2012-06-25 21:50:00
With the limited cards I have available right now (there's still a huge amount on their way), I've put together a Boris and an Eladwen deck. I didn't use any of the exclusive/premium foils, as I want to keep those complete and in their boxes. Who knows, maybe they'll eventually become of some value. Or not :p
I scrounged up some dice and am re-using the starter boxes to hold the decks (both should be replaced once the bonus stuff comes in). To keep the cards clean and undamaged, I broke out my old UP-DP sleeves which were still in my suitcase of other TCGs. Other TCGs? Sure! In that same suitcase you'll find:
But the best thing of all inside that suitcase, is a little block of pewter: my 1995 Reaper Scrye crystal ball life counter!
There's a story behind that one :) Back in the nineties, my father worked for Compaq and as part of his job he'd frequently travel the globe. Among others, this involved plenty of trips to Houston, Texas. Aside from Longhorns memorabilia, he also brought me back geeky stuff like miniatures, comic books and Magic paraphenalia. The Reaper Scrye life counter had grabbed my attention, while leafing through a Reaper catalogue he'd brought along. So for his next trip to Houston, we set up the fax order form and ensured that the minis would be delivered to his hotel. And thus a golden/brown as well as a black counter made their way to our home. The black one was ordered on behalf of Menno, who to my knowledge still owns it.
So... Now I just need someone to play with :D I'm luring Martijn and I've also tried to reel in a colleague of mine who's played Shadow Era online before.
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2012-06-24 13:56:00
I've been working on a new project for the Renshinjuku kendo dojo: a few months ago Heeren-sensei asked me to come up with some ideas for renewing the dojo's website. The past week I spent a few evenings putting together a new website, based on Wordpress. Part of this concept is a page providing details about the training locations: basic info, a Google Map and drawings of the dojo layout.
Making sketches of building layouts isn't a very hard job. Half an hour doodling with OmniGraffle gave me the basic drawings. But it's thanks to the great website of mr. Dillon Lin that I could fill in all the proper names! Mr. Lin's dillonlin.net site does in-depth articles of kendo dojo, both famous and local. It's a joy to read about kendo dojo from an architect's point of view, going into building design, flooring structure and history.
His article "Basic Dojo Layout" provided me with most of the terminology I needed for my own sketches.
In the image above, the building on the left is our Amstelveen dojo, while the building on the right is the one in Almere. The prior is situated in a local sports facility from the 70s/80s, while the latter is in a brand-new high school building. While the facilities in Almere are much more modern compared to Amstelveen, the concrete+rubber floor in Almere is sub-optimal compared to the suspended wooden floor of A'veen.
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports, geeky,
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2012-06-23 21:44:00
Woohoo :)
As one of the first folks on the Shadow Era forums, I've received my first order of cards. The human mage and human warrior decks came in, along with the two boxes of bonus foil cards.
Back in the day I wasn't a big fan of foil cards (I actually disliked the ones I saw in TCGs like Star Wars), but a lot of these cards are either pretty subtle or just good looking. Of course there's plenty I don't like, but I'm surprised by the amount of foils I do like! I especially like a lot of the Elemental foil cards, as they really make the colours pop!
I'll need to wait for the other two orders to come in, before I can start building proper decks. I should've ordered a human rogue, instead of warrior, but there you go. I'll just build a rogue deck from the cards that I'm getting :)
EDIT:
It's funny how opening booster packs takes me back! The feeling's familiar and the movements are still burnt in: grab the stack of cards with my left hand, the fold in the cover in the right and pull with the right to pull open the top from the middle. :) It's cool that each booster contains a code that can be redeemed for in-game currency for the online game.
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2012-06-23 18:52:00
Holy wow, today's class was awesome! After being absent from the Almere dojo for five weeks, this was a great day to return!
Entering the dojo around 09:10 I was amazed! Already the room was packed and not everyone was there yet. We had barely enough room to practice kata while the newbies were doing kihon practice. Warming up was even tighter packed, with everyone in a circle. The group was pressed up against all the walls and not half an hour into class we threw open the fire doors for some fresh air. ( ^_^)
As Jeroen had already pointed out to me, class changed a little bit. After warming up we immediately put our gear on (skipping the footwork practice we usually do) and went into kihon and waza practice. Oki-men, hayai-men, oki-kote, kote-men, oji-kote and oji-men. After that: jigeiko! While Kris spent some time with the nidansha, we were told to hold two-minute fights amongst ourselves.
