Can You See With Your Tongue? | Senses | DISCOVER Magazine.
This is an amazing article - a scientist who managed to make people react to light-based input without using their eyes. The human brain is … limitless within its limits ? It’s definitely worth the read.
On Monday I went to the dojo as usual, though I’d had a cold over the week-end and wasn’t quite over it (I’m still not over it now..). During form practice, I was constantly correcting myself - I guess that goes to show I need to practice a lot more, if I dedicate this much mindpower to each form.. 
The MIM keeps 60 days by default. That may be too much for you..
By default, the folder C:\Program Files\MIM\config should make you really happy, it’s got lots of plain text files with configuration for all kinds of settings.
cleanup.txt has “ARCHIVE LEFTOVER AGE (DAYS) := 60
Change that to whatever you feel is appropriate for you needs.
Yesterday evening a man who trained about as long as sensei came to train with us. Black obi, rather frayed to white. He’d trained a long time under his uncle, and then ~15 years under sensei’s sensei. He’d taken a break for a while, so he was a bit out of shape, but his mindset, his attitude, his devotion were 100% into everything he did - an important lesson which I forget all too often.
He left, very happy to have joined us. I hope we’ll see him again.
Whoo! I haven’t done a post that long in a while! Also makes me think I should get a wordpress plugin for some ‘code’ tags..
I put ‘activerecord’ in there to take advantage of the ‘24.hours.ago’ notation, which makes life much easier. The cost is a little less than 2 seconds to load the library, so I think it’s worth it. It runs as a daily job before backup to tape, to clear old backups from the directory tree.
require 'activerecord'
def delete_recursively(in_here)
Dir.chdir(in_here)
Dir.glob('*') do |filename|
if File.directory?(filename)
delete_recursively(filename)
else
if File.mtime(filename) > 24.hours.ago
File.delete(filename)
end
end
end
Dir.chdir('..')
end
delete_recursively("your/path/here")
This blog may yet come alive! I’ve figured out how to post to this from my Blackberry I use an app called bbmetablog (google for ‘bbmetablog opencod’), currently version 1.2.2 . I had a bit of an issue getting xmlrpc line set up propery, until I changed their default ‘xml-rpc?openagent’ to ‘xmlrpc.php’ .. And I’m live!
Yesterday we had a small class, so we were able to each work on what we needed. I, hopefully, now have the full chatan yara no sai form, so I just need to work it..
We did some kali stick work. The yellow and blue belt had never seen those drills before so we started with a simple high-low-high, but we did try for a little bit the sinawali drills, specifically heaven, because that one’s fun Kali sticks are very good to work follow-through, speed and flow, and god knows I need that.
Monday and yesterday, two blue belts were to test for purple. They went through their calisthenics and basics; I did not see their forms on Monday, but I did see them on Wednesday. They were bad enough sensei wanted to see them again, that much I understood, but not sure how bad until I saw them both.
Neither of them broke a sweat until fighting, not for the 100 jumping jacks, not for the 60 push-ups, not for the multiple kick combinations. They did get out of breath when doing all the forms in a row, at least…
Neither displayed the spirit we expected from a blue belt.. Let alone from someone testing. A test is supposed to be the hardest thing you’ve done to date and you’re supposed to work as hard as you can.. And that’s usually noticeable. Further, their forms weren’t even up to blue belt level. Chances are they did not practice outside the dojo.. Or even think about the art at all. While some people do martial arts leisurely, you should either expect to stop progressing or realize that work needs to go into it.
One of the blue belts seemed OK with the postponement and stayed to speak with sensei.. The other one pretty much stormed out.. Well, we’ll see what happens now.
You have to TRAIN !
Is it a worrying trend that I write mostly about pain in here?
Every once in a while, usually while doing a high block with my left arm, I’d feel a pain in my left shoulder. It felt like a part was rolling over another one.. Muscle over bone, or something like that. It’s not pleasant and is the kind of pain that stops your movement quite short and quite abruptly.
It happened yesterday while doing an uppercut (or, you know, punch to under the jaw/to the throat/etc). I realized my body alignment was wrong and my left elbow wasn’t kept in properly. As soon as I fix that, I think, I’ll feel a lot better about the whole thing
This of course begs the question.. What else am I not aligning properly, but maybe not quite wrong enough to get pain from it?