Practice was another beat down for me, but in a good way. We spend the first 20 minutes or so after warm-ups practicing fumikomi moving back and forth across the gym floor almost non-stop. Once again my stamina failed completely by the end of the drills. At the end of it we did 50 hiya-suburi which I was unable to complete as well, but did as much as I could and then a few more so I’ll make progress regardless. The remaining part of practice was spent on kiri-kaeshi of different flavors. I found this drill to be quite useful since we worked on both the receiving and attacking sides. We also went over the finer points of where exactly to strike and how to receive. We ended by doing some precise target practice; men, do, kote and even a light tsuki. Overall it was another great practice and hopefully I’m actually getting better.
Tuesday Keiko
January 13th, 2010Friday Keiko
January 9th, 2010Kendo kieko was pretty intense last night. We spend the last 20 minutes or so solid doing ji geiko with each person in class. There was probably about 4 or 5 minutes spend with each person and I definently need to step up on the aerobic side of things if I hope to survive those and still manage to keep proper form. I know that is part of the purpose behind doing practice like that, but I’ll also need to put in extra effort outside of practice to try and up my endurance and stamina.
Kendo
January 6th, 2010Over the last few months I’ve been taking part in kendo or Japanese fencing. I’ve always been interested in the Japanese culture so Kendo has been an excellent way to expose myself to more of that as well as a way to help get in better shape. I hope to start blogging a bit after each practice, or keiko, to just put down my thoughts and experiences.
The Known Universe – Cool…
December 23rd, 2009STAR WARS: The Old Republic
July 19th, 2009
I get more excited the more I read and see about this upcoming game. They, of course, don’t have any of the big an exciting information yet; such as all the classes, races, etc, but just the couple of game play videos I’ve seen have me hoping this will be as fun as WoW has been. I’m sure I’ll start out playing a Jedi on the Republic side of things, but could probably be persuaded to try out a red saber 
.
Mining for goods!
July 16th, 2009This is a cool video on a presentation at TED on a new medical device for retrieving bone marrow from donors. The current way of harvesting bone marrow is pretty painful and brutal. This new device is pretty interesting and quite ingenious.
Boxee Update
July 14th, 2009Well after fighting with Linux for about a week I finally decided to scrap it. I fought trying to get the audio to work properly and it never would really work 100% and even when it would work it would stop working for no reason after a short time. So I installed Windows 7 x64 RC, installed Boxee, plugged in my digital optical cable, changed default output to SPDIF and everything worked like a champ first time with no issue. It even play’s ISOs with sound which I never did get working in Ubuntu.
I guess this is probably why Linux will never make it in the mainstream desktop market.
Its Name Was Boxee…
July 6th, 2009
So in my quest to create a media center PC MythTV didn’t hold the Holy Grail that I had hoped it would. It seemed to be geared more towards recording content and playing it back than playing currently stored content for which I was primarly searching. I’m not saying MythTV couldn’t do that, but it required more plugins and configuring that I wanted to spend.
I decided to move on to XBMC (Xbox Media Center). I had previously had XBMC installed on an old XBOX that I had and really liked how it worked and played. They had more recently come out with a version that would run on Linux so I figured it deserved a shot. After playing with it for a bit I was somewhat satisfied with it, but it was still missing the Hulu plugin that I was hoping for as well. This brought me to Boxee which is an extension of the XBMC project.
Boxee has a very nice UI and includes pretty much everything that I was looking for in my Media Center. It will play Hulu as well as a number of other streaming content, has built in bittorrent and plays almost every format known (including ISOs). The only thing that it doesn’t do currently is play Netflix, but I think there are some work arounds for it as well as they are working on solving that issue.
I had some difficult time getting the digital audio to work properly mostly due to issues with Linux (isn’t it always? ), but I think I have it mostly ironed out now. I still can’t get the sound to work when I play an ISO file, but I’m sure I’ll get it figured out eventually and that isn’t deal breaking — yet.
I found this article where someone built a pretty decent set top box using boxee and a slim computer case that I might do as a second box for my bedroom.
Summer Landscaping
July 4th, 2009So I don’t know what possessed me, but recently we started redoing some of the landscaping around the house. Its definantly more work than it should be, but was less work than it could of been. I wish I would of taken a before and after, but all I have is a middle and after. I had some ‘vile weeds’ aka. roses there before, but moved them around the corner. There will probably be more landscaping to come in the future (yay…).
Here is the middle pic:
The evil front porch in the middle of transition.
Here is the after pic:
This is the front porch after.
MythTV
June 22nd, 2009
http://www.mythtv.org
So I’m thinking of taking a crack at installing MythTV on a Ubuntu box and setting up a little media center computer. I’ve been using my Xbox for along time and just reading off a share on my main computer, but I’ve been having a lot of issues with my Xbox being able to see media as well as the Xbox doesn’t support a number of codecs and hopefully MythTV will have better support. I think I will start with just playing stored media content and then move up to recording my HD feeds and perhaps my satellite feed later on.
