Tonight, nearby Kidderminster pub, the Wren’s Nest, held a fundraiser for victims of the flooding across England this Summer, complete with a raffle, live music, a bike show, fireworks and the ritual burning of a wicker man at the end of the night to cries of “BURN ‘IM!!” :-)
We used it as a flimsy excuse for a farewell knees-up and invited several of our friends from around the country. I felt a little cheated that my buddy, Pokemeister, bought the best raffle ticket, but it didn’t win him any prizes. We all drank a little too much, except Pokey’s other half, who had way more tequila than she could handle and after redecorating our bedroom with her lunch, and a couple of hours on the big white telephone to God (Bleargh! Oh… Gad!!) spent the next 24 hours feeling incredibly delicate.
It took me a couple of days to recover from the busyness of the earlier part of this week, so this blog is currently operating in a bit of a timewarp while I post articles that would otherwise have gone up a few days ago. I hope it doesn’t irritate you too much :-)
At the end of yesterday’s exciting installment, you will recall that I had collapsed exhausted just after 4:30pm after almost 30 hours without sleep…
Just 90 minutes later my alarm sounded to remind me that I needed to be in Coventry for my MCMAA class. Ordinarily, I might have given in to the temptation to shut off the alarm, roll over, and go back to sleep, but feeling surprisingly refreshed didn’t want to miss 2 hours with David Hastings (3rd Dan Hapkido) learning about the use of a cane (aka walking stick) for self defence.
The first thing I noticed was how much easier it is to whirl a cane around than an escrima rattan stick, simply by virtue of being able to hold it in the crook and spin it like a tonfa. That said, most of the lesson revolved around using the other end of the stick for various take-downs and restraints. Many variations were covered: wrapping up the attacker from a wrist grab, with variations for same side and cross body grabs; and defending against a single punch. A lot of emphasis was given to dragging the “blade” of the cane along one’s opponent’s forearm, progressing into a wrist lock or takedown, which meant that by about half way through my forearms were very red and a little swollen, the bruising will probably take a week to come out :-(
I had to demonstrate some basic knife defence skills for my Tae Kwon-Do 3rd Dan, and were I to pursue Tae Kwon-Do any further, more advanced techniques would have been required to pass my 4th. Even before I became interested in FMA, I always thought it wasteful to learn how to demonstrate several heavily practiced defences against knife attacks from various angles for my Tae Kwon-Do gradings. The techniques I practiced were not integrated with anything else in the style, and I would certainly never have dared to use them against a live blade except perhaps during the last few weeks before a grading when they were well-rehearsed. By contrast, Mr. Hastings demonstrated how the various drills we practiced with the cane worked equally well empty handed, similar to one of the features of FMA that I’m especially fond of. Like FMA, the weapon is treated as an extension of the users body, so that the body mechanics and muscle memory learned when working to defend against an attack from some angle with a weapon, can be applied equally well without the weapon. After a few years of training like this, I think I would be able to build enough confidence to defend against a live blade… with or without the aid of a rattan stick!
Having spent the bulk of the lesson drilling cane techniques that could be applied equally well with an escrima stick, we spent a little time exploring how the crook could be used to attack, trip and hook an opponent, culminating in a spectacular pile-driver that I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of!
With my background in Tae Kwon-Do, I’ve always had some latent interest in Hapkido. I had previously thought it was Korean Aikido, and imagined that I might gravitate towards Hapkido as a gentler style that would be kinder to my body as I get too old to perform Tae Kwon-Do’s acrobatic kicks, without leaving behind the Korean roots of my teaching. Mr. Hastings was kind enough to spend another half-hour after the end of the lesson informally answering questions and chatting with us. I also took the opportunity to quiz one of his senior students during the lesson itself; I was surprised to discover how complete and rounded Hapkido actually is! In addition to teaching striking, throwing, grappling and all that entails, as well as softer Aikido-influenced force redirection — several weapons are taught too. Overall, the cane is a very interesting weapon that provides endless opportunities for attacks and defences that are not possible with a straight stick, and I hope to enjoy tapping into more of Mr. Hastings extensive knowledge someday soon.
After last Friday’s abortive attempt to collect our Indian travel visas, I resolved to rejoin the very same queue before 6 o’clock this morning… which, in turn, involved getting up no later than 4:30am! Unfortunately for me, I was totally in-the-zone with what I was working at on Sunday night, and I didn’t notice the time until long after midnight. Afraid of my ability to actually get up again after only 4 hours sleep I worked on through the night, eventually setting off in the car for Birmingham with a sleepy Octavia a little after 5am.
Having collected some supplies from a 24 hour garage en route, and parked less than a block away, we joined an already substantial queue around 6am. There were camper vans parked outside the consulate, and the family at the front of the queue claimed to have been here since 4:30pm yesterday! Luckily, even at our position further back, we were surrounded by interesting and friendly people which made passing the time while standing in the icy morning cold a little less traumatic. Around 8am, the shutters on the front of the consulate were opened allowing the first 50 people in the queue to cram into the entrance hallway, where even if dangerously overcrowded, it was at least somewhat warmer. As the queue approached the door, we decided to wait outside and avoid the frayed tempers on the other side.
