Krav Maga (by alaric)

I've always enjoyed combined mental/physical challenges. As a child, I often entertained myself with things like getting from one part of the house to another without touching the floor. This required planning, and finesse; the combination was exhilerating.

I enjoyed my time in the Combined Cadet Force, as many of the exercises we were set involved this combination; and I particularly enjoyed being in the school shooting team. Especially when we went out to electronic target ranges and did exercises involving running to checkpoints with an assault rifle, diving into the prone position, inserting the magazine, shooting at targets as they popped up, and then running to the next checkpoint. It was like playing Time Crisis!

However, that kind of thing has been missing from my life for the past decade or so. Also, I've been spending far too much of my time sitting in cars or at desks, with my main exercise being carrying heavy objects (such as sleeping children) for short distances. I was feeling a keen desire to exercise more.

Then about a year ago, Jean started doing Ju Jutsu, and I started to wonder about taking up a martial art. I remember, many years ago, a friend saying he was taking up Krav Maga, an interesting-sounding Israeli martial art that grew from self-defence techniques in the Jewish gettos of Hungary before World War 2.

However, my searches found no nearby Krav Maga groups; the nearest was in Bristol. So I gave up on this idea for the time being. But a few weeks ago I spotted a poster in a shop window in Cheltenham advertising local Krav Maga courses; sure enough, a group had started!

So yesterday evening, I turned up to give it a try.

It's delightfully pragmatic; most of the attacks seem to revolve around wacking your attacker as hard as you can in the softest bits of them you can reach, then running away. The first skill I started practicing was how to kick somebody in the groin, punch them in the face twice in quick succession, pull them down hard onto your rapidly-rising knee into their stomach, elbow them in the kidneys, and end up behind them (running away, of course), in one smooth motion. We then proceeded to have a try at being pinned from behind by one person while another ran at you from the front; there is a technique to escape the grip and leave the person gripping you curled up in a painful ball on the floor, but doing it while also dealing with the person coming at you from the front makes it a lot more interesting. There were also some more abstract exercises in dealing with large numbers of people coming at you, avoiding being cornered or surrounded, and getting them to get in each other's way. That involved some physical activity in keeping moving, but it was mainly a mental exercise, observing the paths of the attackers and planning your movements.

The practising was good exercise in itself, but we also did a bit of general fitness exercise, largely as part of the warm-up before getting into the practice. I left feeling tired but lively, and today I've been feeling the ache of growing muscle over much of my body, so it's been a good work-out.

I got on well with the other students, who were very helpful with the new people in their midst; and the instructor seems to be a truly intriguing and inspiring person!

It was good challenging fun, so I'm going to keep going, hopefully switching to the Gloucester group that will be starting on Mondays in September!

I turned up in a shirt and trousers, straight from the office, but most of the people there had track suits. Black ones, and t-shirts with martial-looking imagery on, were particularly popular. The contrarian in me is now wondering if I can get a glittery pink tracksuit in my size...

ORG-mode and Fossil (by alaric)

I'm always moaning about how I have too many ideas and not enough time, so it's quite important to me to manage my time efficiently.

My biggest concern, with many projects on the go at once (and I don't just mean fun personal projects, I'm including things my family depends upon me for as well), is that I'll forget something important I'm supposed to do. And I'm also concerned that I'll forget a fun personal project, so that when I do get a moment, I can't think of anything to do, or that I spend my time on something that doesn't get me as good a reward for the available resources as I could have had.

Therefore, I've always been a big fan of "To Do" lists in one form or another. I've tried a few apps to manage TODOs for me, from the excellent personal information management facilities of the Palm Pilot to Things on the Mac, but I've tended to find such things restrictive. For a long time I had a complex OmniOutliner setup that also computed my timesheets with AppleScript, which suited me well; indeed, I've still yet to completely migrate all of the content out of that file (tricky now I no longer have a Mac, but I've looked at the underlying XML file and it seems reasonably parseable), and I think it still contains some notes about ARGON that I've not written up anywhere else!