I fought Sander and Jeroen: those fights were awkward insofar that both fighters kept on pushing and ramming against eachother instead of "talking". I also let Ramon practice oki-men on me some more :) Then, as I took a short breather by the fire exit, Kris was ready with his coaching and he was itching for a fight! So he grabbed me and we went at it for five minutes!
I was spoilt! To get five private minutes with Kris! If anything, what that time taught me about my keiko is that I am now stuck waiting and not paying attention, instead of my original flaw: simply rushing in. Kris would be wide open and I'd just be starting him in the eyes. Or his shinai would be this -><- close to me, deep within my ma'ai and I wouldn't even notice that he'd krept so close!
Class went into overtime (we finished twenty minutes) late, because the whole group was run through no less than five rounds of uchikomi geiko! Followed by all kendoka in bogu doing a round of kakari geiko against Kris. Afterwards I was spent, but I haven't felt this good in a long while! :D
A great class! :)
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports,
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2012-06-22 20:38:00
Finally! I have finally figured out how to restart the PhotoStream agent, after waking my Macbook from it's sleep!
After figuring out how to access the PhotoStream data through Finder, I now needed a way to trigger a synchronization in the Stream. Normally, after setting up PhotoStream in OS X system preferences, the agent software will be started when you login to your desktop. However, this says nothing about potential restarts after sleeping your Mac.
First I dug around in launchd / launchctl and quickly discovered the full name of the agent: com.apple.photostream-agent
After that, things got difficult as I couldn't find any configuration file to load the agent with once it had been kicked out of launchd. So you can launchctl [stop|start] all you want, but once you launchctl unload I cannot load the agent back in.
I found that the actual agent appears to be an application in /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems. There you will find PhotoStreamAgent.app, which can be ran and which will in fact load com.apple.photostream-agent. However, this will not be the vanilla one, but one with an extra label in front of it.
Mmm, this doesn't seem to work properly yet. I'll need to do some more researching.
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2012-06-20 12:23:00
As I wrote recently: it's highly important that I strongly focus on the basics for the next few weeks. Last night and hopefully one or two more nights this week, I'm focusing on:
So. Nothing special during home training this week (or next), just grinding the millstone on essential basics.
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports,
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2012-06-18 17:03:00
Holy crap! ( O_o)
Here I was, minding my own business doing some work on my laptop, while Dana was playing with her water colours. "Daddy look!" she pipes up and I see she's drawn a very nice looking letter A. "That's letter A!" she happily exclaims and I compliment her, because it really was a nice one. I go back to my reading and a minute or two she says "Daddy look!" again.
BOOM! Kid wrote her own name!
I don't care that she wrote it from right to left (she started with the rightmost A). I don't care that her N is a W (because N's are hard). But the kid actually wrote her own name! ( ^_^)
kilala.nl tags: baby, awesome,
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2012-06-17 19:30:00
I love cats. I love office humor. I can appreciate evil when applied properly. I love office humor involving evil cats.
Of course there's Catbert, the evil HR manager at Dilbert's company. But Catbert's old hat! Meet The Oatmeal's Bobcats! They're assholes, they're evil, they're cats at my own level in a corporation. ( ^_^)
There's five pages of comics so far. After that, check out some of The Oatmeal's other great work.
kilala.nl tags: geeky, cats, internet, awesome,
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2012-06-17 11:21:00
Marli and Dana are at the Dolfinarium in Harderwijk, with our good friend Nathalie and her son Lucas. I was supposed to come along as was Nathalie's husband Paul, but where Paul was indisposed with a head cold and work, I let my anxiety get the better of me. That's the second time in a month's time that a social occasion got spoiled. Meh :/
Luckily there are also plenty of occasions that -are- successful (I'm keeping track of everything, as part of the post-therapy work), but stuff like this always stings a little. I'll just make sure not to beat myself up about it. :)
Recently Marli did make an interesting observation: "Sometimes I think that the therapy only made things worse, because you're now very aware of the problem. Now you're expecting it and preparing for it even in cases where you never had issues."
