play around with it.

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A chilly and misty space center We did a night hike, and spent the night at the Chabot Space Center in Oakland the other week. The weather did not permit us to use the large telescopes they have there, but we did get to see the perigee-syzygy of the Moon. It was quite large and nice looking, but too bad the camera does not duplicate the same optical illusion our brains produce by making it look REALLY big: A nice full moon The hike was fun, even when our guide quietly announced “I think we miss our turn…”

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Hey Dad, lets chat. We’ve spent a good amount of time traveling in either a car or a big rig, listening to music. I remember waking up at 4am during my summer vacation so I could accompany you to help deliver lots and lots of boxes to U-Hauls around California. Or, our trips to Santa Cruz/Mission Springs, (despite the fact that you maliciously left the AC off for the entire trip just so we would really appreciate that cool Mision Springs air :) ), it was always a lot of fun and I really expanded my musical palette.

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I guess I missed writing about last years Christmas in February. I’ll have to try and make up for it right now. First off though, we didn’t charge the battery for our nice camera. We were not prepared at all this year. So, the nice family portrait was not taken by us this year, and I don’t have a copy. Here is the other part of my lack of preparedness… I sort of forgot to tell Michele that this was the weekend we were going to my Dads.

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Amnesia is a great horror game, and one of the most immersive games I have played. It has a dark HP Lovecraft inspired story that you, the protagonist Daniel discovery throughout the game through flashbacks and diary notes. The game starts off with you, Daniel, waking up in a Prussian castle with a note along the lines of, “Hello me, I took something to make me forget the terrible things that have happened.

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We took a trip to the Children’s Museum in San Jose. It was sort of like the on in Portland, but not as nice. It would have been a lot nicer if you could get in the vehicles and do something with all the knobs and buttons. They also had a horse drawn buggy, with a big sign that said “Please do not climb”. Seems a bit off, like a “keep off the grass” sign at a playground.

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It feels odd to read a children’s book, but it was very engrossing and a fun light read. I blew right through it though, partially because I didn’t want to put it down, and also because even for a 300 page book, the font and text padding was larger than normal. Oh sure, I felt like a literary machine, reading 100+ pages in one sitting. Combine that with a nice cute story where there are no hard moral choices, a clearly evil bad guy, and no big words… reading hasn’t been easier since I read an X-Men comic!

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No cool Christmas pictures or stories, I did see this clip on YouTube and though “Wow, how interesting”. For two reasons, first off, it is cool to see how a line algorithm works. Secondly, it is just as fascinating to hear a reasonable hypothesis as to why we don’t use that. Because our brains are really bad at making good decisions. {% youtube F5Ri_HhziI0 %} Otherwise, there are two (and a half) days left in the year, and that means I rushed out to the internet to make a small donation to The FreeBSD Project.

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