A notice on the outside of the door proclaimed that in order to prevent a huge number of bodies congregating outside the building every morning, postal applications for visas were no longer being accepted. It seems to me that this would actually increase the number of people waiting outside, but who am I to question the delicate workings of the consulate administration? :-)
A little after 9am, the door at the bottom of the stairs leading to the waiting room were opened, and despite the best efforts of a beleaguered staff member to fairly distribute numbered tickets in order to the people at the front of the queue, the people sardined into the entrance hall dangerously stampeded forward almost causing a couple of fights to break out. Sadly, several queuers on our side of the entrance door also pushed forward hoping to take advantage of the chaos to get a better position in the queue. I refused to let anyone still outside with us through the door ahead of me, and made everyone remain outside until the entrance hall had cleared before filing through in a more civilized and orderly fashion. I think a few queue jumpers were disappointed. :-D
Once we had collected our tickets, making us around 50th in line, we took one of the last remaining seats in the waiting room and took the weight off our feet until we were finally called forward around 11am; 5 hours after originally joining the queue outside. At the window we each handed over our our application forms, passports and £30 fee, and in return were given a receipt and instructions to return between 3 and 4:30pm to collect our visas.
Fearful of being too far back in the queue to be able to collect before closing time, we returned at 2pm… early enough to wait in the warm entrance hall until the stairway door was eventually opened twenty minutes late at 3:20. Even when we had scaled the stairs and joined the queue at the collection window, the staff didn’t actually give back the first visa for another quarter of an hour. Even so, we reached the front, collected our visas, and were back to the car park a hair before our parking ticket expired at 4pm.
A total of 7 hours in a queue after missing a nights sleep certainly took its toll, and I fell asleep exhausted immediately upon arriving home. Never again!
If you’d like a free linkback in next week’s Sunday Link Love, just send me any cool links you find. It couldn’t be any easier to leech some of my traffic: go to the plugoo box in the sidebar; type in your blog url, add a link to something on the intertubes I might find interesting and press send. That’s it!
iPhoneDrive – As if space wasn’t already tight enough on your iPhone, here’s a way to fill it up even faster ;-)
TextExpander 2 – A whole new version of my 2nd favourite abbreviated typing application, with a 30 day demo or as a free upgrade for registered users.
Dealing with Signatures in a Paperless Office – Maybe I can use this tip to get me out of the print-sign-scan bind that a lot of businesses still make me do if I want to deal with them?
Following up on John Gruber’s recent post about iPhone web apps: I absolutely agree that right now there is definitely something that makes certain applications work better as a web application in your browser, where others seem more suited to running natively on the operating system. I’m also right behind John when he says:
Imagine [...] an Apple-designed next-generation [...] embedded runtime for net-based apps that “kills” Flash [...] by out-classing it[;] enabling Mac OS X- and iPhone-quality user experiences in apps that reside on a server, not the client.
There are two things that split applications between those that work well in the browser, and those that work better as native desktop applications:
The richness of the interface a developer can provide;
Whether network access is an integral part of the application.
John’s next-gen net application runtime certainly solves the first, and if it can truly provide an equivalent user experience to the same application running natively, then what would be the point of writing Cocoa applications in the first place? Network access. I don’t care how well written google mail is, if I can’t search my mail archives or queue a draft email for later delivery while I’m away from a network connection, then I’ll stick with Apple Mail!
I’m sure that we’re only a decade (or two at the most) away from always-on high-speed mobile network access (probably from telcos whose current business model is falling apart slowly as the population discovers internet telephony), and all Apple needs to do is have a great web-app SDK in place well before then. Perhaps that’s what they were trying to do by not releasing a Cocoa SDK for the iPhone, but until those two things that prevent certain web-apps from working as well as an equivalent native application are solved, few users will want to forego their native applications.
Unfortunately, the browser market is still splintered enough that simply providing John’s next-gen net-app runtime isn’t enough to win mass user mind-set. Apple is, however, ideally placed to do so. In addition to providing a rich user experience and clean development environment, Apple can showcase their runtime by using it to host the applications on some future revision of the iPhone, along with an reimplementation of the dotMac web interface, and some of their key software. Say, iTunes and iCal? You can bet that FireFox will follow suit with their own implementation, and if Microsoft doesn’t want to miss out on the party altogether, they had better follow suit before all their users migrate away from Internet Explorer to either FireFox or Safari.
Long before all the parts of this future come together, we have the promise of Google Gears to make running web-apps without net access less painful, and Web 2.0 technologies to make our user experience a lot nicer while we are online. The rest is just a simple matter of programming :-)
Tonight, nearby Kidderminster pub, the Wren’s Nest, held a fundraiser for victims of the flooding across England this Summer, complete with a raffle, live music, a bike show, fireworks and the ritual burning of a wicker man at the end of the night to cries of “BURN ‘IM!!” :-)