Along similarly interesting lines I remarked: "One thing I really hate about my anxieties is that you (Marli) can't fully trust me anymore: is he really sick, or is he anxious and is he trying to get out of something?"
EDIT:
Pfew! Turns out it wasn't completely bad that I didn't go :|
The Norit I took this morning held the wolves at bay until roughly 1330, then they reprised their attach with a vengeance. I'm not used to activated coal passing through my system in under twentyfour hours, so four is a new record. Yikes. I'm definitely staying home from work tomorrow; I'd hate to infect colleagues with this bug.
kilala.nl tags: life, meh, anxiety,
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2012-06-16 20:01:00
It's not often that Marli gets excited about cleaning commercials. While I was making tea in the kitchen, she excitedly "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!"s me back into the living room and rewinds the PVR. It was an ad for HG's detergent for sports clothing.
As we all know kendo stinks. Kendo armour gets a bit smelly, kendo gloves can get pretty bad and my keikogi (the jacket) is godawful every single week. Hence Marli's enthusiasm. Let's give it a shot then :)
kilala.nl tags: sports, kendo, life,
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2012-06-15 09:06:00
What a great week! </sarcasm>
Wednesday saw a number of 'escalations' at the office, one of which I was involved with. I tried to deal with it to the best of my abilities, including the enryo rules I'd set for myself. I was polite, I enforced standard procedures and when management became involved I defered to my acting teamlead. The latter however did not prevent at least four different people from contacting me personally, trying to force the issue. While I believe that my team acted exactly as we should have, I feared that we would (once again) be portrayed towards higher management as the inflexible power-trippers who were blocking progress.
The fact that the highest managers had gotten involved and because people kept addressing me personally, I feared that another managerial talk would soon follow. Along the lines of "again you blundered out there and got people pissed", or "you should have been less visible and defered to your colleagues". Now, so far all of that is simply in my head as I haven't even spoken to my teamlead yet, but that's the way anxiety works: it fills in blanks with worst-case scenarios. What this effectively means is that I can't even break wind at the office, without fearing that somehow management repercussions will follow.
On wednesday night this led to a big panic attack, which had me in cramps and aches most of the night. I'm proud of how Marli handled the situation, as she calmly and quickly did everything to help. "What do you mean? I was a grouchy bitch!" she retorted my pride, but nonetheless she did exactly what I needed :)
Come thursday morning, I'm a wreck so I don't go to the office. I found it odd that my physique had been affected by the panic attack this much (muscle aches, nausea, headache, dizziness), until we concluded later that day that I have the flu :) So there we go: a messed up night due to anxiety and messed up days because of the flu.
kilala.nl tags: work, enryo, health, body, meh, anxiety,
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2012-06-12 22:21:00
It is my intention to train without bogu at Amstelveen, for the next few weeks: back to basics!
After last week's class eye-openers I've asked Roelof-sensei to take Miyahara-sensei's remarks into account, so we can ensure that the two basic flaws in my kendo can be remedied:
I am glad that he agreed and I had a great class tonight. After going over all of the basic stances, I practiced suriashi with the other bogu-less kendoka. In between, we watched the advanced techniques being explained by Makoto-sempai and the others. This included the differences between de-gote, nuki-waza and kaeshi-waza (some of which is still vague to me, so I need to do some reading!).
During our practice of oki-men, Roelof-sensei also grabbed my shoulder. He saw a big flaw in my timing and he would only let me move forward or backward at the exact right, time. This timing is way different from what I've been using on large men-strikes so far! In this case, the right way to do it, is to only start moving once you're already halfway through your downswing. Because only then is the distance that the shinai needs to travel, equal to the required instep and fumikomi! This is was Kris-fukushou has been trying to get me to understand! He always told me to "step in later!", but it never clicked -when- this "later" was :)
Other people who helped a lot:
Saturday I can finally join class in Almere again. After oodles of family and work events, I'm back to training in my home town. I'm ready to kick some ass! And to get my ass kicked! ( ^_^)
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports,
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2012-06-12 12:09:00
In the summer of 2008 I discovered the Bommel radio play.
Thanks to the wonderful fansite De Bommel Schatkamer, I discovered that a total of 562 episodes of the radio play were made and aired in 2007-2010. 75 stories, spread across 15-minute episodes makes for a lot of listening material! Both the voice acting and the effects and storytelling are excellently done, so it's a pleasure to hear these stories on my daily commute!
