Members of my fencing household, The Tadcaster Militia, affectionately call me Dancing Bear because of some of the (insert appropriate adjective here) way I sometimes defend myself when retreating. It’s an aggressive defensive porcupine method that I would never *ever* teach anyone else to do, as I’ve often got a leg in the air and the other one and my arms all octopus drunken monkey style. It can look very fluid from the outside, almost like I’m dancing.

In any case, I’m working on the last of the training videos and finishing the editing, and I thought I’d share a screen cap of Dancing Bear in action. Here, I’m fighting Griffith and blocking a strong horizontal cut. The picture doesn’t show the followup strike to him either.. mooohahahaha. You can definitely see his blade being blocked with a beautiful perpendicular dancing bear move.

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It’s the Summer Solstice today.. Ok, that’s misleading.. it’s only the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere… which it’s most likely where you’re reading this from…So I guess I’d be more technically correct to wish you a happy June Solstice, or more generically a Happy Solstice!

Current Mood:  calm

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I’m looking at you Stacey! (staceyspins)

From Boing Boing

HOWTO knit a baby viking helmet

 Got a baby? Got knitting needles? You can use the latter to improve the former (and perforation of the child is not involved, you sicko) — by making a baby viking helmet! Link (via Craft)

 

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First off, my bracelet was found! The last place I was at Thursday before going home was one of our offsite properties doing some work on the server. The bracelet must have gotten caught on the chair or desk or something, because one of the employees found it late Friday… Yeah!! That started off a good weekend.

Saturday, we went to Steve’s 6 year old birthday (Katelyn). Had a good time. Spent most of the afternoon chasing our two tumblebugs around the yard and playsets, so we didn’t get that much time to socialize. It was mostly their family and Katelyn’s schoolmates families though.

They had a magic theme with a magician later in the evening. At one point, they had a pin the tail on the rabbit. Connor did really well, but Alia insisted that the tail belongs on the rabbit’s ear. Later, she collected all the tails on the two rabbits and keep redistributing them. At one point, she had them over on the slide.. because, well, you know… rabbit tails need to have fun too!

Sunday was Father’s Day. Jean made a nice french toast breakfast in prep for the day. It wasn’t going to be an easy one, because my father was coming over in the afternoon to help us setup a 16′x42″ pool for the kids. It was an early birthday gift. We wanted to do some gardening and lawn work, and I had to mow. She also bought me a book of Crytograms and made a really beautiful collage with photos of me and the twins, and Dad is #1 text and whatnot. I know she was amazed at how many pictures I’ve actually *been* in! So many in fact, that she couldn’t use them all, and actually found ones with me smiling. You should see the range of hair styles I’ve had in the last two years.

Worked all morning, got a shower.

We start setting the pool up. The ground needs to be level. It looks level. It’s not. After filling up the first 2 inches, we see that the water is all pooling to one side. So now we have to drain it to move it, and we head off to Lowe’s to buy some sand or top soil and try to stablize the ground. It was about a 2-3″ incline over the 16′, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but causes lots of problems with the pool.

So now 1200 pounds (30 bags) of top soil is moved into the car, out of the car, spread on the ground. Whew! Talk about back breaking work. Took a break for a wonderful turkey dinner. Went back outside and finished setting up the pool and beginning to fill it.

Once there is about 3 inches of water in it, you need to get inside and ’smooth out’ all the wrinkles on the bottom. So I did that, and was shortly joined by my kids, who both decided that they wanted to play in the water too while Daddy worked.

The pool still wasn’t perfectly level, so we had to keep moving the dirt underneath, and I wound up bringing in another two wheelbarrows of dirt from the compost pile.

Alia had us laughing so hard at one point, as she’d grabbed the hose and was having a grand old time swinging it around and watching the water arc through the air. Then it would get slightly out of control, go directly above her, and splash down on her head. She’d startle, drop the hose, and have a shocked look on her face. This happened about 5 more times, each time, she missed the cause and effect. Eventually she got it though, because then she was hosing down Connor and me, neither of us too appreciative of the fact. Sure, the water I was sitting in I’d gotten used too, but when the cold hose water hit the top of your head and face, it really gets your attention.

We left the H20 running from about 5:30P to around 11 last night. It’s about 2/3 full. Maybe Jean and the kids will play it today. I still need to setup the ladder and the filter, and then pick up some chlorine and whatnot to treat the water. Last thing we need is to a giant algae mosquito farm in our backyard.