However, I've had the most success with text files, adding hierarchic structure with headings, so it was fairly natural for me to try Org Mode one of these days. For those not in the know, this is an Emacs package designed to help you organise things with hierarchically-structured plain text files. You write heading lines prefixed with an asterisk, indicating the level of nesting by adding more asterisks, and Org helps by syntax-highlighting the header lines, hiding entire subtrees so you can see the large-scale structure, editing operations to cut and paste entire subtrees (properly adjusting the levels to match where you paste the subtree too), and so on.

But that's just the start. That's what it inherits from the Outline Mode it's based on.

What Org Mode adds on top of that is really hard to list. You can add workflow tags (TODO -> INPROGRESS -> STALLED -> DONE, for instance; you get to define your own little state machine), along with optional priorities, to mark some headings as tasks requiring attention (and obtain a report in the "agenda view" of all headings in certain states, ordered by priority, for instance). You can attach tags to headlines (and use them as filters in the agenda). You can attach arbitrary key-value metadata lists to headings (which are folded down into a single line, and opened up on request, so they don't clutter it), and use those to annotate things with deadlines, or scheduled dates, and have a calendar view in your agenda. Or use the key-value properties to filter the agenda view. Or have Org Mode automatically record a log book of state transitions of a task in the metadata. Or take metadata keys out and display them as extra columns in the hierarchy of headings, in a manner reminicent of OmniOutliner. You can embed links to other files that can be opened in Emacs; if it's an org-mode file you can link to a heading by a unique ID, or you can link to any old text file by line number or by searching for nearby text. There's a feature you can use, while editing any file, to create an Org-Mode heading containing text you are prompted for and a link to the place you were at in the file you were editing, timestamped, inserted under a specified heading of a specified org-mode file, so you can trivially create tasks referencing the file you're working on. Or you can embed executable elisp code to perform arbitrarily complex operations.

I'd been using Org Mode for a while, but I wasn't really using it properly; I had a whole bunch of .org files for different areas of my life, but it was sometimes difficult to fit things into the taxonomy. However, lately, I've had a big tidy-up of my home directory.

I've migrated old projects from Subversion or Git into Fossil, for a start, so now all of my projects - open-source ones at Kitten Technologies, and personal ones, are in their own Fossil repos, which means they have their own ticket trackers for their individual tasks. But each and every one of them has a heading in my new single tasks.org file, which is a unified repository of things I should, or would like to, think about. Fossil projects have a single heading, tagged with "FOSSIL", that lists the place in my home directory where I have the repo working copy, and the URL of the master repository on my server; ŧhis exists to prevent me from forgetting about a project.

I've migrated our long-standing home wiki (mainly a repository of recipies and other such domestic stuff) into the inbuilt wiki of the Fossil repo I already use to store documentation about the house, such as network configuration, a PDF of the plans from the Land Registry, and stuff like that; and the ticket tracker in that repo is now the domestic TODO list. Running the Fossil web interface for that repo off of the home fileserver means that Sarah and I can share the Wiki and task list. And I've configured the Fossil user roles so that anonymous users can't see anything too sensitive.

So in general I've moved as much as I can to Fossil repositories, combining versioned file storage and ticket tracking with a wiki as appropriate; and my tasks.org exists to act as an index to all of them, and to store actual task list items for things that don't naturally map to a fossil repo, although I may find ways to deal with those as well (for instance, I have a fossil repo I use to store my org files, encrypted password database, household budget, address book, and the like, that I'm not using the ticket tracker on; that could be used as a place to put my general administrative tasks as tickets).

However, although putting tickets in the repositories that store individual projects is conceptually neat, and allows for third parties to interact with my task list for open-source projects on Kitten Technologies, it does mean that I have a lot of separate task lists. tasks.org means I won't forget about any of them, but I still have no simple way of knowing what the most urgent or interesting task out of all of my twenty-five repositories is. That's not a great problem in itself, but the next logical step will be to use the automation facilities of Fossil to pull out the tickets from all of my repos and to add them into tasks.org as tasks beneath the corresponding Fossil project heading (including the ticket URL so I can go and edit them easily), so I can see them all consolidated on the agenda view...

