5:41 pm in Martial Arts, Travel by Gaz
As an idle musing when I was chatting to one of the senior black belts at the black belt pregrading on the 17th of this month, I asked whether Korean was written like Chinese or Japanese. She didn’t know, but I had a little free time on my hands today so I thought I should satisfy my curiosity and find out!
Korean is written with characters called Hangul, which are written from left to right just like English. Surprisingly, there is an alphabet consisting of just 19 consonants and 21 vowels, many of which are minor variations of each other. No ideograms with one symbol per word :-) Better yet, I was amazed to discover that words are written phonetically by building syllables composed of
two or three letters arranged in little boxes… no where near as complicated as I had expected.
Here is an interesting site that offers a short introduction to Hangul, by J. David Eisenberg (author of the O’Reilly SVG book :-/)
7:19 pm in Martial Arts by Gaz
This year the English was an open event and in addition to the Evolution TaeKwonDo guys, the Irish ITF team that will be in the Elite Team event in June came over for a warm up. There were only two weight divisions in the Men’s black belt again, but thankfully they combined light and middle weights, so Francis Miller wasn’t in my division :-) Unfortunately, all but one of the Irish guys were, and their contact was borderline excessive IMHO.
I ended up with a bye in the first round again, since my opponent had pulled out. Second round was versus one of the ITF guys, and was a difficult fight for me because I’m completely unused to the blitzing style they all seemed to use. He was a bit heavier than me, and pushed me out of the ring about six times, keeping me on my back foot for the entire bout. It felt like the area was too small and I couldn’t find the room to turn and stay inside as I tried to pick off the gaps in his guard as he rushed towards me. Even so, despite losing at least 3 points for travelling out of the area, one of the judges had scored me infront, so I was rather pleased despite losing. Read the rest of this entry →
6:55 pm in Announcements by Gaz
Another nugget of pure gold from alistapart.com: To aid navigation of my site, I’ve added navigation tabs at the top of the page to access each of the site sections in a single click. Briefly: Home and Planner are my two emacs-wiki projects; Journal is my Blosxom served blog (rendered by emacs-wiki); Arch is a ViewARCH view of my public code projects. Issues is empty for the moment, but will contain the web-space view of a Roundup issue tracker.
