azazil.net

Sure enough, no sooner had I sat down that Mr. Sparks cracked a funny about officials wearing excessive jewelry. Oops. More embarrassment for me :-( I had anticipated it though and removed everything before I arrived. The whole day was just a refresher for me really, but I was surprised at how fast the day went. I think I’m going to officiate at the British Championships in November too, and then I will have completed four events and hopefully qualify for my Referee’s Certificate. If that all goes according to plan, then I’ll be able to concentrate on competing next season before I ramp everything up for my 3rd Dan in 2005.

I arrived a few minutes late, and the official’s teams had already been allocated to areas. It seemed for a moment that I would get to float between the areas to give the other officials a break for water or the like, but pretty much right away I was press ganged into Mr. Billy Thompson’s team. I did time keeping for most of the morning through the yellow and green belt divisions, but after lunch Mr. Thompson asked me to run the area for a while. I hadn’t done it before in a live competition, but getting my Ref’s certification requires that I do it, and I won’t be eligible for my 3rd Dan until I’m qualified. By mid-afternoon my area was hosting Men’s Heavyweight Red Belt division, and I realised that most of the competitors were bigger than me… however, their respect was excellent, and I think I fooled everyone into thinking I was confident and self assured by shouting a lot :-)

Mr. Sparks watched some of my performance, and apart from making me remove all my jewelry after I had bowed the competitors off for my first ever live bout, he didn’t pick me up on anything, so that went well. I wonder whether he will mention anything at the course next weekend?

Finally, the Men’s Black Belt Middle Weight division came to my area, and I was hoarse from shouting and exhausted from the concentration. Thankfully, Mr. Cockburn was on hand to bribe with a cake and I moved back to time keeping until the end of the Championships.

Yikes! My first post-2nd Dan pre-grading is here already. That means I’m already 25% of the way to 3rd Dan: It’s going too quickly. I’ve barely got to grips with ChoongJang, and I’ve got two more to learn. The focus of this session was, in fact, patterns. I had the pleasure of fumbling my way through a shaky rendition of ChoongJang in front of most of the GTI instructors and Dan grades from the South West quadrant of the country :-/ But, to regain some perspective on the issue, I did make a conscious decision to learn the most difficult of the three patterns first so that I would have plenty of time to polish it. I’ve been led to believe that ChoongJang is an excellent competition pattern too, though based on my performance today I think I’ll stick to refereeing at the National Points Championships tomorrow.

Go see this movie! I am surprised at the mediocre reviews this film seems to be getting. The set pieces and costumes were moody and evocative, and the characters compelling. I’ve always had a soft spot for a good anti-hero, and it is rare for Hollywood to enter that territory. You know that you are rooting for the bad guys from the start, but there is an interesting twist which I didn’t see coming — although my friends tell me it was obvious; maybe I was too mesmerised by the cinematography to pay too much attention to the plot. I’ll definitely be buying this on DVD as soon as it comes out.

I have never really used vi in anger, although I do use it for quick, simple text editing if I know I’m only going to be in a file for a few seconds. I started to teach myself JoVE, and then JED at University, before graduating to GNU Emacs 18.59 around 1990. I flirted with XEmacs on and off for the following 5 years, but never made the switch whole heartedly until the advent of pseudo-transparency in Eterm. Since I spent around 10 or 12 hours a day in emacs, I wanted a way to not have it get in the way of my beautiful desktop wallpaper.

For me, XEmacs’ killer feature was colour syntax highlighting in a terminal emulator using ANSI colour escape sequences. I could run it in Eterm with transparency. However, I found out a couple of years ago that GNU Emacs now had a similar feature, but I could never really be bothered to convert back again. Even when I bought my iBook, the emacs shipped on apple’s GNU Developer Tools CD didn’t want to play nicely in colour in Terminal.app, so I installed XEmacs and used that.

Anyway, today a serendipitous combination of events made me switch back. I found htmlfontify.el, which doesn’t run in XEmacs, and while getting GNU emacs to eat my startup files to try it out, I found an FAQ in the GNU emacs documentation that said the terminfo database was often responsible for a lack of colour. I now have a working GNU emacs, after only a couple of hours of removing the XEmacsisms from my initialisation files. And better yet I’ve hooked htmlfontify.el into emacs-wiki!

To have GNU Emacs display colours properly in Terminal.app?

$ TERM=xterm-color /usr/bin/emacs -nw