Of course, 562 episodes are a big deal to download by hand, so I wrote a script to pull them from the server one by one. Huzzah for OS X and shell scripting! The script got a little more intricate because the MP3 files are never directly linked, but instead are stored behind a load balancer. So a link like this http://audio.omroep.nl/nps/mp3/bommel/001.mp3 would actually load a tiny HTML page with a meta-refresh to a dynamically created link behind a load balancer (including a session ID for randomization).
The actual code is of course more intricate, but here's the meta:
while ($NUM -lt 563)
do
FILE=$(curl http://audio.omroep.nl/nps/mp3/bommel/$NUM.mp3 | strip-to-actual-link)
curl -o $NUM.mp3 $FILE
[[ $? -gt 0 ]] && (echo "Something went wrong"; exit 1)
NUM++; sleep 60
done
That script ran most of the night, while I slept. And now I've got a bit over eight gigs of MP3 radio plays :)
EDIT:
It turns out that the ID3 tags of the podcast episodes are rather messy. There are variations of the artist, the album title and the track numbers are all mucked up. In order to fix them it's easiest to use yet another script, this time with a tool such as ID3tool. This will allow you to set a number of tag details from the command line. Sadly, it appears to only set ID3v1, not v2. I'll need to verify how well that works with iTunes. It also appears to fail in updating the track number on anything after file 256.mp3.
EDIT2:
Even better! ID3Lib works with ID3v2 tags and is also a command line tool. I found that tip here.
NUM=1; mkdir import
cat BommelTitleFiles.txt | awk -F# '{print $2" "$1}' | while read FILE TITLE
do
id3convert --strip $FILE
id3tag -a"NPS" -A"Hoorspel Bommel" -c"(C) NPS" -y2007 -t$NUM -T493 -s "$TITLE" -g"Radio play" $FILE
mv $FILE import/$NUM.mp3
let NUM=$NUM+1
done
EDIT3:
It turns out that there are both duplicate files, messed up title tags and missing files if you only go by xxx.mp3. Apparently there's a wad of xxxa.mp3 files thrown in there as well. In order to fix the broken titles and to grab only the required files, here's BommelTitleFiles.txt. Each line of this file is a title-file combination, so you can download only those files needed and apply the right title as well.
Also, it turns out that most of the files have the "is part of a set" ID3 checkbox set. I found it's better to simply strip all tags using id3convert --strip $FILE, which will clear everything.
kilala.nl tags: awesome, reading, geeky,
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2012-06-10 22:31:00
A while ago Marli and Dana went shopping with Anneke. While at V&D, they got a few pictures taken with Dana <3
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2012-06-10 21:31:00
There we have it: all three Sluyter siblings are hitched :)
I went first, followed last year by my sister and this weekend it was my brother's turn.
Last Friday Dana was picked up by uncle Peter, as she'd be sleeping over for two nights. We waved her off, as she was grinning widely in the back of Pete's car. You could tell she just knew she was going to have fun. And she did! Trips to the playground, to the Rhenen zoo, dinner with pancakes and lots of playing with her nephew Mike. We're told she wasn't much trouble... She just needed a little bit of telling off from time to time, but aside from that she was great. She even indicated around 1930-2000 that she wanted to go to bed :)
Unfortunately our flight over wasn't great as the bumpy takeoff left us nauseous for the ride. Our arrival at the KlausK hotel went as planned and the room was excellent. Expensive, but very good looking and the breakfast is just awesome! A selection of finnish delights! The hotel was a revelation, as we'd stayed there before, in... was it 2001? 2002? *shrug* Back then it wasn't bad, but not very good either and the decor was straight from the early eighties. Now it looks great!
Saturday morning we shopped at Stockmann, looking at cool kitchen stuff, beautiful dresses and coats (which were tempting but not bought). We did get some great books for Dana (Mauri Kunnas and Moomin, what else?). After lunch we took another nap, to get onto the ferry to Suomenlinna at 1400.
Niklas and Mirva would be getting married in the fortress' church, followed by a dinner reception in the officers' club. It was only a small gathering, but that made it all the more special :) Basically, it was family and the best of friends (which of course included Nik's band fellows). The church wedding was solemn, the dinner party very nice and we even made a new friend of two! :) A great day, which ended with a long trip back to the harbor...
