Warmups

1. 25 squat jumps
2. 25 regular pushups
3. 25 wide pushups
4. 25 diamond pushups
5. 35 crunches (legs up)
6. 35 bicycles
7. 25 leg raises
8. hold legs 6 inches off ground for 45 seconds
9. Stretch up

Drills

1. Mirror drill − 3 minutes
2. Front hand education − straight lead/backfist, straight lead/hook, hook/backfist, low straight to high straight
3. Knife drill − standing in place, practice 5 angles of attack
4. Knife drill − with a partner, parry (meet) 5 angles of attack with the same angle, going back and forth... [More]

This was a private, only two participants and the second one showing up late. No bowing in was necessary.

As a private lesson, student requests determined what was practiced, and here is what your correspondent retained as lessons:

hook kicks

practiced next to the wall, just hitting the thigh of the partner. Due to the wall, the leg has to come up straight, but when veering into the target, the trajectory is nearly parrallel to the floor. It is important to twist the hips before the rear... [More]

Warmups

1. Shadow boxing
2. 75 jumping jacks
3. 25 pushups
4. cat stretch
5. 25 wide pushups
6. cat stretch
7. 10 reverse negative pushups (start low, not on the ground, push up to halfway on the count, back down when say ‘down’)
8. cat stretch
9. 25 bicycles
10. 15 crunches with legs pulling in as well (like jacknives, but collapsed)
11. stretch up (3)
12. 20 Squat jumps
13. Tiny break
14. 10 squat thrusts

Live Round

Go for about 3 minutes apiece:

1. Straight Lead
2. Straight Lead/Backfist
3. Straight Lead/Uppercut
4. Straight Lead/Hook (high)

... [More]

Both earthli Projects and the earthli WebCore are still in development, but here’s a screenshot showing the new look for the job page.

Beware of those who believe in altruism. It’s a quick step from believing it may exist, to seeing it everywhere, to believing yourself capable of it. If you think you are being altruistic, you have more than likely failed to examine your own motives properly.

earthli was down for a few hours recently because the server has moved to a new home, a move of only a few km. earthli’s generous hosting company, Opus AG has moved into fresh new quarters, which means earthli shouldn’t move again in the near future. Current bandwidth is 1MB upload capacity.

Myth and Denial in the War Against Terrorism by William Blum (ZNet) write about the real causes of terrorism instead of the blithe “And the more you love freedom, the more likely it is you’ll be attacked. … they hate our democracy, our freedom, our wealth, our secular government … [people who] reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands … ” claptrap issued forth from our estimable administration. One can dispute how ‘secular’ the US government is, but one can’t argue... [More]

WebCore boxThere is a brand new release of the earthli WebCore, along with upgrades for all four modules. The modules are now available for download in easier-to-install packages and include much better installation instructions.

As you can see, the WebCore has also acquired a shiny new logo.

Earthli, less than a year after it’s last logo change, has once again updated its logo. This one really feels like the one that will stick, as it’s unique and looks nice. It also lends itself much better to a smaller, more recognizable page icon (if you’re using a browser other than IE, you should see the icon in your page tabs or bookmarks). It also doesn’t remind people of IE (like the last one, with the ‘e’ in it) and doesn’t steal the look of Mac OS X with the ‘aqua’ rendering.

The logo... [More]

KB toys has transcended any cynic’s wet dreams by offering a George Bush action figure. It’s not Bush in the oval office or gazing with steely resolve into the distance; it’s Bush dressed up as a fighter pilot and designated as an “Elite Force Aviator”.

Go to the link and read the text; it’s not a joke. A more fitting symbol of the deep illness of America society would be hard to find. A wonderful sign of the hope for American society would be if people boycotted KB toys because of this. I hope... [More]

Finally a browser detector you can depend on. Let’s face it, with all of the browsers on the market today, you need a slightly more sophisticated tool than just searching for ‘MSIE’ in the user agent, right? The earthli Browser Detector does just that, using a relatively sophisticated algorithm to suss out what kind of a browser is really hitting your server.

earthli Browser Detector

Earthli has a new default style — based on OS X backgrounds and colors. Also, for all you IE users stuck in the dark ages, there is now automatic support for using GIFs instead of PNGs so you’ll get to see all the icons correctly.

Earthli has been upgraded to the latest version of the WebCore. All applications have been upgraded, but only Projects really has new functionality. The entire site benefits from upgraded styles and theme handling.

Common Dreams is reporting in Wolfowitz: Iraq War Was About Oil that “at an Asian security summit in Singapore”, Paul Wolfowitz said:

“Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”

This is the same guy who was also quoted earlier this week as saying that, in the recent Iraq war, “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one... [More]”

“What possible justification could we have for going to war with Syria? Oh, I’m just kidding—go right ahead, I don’t care.”

Bombs Away, And Poor Pay by Jimmy Breslin, found on ZNet got me thinking about ways of convincing people without morals that the Bush administration is out of control. It’s quite obvious that a good percentage of the US population is willing to plunk down their hard-earned tax dollars without considering moral issues,... [More]

Congress has finally found something to do; US lawmakers lose patience over spam on the Register reports that:

“US lawmakers finally appear to be losing their patience over spam, with unsolicited e-mail now costing American business billions of dollars every year.”

