My Wushu Blog

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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I spent the weekend at Google for MeetBSD in celebration of FreeBSD’s 15 birthday. I drove 70.2x4 miles, on a weekend, and for Saturday I got up slightly earlier than I would have for work. All worth it, this was the coolest mini-conference I’ve been to. Of course, the last conference I went to was BSDCon in 2003, and that was nice as well. The point is, I don’t get out all that much when it comes to conferences, I just make an exception for my favorite UNIX OS, FreeBSD.

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El Aura This was a cool Noir film. A taxidermist who is a little unusual, socially disconnected, and suffers from epileptic seizures finds himself in the middle of a heist. Yeah, it is sort of a jump, it works though. Thanks again to twitchfilms.net and their cool DVD reviews.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull This was the first time I had seen this movie. I skipped seeing it in the theaters, that’s my usual thing these days, so I patiently awaited for it to come out on Blu Ray. I have some mixed feelings with the movie itself, but the video and audio quality was fantastic in almost all scenes. There was the particularly goofy jungle scene where the CGI was painful to look at, but I disliked the tarzan-esque vine swinging in the first place so that may have tainted my opinion.

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This class was the most intense class I’ve had since I’ve been back. Jenny and I did a little jog for our lunch workout, and since I still don’t jog all the time, I was already sore by the time I got to class. Thats good though, I don’t mind, I feel like I accomplished something big. Our warmup was brief, James led it and since he had a tooth pulled Monday, he wasn’t going to go all out.

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