And now we're home, after a loooong day. Luckily the flight back was a lot better.
Oh right... If we're keeping count, I ate eight or nine Karjalan piirakkat in the span of 48 hours :D
kilala.nl tags: family, awesome, travel,
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2012-06-05 22:48:00
Wow! Tonight was bad. Bad, insofar that I made a lot of mistakes and was "crap" in general. On the other hand it was awesome because I had an epiphany tonight. Two even! I'm very grateful for the sharp eyes of Roelof-sensei and Miyahara-sensei.
The eye openers are:
First up, during kihon practice (we were doing oki men) Miyahara-san saw something about my footwork. She tried to explain it, but at the time I failed to grasp what she was saying. So after class I went up to her to ask what it was that she saw.
In my striking of oki men, Miyahara-sensei saw me cross my legs. I do fumikomi on my right, then step past it with left. That's just awful, especially because I do not even feel it happening! I honestly thought I was sticking to suri-ashi! It is such a basic flaw that she told me that she thinks I need to get out of bogu again and keep on practicing the basics. She was taken aback that I do not feel it happening and was sure that this must have shown up before.
She was right of course! Back in March, Kris-fukushou pointed it out to me during footwork training. And when Marli came to observe our class in January she actually noticed that many of our students have the same problem: fumikomi on right, then cross with the left, then go back to suri-ashi.
Second up: it has finally clicked! What Roelof-sensei has been trying to tell me in different words for the past three months has finally clicked! I finally get what he was trying to tell me about my breathing! Regardez, the graph below might be crappy, but it explains what I'm describing below. The blue line is breathing, the red line is striking. It's a rough sketch, so on the second graph the blue line doesn't dip deep enough. Sorry! ( ^_^)
It all clicked when Roelof-sensei changed his wording to include one new term: "make sure you have a fluidly rolling breath".
What I've been doing so far was timing my breathing based on my striking: inhale sharply on the upswing and exhale sharply on the strike. This leaves me winded very quickly (as witnessed today where I was worn out after three kirikaeshi and five rounds of kihon). What I instead be doing is breathing naturally in a nice sinoid: in-out-in-out, a nice wave pattern. I should then time my striking based on that: upswing when I near the peak of my inhalation, strike when the exhale starts.
Like the footwork problem described earlier, this is a complete return to the basics. I need to practice A LOT on the very, very basics to get this stuff right! And I need to remember all these things at the same time, to improve them at the same time. It sucks that my memory's so awful and I even forget things within a day.
I am very grateful that Marli agreed to letting me train twice a week! The extra practice is of course very helpful, but it's also very important that the crowd in Amstelveen is so different: many higher ranking kendoka, who quickly zero in on problems I'm having.
kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports, awesome,
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2012-06-04 21:48:00
"Information in the wired network is in disarray. This news report is being sent out at this moment, but please be aware that it may arrive tomorrow, or possibly yesterday."
It's been almost eleven years. Eleven! Serial Experiments: Lain was first shown in 1998 (a year after Cowboy Bebop) and I first got to see it on DVD in 2001. By the standards of the time, that was actually a pretty quick JAP-TV to AUS-DVD adaption!.
Re-watching it now, I'm amazed that the artwork didn't put me off at the time: I hate the character designs and the lacklustre animation. It's made up for by the general art and concepts, but still... Boy, can they make the people look ugly! I've seen better designs from the seventies! :D
Lain... Is it a pretentious piece of cyberpunky incoherence? Is it a deep work on existentialism and modern technology? Is it just plain fscked up? Who knows! Better minds than mine have discussed the show! Even as recent as 2011 has college professor A. Mathews held class discussions with the sole purpose of analyzing Lain. She's gathered her students' reactions on her blog for all to read, which I'll definitely do sometime soon. As I said: greater minds than mine have thought about the story the show tries to tell, so it'll be an interesting read!
For my part, let me just say that I love living in the future ( ^_^) It's awesome to see the technology that folks in '98 could dream about in my own hands and in an improved form no less! At the time they were pondering kludgy smartphones and just look at my iPhone! They were imagining holographic user interfaces and cool user interfaces, just look at Kinect, Surface and so on.
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Thomas Sluyter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.