Part of this process which has been interesting, though, is digging out various old TODO lists (such as the aforementioned OmniOutliner file) and project directories scattered over archives of old home directories and consolidating them. I've found various projects I'd forgotten about, and neatly filed them as current projects or into my archive tree as old projects (and, oh, how I look forward to being able to put things like that as archives into Ugarit, automatically cross-referenced by their metadata...). Having brought everything together and assembled an index reduces the horrible, lingering, feeling of having lost or forgotten something...

Cornbury Sunday 2012 (by sarah)

There are a lot of photos here, just click on any you want to see bigger 🙂 (WARNING lots of CUTE)

Sunday Morning at Cornbury Music Festival loomed large and again I was the first to rise,s o I went to the lovely on site showers and then went and bought Kava Coconut milk from the brilliant site store and began making breakfast and stuff. Jean had instructed me not to run away again as she didn't like me being missing Saturday morning when she woke up!

Though the baby didn't stay over with us again as she is still so chesty she did have a good explore of the campsite 🙂 Whilst her sister decided to roll down the hill in her sleeping bag - this is traditional for camps we are on. Last day come rain or shine she gets to find a hill and roll! This time she was disgruntled as I wouldn't let her go any further and there were spiky plants she was worried she would roll into!

We didn't see the giant rainbow birds again but we did see some Road Rage Grannys ridding their shopping trollies - Jean thinks it might have been the same people just doing a new pretend.

We had a go at Welly Wanging - Alaric almost won me a pair of wellies but the welly skidded half an inch over the line and it had to be the whole welly in the circle 🙁

Mary Mary not quiet a fairy, has lots of flowers you know! She also kept trying to run off with other toddlers which was fine until they got pushy as toddlers do and being small she was being bowled over by babies 3 months her junior!

Alaric really wanted to make a fish as did I but Jean didn't so Al went and made one anyway but just the frame as we didn't want to be taking a gluey drying thing home with us!

I love stilt walkers! This time it was a larger than life Lord who kept trying to join in the Morris Dancing!

Jean has a habit of finding people who will blow bubbles for her - this I found is quadrupled when she has her sister with her!

We still could not find any childrens ear defenders so Jeany did not want to go to near the stages but that didn't stop her and Mary from dancing to the songs!

The girls loved the ribbon maze which Jean had spent large parts of the festival making as she did last year at the festivals!

We liked the Morris Dancers especially as they had girl ones dressed in funky blacks highlighted with different colours and there was a Big Cheese too who actually had a cheese hat 🙂 I had to stop the girls trying to join in, I spotted the symptoms - wiggling and inching forward in the hope mummy and daddy wouldn't notice. But big sticks and stomping feet wouldn't mix well with little girls so I had to be mean!

Mary managed to join in the crafts this year - well painting - with just a little help. Jeany was so excited to be helping Mary to paint!

There was one group of people running the most fantastic kids workshops! This was the Going Native one which Jean loved!

She even made a bow and arrow which she got a bit annoyed with having done actual archery - there was a feather and no knock on the end of the arrow. No arrow rest she could cope with but no knock....

Here is a pic of my family festivaling it 🙂

I ran the sock puppet making so Jean made several - this is her with one of her creations whilst wearing her angry birds hat from Wychwood Festival.

And then after face painting and candyfloss and Jean winning a badge from the Qi elves for her question about recursive acronymes (it was her own question too! I was relieved that it was a different set of people to the ones I'd asked my question off!). It was time to go - with me moaning about a certain Will Young who's lovely voice was mullering once again, one of my favourite songs - warrble warrble - how much warrble? rolls eyes.

Saturday of Cornbury (by sarah)

If you want to see bigger versions of the photos just click on them.

Rainbow Birds - Jean had us tracking these birds all over the place! Though she was worried they were going to lay an egg on me due to a seam on their bum 🙂

We had a lovely breakfast at the campsite before we headed off to run my workshop.

Jeany's photography

We had a very sleepy Jeany after she had done loads of crafts so we had a late lunch with iced drinks from Cafe Nero were we heard the lovely Yvonne Lyon.