Anyway, it was a long post and a great weekend. Grandfather and father working hard for our kids. Sure, I could have been sitting on my ass all day with someone feeding me grapes (um, no), but this was much, MUCH better.

Current Mood:  happy

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I’m very upset right now. Last night, on my way to the Iron Bog business meeting, I realized that I was missing my bracelet. Jean gave it to me over 10 years ago on either our first/second valentines’ day. I think it was more likely the first, because she wasn’t even really aware of my metal allergy at that point, and had to return the first two she bought me because they kept turning my wrist green. Finally, she settled on a stainless steel one.

It looks very similar to a medical ID bracelet, but it has my initials on the outside and an inscription on the inside. It’s fallen off before, but I’ve always immediately known.

Last night it was gone, and I only realized when I started scratching my wrist in absentia.

Jean’s looking for it in the house, I’m looking for it in the car. It most likely got caught on the corner of my pocket when I was taking my keys/wallet/cell phone on/off.

*keeping my fingers crossed*

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I’m not a big baseball fan. My visits to the stadium in the last 20 years have been solely to watch the fireworks shows on July 4th. However, if you really needed a reason not to watch the Phillies and be glad you aren’t in their region, this is it:

Milestone Marks What Phillies Fans Already Knew

In fact, no team has ever stunk so often as the Phillies, who, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, have lost more games than any professional franchise in any sport. The Phillies are 14 losses from a particular threshold of ignominy ? the 10,000th defeat for a club that has won one lonely World Series title (in 1980) during its 125 years of often dreadful existence.

Current Mood:  apathetic

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As long as we’re mocking end users in our office thomas-delbroc, I felt it due time to post about an extraordinary adventure with a printer I had yesterday. A particular user, who’s been no end of trouble the last for days, called to tell me that her printer was sending out blank pages. She had gotten ’some’ error message about the margins, but printed anyway. Now, the printer wouldn’t stop, even turning it off and back on, and she couldn’t delete the job from the printer.

I took a look at the Excel file in question. Somehow either every cell was set to be a page, or the margins were set to 10″ a side or some such nonsense (maybe I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say it got corrupted). In any case, it was printing:

Page 47 of 13,901

The printer was doing exactly what it was told to do.. print thirteen thousand pages.

Current Mood:  indifferent

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We’ve been using Google Maps for years now, ever since it was first released. I find the Ajax interface to be very easy to navigate, and I’m happy with the results. One of the great things about Google is that they are always adding new features. The problem is, that sometimes these new features slip in and as a regular user you have no idea. Granted, their new Street View feature (see real images and navigate 360 view at the street level) is getting a lot of news in the past weeks because of privacy issues. However, there are plenty of other features available, and I recently discovered two I didn’t previously know about.

For example, did you know that you can look at a Google Map and see traffic flow (real time)? How’s that for last minute planning! Did you know that you can save common addresses and even make your own address a default starting location?

I highly encourage you to read the Google Maps User Guide so that you can see what you’re missing. Learning keyboard navigation and knowing simple things like your mouse scroll wheel can zoom are going to make things easier for you.

So what two things did I learn? First, that they’ve now added the ability to Add Destinations to your directions. This means you no longer have to go from Point A to B and then from point B to Point C on two different sets of driving directions. You can go from A to C via B. Real nice for multiple destination travels.

The other thing is the really awesome ability to create your own map! These can be public, such as America’s Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66, or they can be private (non searchable). Being private doesn’t mean you can’t give out the link to other people –

– such as Directions to Our House. Now, I didn’t add any nifty pictures or video, because that would just be overkill… for now at least…

Now you have a link which takes you to a fully interactive Google Map that I created. You can click on our house, and have all the regular Google Map features, such as ‘Get Directions to this Point’. Or you can simply print it out and have the information to come visit us! Wanna see something really cool? Follow the link to our directions and then switch on Satellite View. Now you can see the actual streets AND our house. If you get lost now, it’s really NOT my fault.

(Edit: 6/13/07 — I removed the link to the house directions for privacy concerns. There are other public maps available for you to get the idea, and if you are particular friend/family who could actually USE the directions to our house, I’ll be glad to forward the link along to you)

Google Map Mashups are a whole separate post, but I’d want to pointout Wayfaring.com, which is a pretty slick one that I’ve used before. It takes all the features of the My Maps functionality and extends it into the public area. This way multiple people can add points of interest and leave comments, etc. Imagine, for example, a map with all the locations of SCA groups in NJ.. or even finer, just the members of Tadcaster and their relation (distance) to each other.

Current Mood:  accomplished

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