Isn’t it great that as long as spam was just annoying everyone in the country and hampering our collective ability to make use of the Internet, it was fine to leave legislation out of it and accept spam as an unfortunate side-effect?... [More]

I’m reading The Clash of Fundamentalisms, by Tariq Ali, which includes some great references. One of them is by USMC General Smedley Butler, who served for 33 years in the Marine Corps and received 2 congressional medals of honor. His first book was called War as a Racket, which appears to be reproduced in its entirety at LexRex and HackVan. In a speech in 1933, he explains his position (the text is obtained from Smedley Butler on Interventionism:

“War is just a racket. A racket is best... [More]”

That title is disengenuous. Anyone who’s ever really read comic books knows that comic books have much better dialogue and much better plot than the cheap version of history being served us by this pathetic brigade of fools in charge of the largest weapons store on Earth.

If you didn’t even feel a little bit stupid being American watching Bush strutting around on the deck of that aircraft carrier to “close out the war”, in a flight suit no less, then you obviously weren’t paying attention.
... [More]

I’ve recently written a new message-logging system for my company and wrote up a bunch of thoughts on the subject into a white paper, Message Logging. The abstract is below:

“Discusses the requirements of software logging, relative to the needs of different types of users of a product. Outlines the goals of a logging system with respect to these users and provides guidelines and a set of rules for providing good self-documenting software components and processes. Sending messages and handling... [More]”

I’ve recently written a new startup system for my company’s main software library. The technology on which it’s based is documented in the white paper, Describing Multi-step Processes. The abstract is below:

“Discusses the properties and requirements of multi-stage tasks or processes. Addresses the challenges associated with maintaining and customizing complex hierarchies of tasks by using a declarative approach which concerns itself less with the absolute ordering of steps within a task and... [More]”

I’ve got all of the Bill Hicks albums. I think it would have been really cool to hear what Mr. Hicks had to say about the last two years in America. I think the eeriest part is that you can get an extremely good idea by listening to the albums he record a dozen years ago. You see, he was extremely critical of the first Bush administration, and Republicans and Right-to-lifers and the war in Iraq. Listen to (or read, some are available here at BillHicks.com) his material and you’ll be absolutely... [More]

“More people (4 million) tune in to The Daily Show in a given week than watched Fox news at the height of the war (3.3 million).”

It seems the Daily Show has more fans than I thought. The article rightly points out that it’s Stewart and his brilliant delivery that holds the show together. The reason it appeals is that he doesn’t take sides against policies, he takes sides against stupidity; against illogic; against doublespeak.

“Stewart’s on-air persona is that... [More]”

I was going to write an all gloom-and-doom article (to which I’m sure you’ve grown accustomed), but it seems the war suddenly got a lot easier and it’s become the cake-walk that Rummy and Shrub have been saying it was/would be all along. As US troops steam into Baghdad, meeting “ meeting surprisingly light resistance” (NY Times), does anyone else get a bad feeling? Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but when it goes from ‘laying siege to Baghdad’ to ‘surprisingly little resistance’, either there’s... [More]

William Bennett (former drug czar) has taken time out of his busy schedule to write an article for FOX News entitled Why We Must Fight − and Now!. He presses the same line that Saddam is a monster and should be removed. Right there with you, Bill. The war is justified because it will liberate the people of Iraq. Bill, the US is about 0-for-50 on ‘liberating’ people and estabilishing democracies. Why should it be different this time?

“ The people of Iraq will soon know what Afghanis know. The... [More]”

earthli will stay remarkably (and perhaps pleasantly) succinct today, letting I should not be allowed to say the following things about America on the Onion explain why. For a guide to proper response to the war, see Rumsfeld’s weekly press gaggle with FOX operatives on Whitehouse.org.

For more context and a good bit of history (and to tie in the article title), I strongly recommend When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History, an article by Thom Hartmann, a historian and writer. The... [More]

As a recent ex-pat, I’ve recently been wishing I could catch the Daily Show every once in a while. Little did I realize what a truly excellent website they have, and what relatively unfettered creative license the folks at that show have. I just checked out a bunch of videos at Daily Show Headlines and other places. (You’ll need RealPlayer to watch the videos, but it’s well worth the free download.)

For great coverage on the recent bill given to the American people for the war and the recent... [More]

Did you catch any recent speeches by George Bush? He’s been giving quite a few lately, ramping up for his 2004 election campagin. First stop − Baghdad. President’s televised address granting Saddam Hussein 48 hours… on WhiteHouse.Org has a translated transcript of one of them, for those of you that have trouble understanding the US President.

“For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have successfully crushed Iraq into the ground with crippling economic sanctions and... [More]”

earthli.com is proud to announce that the code on which this web-site runs is finally ready for release to the masses. It is published under the open-source GPL license and is available for download right here on earthli.com. The release is accompanied by full documentation for both casual users and developers. For more information, visit the official WebCore home page.

earthli has been upgraded to a 2.4GHz IBM rack server with scads of memory. Tests indicate that application pages (like those in Albums, News, Projects or Recipes) are loading from 10-15 times faster than before. This is due in part to the move to a faster server, but also because the server is now Debian Linux and can use the APC PHP cache, which gives a 50-200% speed boost as well (again, based on testing). Enjoy.

How are you interpreting the latest news about Iraq? Is it coming across as intended that the US is attempting to liberate the people of Iraq from a terrible dictator in order to bless them with self-imposed government and democracy and must do so in the face of most of the rest of the nations of the world, who are only interested in their own interests and/or are too cowardly to fight? If this is your base opinion, then mission accomplished for the White House spin doctors. Let them know so... [More]