Later on we went to the Riverside Stage and everyone was fed up with my camp food so we bought some noms to eat whilst watching the acts.

I thought the singer here had an amazing voice. I think they were called Satsangi.

We then wizzed over to the SongBird stage to catch Hugh Laurie and The Copper Bottom Band (although due to the Qi tent I kept saying we'd seen Stephen Fry but amazingly everyone knew who I ment :/ )

If I lost Jean and Al I could just wonder over to the Alpro Bowl and find them every single time.

Ecover were there again with a cool dome for yoga and stuff, we played games and painted a giant ECOVER. Jean and Al came 7th out of 2000 odd players on the game last we checked 🙂

This is Dave - he was the brains behind security and had a great time dancing at the main stage.

After Alaric accused me of always taking photos of random bits of plastic I went back to the camp site and took a photo of some plastic.

I just had to photograph these guys.

Whilst I was doing my sock puppet workshop these guys did the most amazing fairy workshop!

This was the outside of the kids zone - it was fantastic!

Jean loved the Morris Dancers so we kept stopping to watch them though we only saw the women dancing the whole weekend!

Saturday like Friday saw a rainbow!

The only thing Jean asked for during the day was a toffee apple so as she had been so good we bought her one 🙂

This tent was next to us and Jean as predicted - loved it 🙂 Her and Daddy want me to do similar to our tent :/

Rainbow!

Cornbury Festival 2012 (by sarah)

Thursday I was so tired - I had had a bad night of muscle spasms but was very excited about Cornbury music festival and I still had a lot of stuff to pack (like all my workshop stuff!). I ment to post these pics of the new hair before I went but forgot! If you want to see bigger versions of any of the photos just click on them 🙂

We ended up putting our tent up in the twilight and therefore cooking dinner in the dark - but I think Alaric enjoyed the challenge 🙂

I was quiet cold and woke Alaric up quiet early on Friday as I didn't realise exactly how early it was. I had restarted my iron tablets but was still suffering cramps in my leg muscles and stuff and I was bored!

It was quiet wet in contrast to last year when I got sun burnt! Not that Alaric cared it gave him an excuse to wear his cloak. It was interesting with the cloak - at Wychwood people had asked where we had bought it and were excited about it - at Cornbury we got Dickheads being very unoriginal about it. Though looking at the second pic I think the Hogwarts comment was spot on - it was just the sentiment behind it that narked.

We headed out to the Festival before it was actually open to the public so that we could work out were the workshop was going to be etc...

I took photos of funky festival things (as I always do).

These were for the top of the bins and are a funky use of empty bottles and has me thinking of some more upcycled projects 🙂

We had lunch back at the campsite and then headed off to run the first of the weekend workshops 🙂 This year it was Sock Puppets which worked really well.

We then went to the Qi tent were I was expecting cocktails as it said interesting drinks in the programme but alas and alack there were none. But Alaric had fun working on my tea cosy and knitted about ten carbon atoms whilst thinking of a question to ask the 'elves'. I asked 'Where are you most likely to find naturally occuring terrestrial buckminsterfullerene (C60 also known as Bucky Balls). I got a badge for challenging them and then much to my suprise as I hadn't seen anyone else given one - I got a signed photo! I think this was for knowing the answer!

I watched Never the Bride whilst Alaric went to get Jeany from my parents.

Jean of course insisted we head straight to the Alpro stand!

I saw this cool natural lighting on the wicker man so had to take another photo!

We then saw same of Charlotte Church - she was delayed by technical difficulties and was a bit wobbly for the first song but then she was great.

We then found a very tall police man.

Then I got to watch the Waterboys 🙂

Jean and Daddy having a sneaky snack that wasn't camp food I'd bought with us!

We then saw the first rainbow of the weekend 🙂

I was really gutted actually as it was a really faint rainbow and disappeared and I headed off to get Jean some suprise bubbles for the morning but I left the camera behind and lo! Full arch with glorious storm lighting over glowing banners up in the festival grounds. It would have been a stunning photo :/

Photos of Jeany