My Wushu Blog

I didn’t want to forget to blog about this, it is a little late. Over a month ago (Jan 31st), Jenny invited me to hike Mount Diablo with the Stanford Outing Group, lead by “V”. I’ve posted her photos to the gallery here, and you should read her post on our trip. Its more entertaining than mine :) http://jettagirl.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/mount-diablo-hike-to-the-summit/ This was a 14 mile hike, took about 6-7 hours (I think) and made my legs feel like jelly.

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Group photo todo My Dad and I are very similar, one of those similar traits is that we procrastinate and push things like Christmas off until ALMOST March :) This get together worked out last year, so we did it again. The traditional holiday schedule is so crazy and overwhelming (especially for an introvert) that it is miserable to try and cram everything in within a few days. With us getting together two months after settling down from the real event, its nice and relaxing and we get to have Pizza without worrying that the place will close due to a holiday.

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Another awesome class of basics with Mark. I like the basic wushu movements now more than ever, for two reasons. I’m so out of it now, I can’t remember an entire form, so its all I can do. If you can do basics well, then all of the rest comes a lot easier. Its something we should always work on. What I also like are little combination, you know, not a full section, but just a short string of punches, kicks, and stances.

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I’ve configured this blog to use my OpenID accounts. I have two (which totally goes against the single identity mindset of OpenID :) ) http://mcarlson.myopenid.com/ http://openid.evil-genius-network.com/mike The second one I just stood up today. I’m always concerned with who has my information, and if I can, I try to keep it all within the realm of my control. Also, the evil genius domain has absolutely no purpose besides a testing ground that I have no problems destroying :)

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A fantastic novel. This type of book makes re-examine yourself, which can be good and bad I guess. The book is essential about two cousins, Sam Klayman (or Sam Clay) and Joseph Kavalier, who decided to pitch a new line of comic book characters during the 1940’s “Golden Age” of comic books. They both bring their own ideals and messages to their fictional characters. What I found interesting is this isn’t about a particular event, but the two characters lives in whole.

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It is hard to say that I’ve enjoyed a novel that was sad and depressing. It was a great read, and I really liked how the dialog was arranged, it was very sparse but not at all wasteful. The book is about a father and son traveling to the pacific coast in a very dreary post-apocalyptic south western. I guess this is all supposed to be after a comet hits the Earth.

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Mark was back, and when I walked in it was obvious that this is where he belongs :) Its always one of my favorite scenes to walk in on, and its because I enjoy the immense pain of simple leg conditioning. Mark is casually leaning on a staff, behind a line of the beginner students, calmly calling out “horse stance…” (pause 30 seconds) “bow stance…” (pause again for 30 seconds)

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So, I updated this blog to the latest Wordpress release, 2.7. The interface is all fancy and it didn’t break my current theme so I’m happy. Aside from that, nothing else has been going on. Work has been fun, home has been busy, and I’m still showing up once a week to Wushu West. I’ll have to quickly summarize the movies I’ve seen soon, and since there hasn’t been one that really stood out I haven’t felt compelled to share any.

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On my last post, someone commented with a full article regarding Kip Macy’s recent legal trouble as a landlord. I don’t know Kip or condone what he and his girlfriend allegedly did, and when it comes to his contributions to FreeBSD it saddens me a little. For a community project like FreeBSD, one persons reputation can reflect on the entire project. However, whats worse is that the commenter,** ‘Mr Scott B’**, feel’s its his role to bring this to the light.

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Thankfully I didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn (7:30!) because it was scheduled to start at 11am. I was a little rushed for time since I had to drop Caralyne off at my parents in Knightsen (so I back-tracked a bit), and I left at 9am, so I barely made it in time for the ZFS talk. A Closer Look at the ZFS File System by Pawel Jukab Dawidek I’ve heard a great talk on ZFS from Bill Moore, one of the primary developers from Sun, but this talk was really cool because it didn’t just say what ZFS is from Sun’s marketting department’s point of view, but the technical details its mail peices and how it integrates in FreeBSD.

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