Hmm thats odd.

Hi there. For all of you wishing I would update my blog, here it is. Pictures speak a thousand words, so I will let this one say ummm.... well it says..... something. Seriously, it was good fun.

Second hand blog

Ooops, whilst blogging, I pressed enter. Hmm. This publishes your blog if you are just writing the title. How embarrassing.

Wel I'm affraid i won't be blogging too much here since I have entered a new blog for my students @taijutsukai.

- The most excellent use for blogger that has been known to man.

Is the world perfect?

Well, yes it is perfect. It is perfect in every way. Sometimes it feels like it is utterly against you, sometimes it is dark and bleak, but yes this is how it is... Perfect. perfect for you and me. perfect in every way. The world is perfect. Sometimes it is all good news and blue skies. Today we saw sand sculptures... They were perfect. I stood and gazed in wonder. It was perfect. The kids were wide eyed and amazed. It was perfect. My wife was emotional and she was happy. Then she was sad, but now she is perfect. I am perfect and the whole world is perfect. Perfect.

For You

A man was walking with his friend in a forest. He stopped atop a ridge that overlooked a massive drop to the forest floor where nature's glory featured, as far as the eye could see in every direction. The man gasped in awe at such a beautiful sight. "This is awesome" he said. "What beautiful things we are blessed to see"... His friend replied "yes, there must be a fortune in timber to be made here."

I wonder sometimes, how our perception is warped. Sometimes we are blinded by our own pride (or our prejudice) in that we can no longer see the truth, for what it is.

Our view of the world is perverted beyond all recognition, to the point that we care about none other than ourselves. Sure we have our family, but whom amongst us have forsaken all for the good of mankind? Surely that is what we elect our governments for... Or am I speaking the words of an idealist, lost in a capitalist society of greed and consumerism? Am I being hypocritical? Have I lost the plot altogether? Can't we all get along in this world without worrying about who is plotting against us? Should you be worried? Am I watching you right now? Yes is that you reading this now? Close your curtains. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Surely not... Surely we haven't succumbed to this. Religion warns of destroying our spirits, sinning our way to extinction. Are we living in an
Uber-Babylon? Is there any hope for us? Should we all join our nearest church to have salvation too?

Faith may be our only salvation, but how far must we take our faith in God? Should we leap out with total devotion to the lord, or should we stick out our tiptoe into the sea of religion that is Christianity, Buddhism or whatever?

Not the favorite child.

The past few weeks have been pivotal in our growth as a couple. For my wife, me and our children, the learning curve has been unrelenting (as it should be). Many events have transpired and eventuated, to varying degrees of enlightenment in us all. In the ‘Tao Te Ching’ Lao Tzu says “The weak overcomes the strong and the submissive overcomes the hard. Everyone in the world knows, yet nobody can put it into practice.” That which was once unclear, has become clear and those who were misunderstood are now who they have revealed themselves to be. As my brother says: “The Leopard cannot hide his spots.”

Our spiritual self is defined simply by us being... As the saying goes ’life is just a thing that happens whilst we are busy making other plans,’ and this is certainly true. Sometimes life will seem to turn a corner like a winding road... confronting you with a choice to make. Sometimes it is a fork in the road or even a cul-de-sac. You have to choose to do something, as unlike driving a car, life does not wait for us to choose. An opportunity will be missed through our inaction, sending us back on the path that we have already travelled.

Whether it is driving a car, watching TV, or making important life changing decisions, one should be mindful of where they have come from: lest the journey may never end (we always seem to be in the same place if we cannot learn from our mistakes).
Ego is our own worst enemy and sometimes we are consumed by it.

On our journey as martial artists, we often arrive back at the beginning of our training. Indeed, the most basic of all things we learn as martial artists remain the most significant. If we never forget the basic principles and the skills with which we apply them, we can never be without the elements required for advanced knowledge and application of further learning.
Martial arts are truly a life journey. You can take the journey at entirely your own pace and with whatever intensity you choose and the results will be proportionate to your efforts.

Now on to the more technical side of things:

Yes I know I have misspelled favourites and ‘no I didn’t exactly excel in English at school, but the favorites folder in windows is a major pain in the rear end if you keep all of your documents on a separate drive like I do. I have a 400Gb for my system partition, a 320Gb for backups, an 80Gb for my documents (which needs to be upsized) and a 160Gb for shadow copies.

Like many people, I have recently reformatted the system HDD due to an accumulation of various problems and Windows Vista behaviours... (Such as the favorites anomaly) and other security related behaviours.

The problem exists due to the fact that people such as myself, insist on integrating advanced configurations of their overall pc setup, in the hope that it will simplify the process of rebuilding when it all turns pear-shaped... Which inevitably will happen folks, if you run your pc 24/7 with desktop SATA drives and your quad core CPU crunching alien data (searching in vain for signs of ET). Check out the SETI project at Seti@home.

I figure that by the time we perfect a solid state HDD with the capacity of 10TB or more, we will have found ET and will be living with him or her on another planet practicing Judo on the ceiling for fear of hitting the ground.- Anyway, the solution my friends, is to set the appropriate permissions for your user account to access the ‘favorites’ folder on the drive in which it resides.
For example, if your user account resides on the drive letter designated d: (and of course that you are right handed), then you would navigate your way to d drive and:
right click on the favorites folder.
Left click on properties.
Left click the ‘security’tab.
Change the permissions for the folder by left clicking on ‘edit.’
Now left click on ‘add’
Left click ‘advanced’
Left click on the ‘find now’ tab
Now select your user profile (if you are not sure, click on the taskbar and check what it says under your picture) by left double clicking on it and then left clicking on ‘OK’
Now left click on the box next to that which says ‘full control’ and then click ok.
Job done.
Restart internet explorer and voila, it is fixed.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love my martial arts. I love it like a blacksmith loves fire, or like a sailor loves the sea. My love of Jujutsu is ingrained on my psyche. Holidays are the worst thing for me, but because martial arts are the second love of my life (behind my wife and family of course), it takes back seat for a few weeks over the Christmas break. I usually drive my wife nuts with my endless obsession with everything martial arts, but occasionally she supports me in my weird and wacky obsessive behaviours, like reading martial arts material whilst on the throne, or at breakfast time rather than the Herald Sun or the weekly times. For instance, a few weeks ago, my darling wife snatched a ripper bargain at a local library clearance sale...

For 50 cents she nabbed some priceless Judo books. One hardback pearler called ‘Judo and Judo-Do’ by a guy named Klingerstorff, another softback by the same author called ‘Judo self taught in pictures’ by Charles Yerkow. Now if you’re thinking that the author’s names sound rather more Germanic than Japanese, you’d be right. What a lot of people don’t know about modern Judo is that it’s founder, was indeed Japanese, but due to the strong relationship between Japan and Germany before WW2, Jigoro Kano (the Japanese founder of Kodokan Judo) spent some time instructing Germans (and British) in his art form. Consequently, Judo was actually taught to members of the German military and according to many sources, was originally driven by the Germans (in around 1930), with the view to inclusion of the art in the Olympic Games. This appears to have been largely politically driven from what I can gather however, as Kano himself seemed resistant to the whole concept of strong competition in the form of a world championship. To those who do not understand Judo, this may seem baffling, but to Kano, Judo was to be treated more like a Church or Religion rather than a competition (who’s emphasis would be driven solely by the prospect of medal counts alone.)

Anyway, the books were an absolute steal at 50 cents a pop. The best bargain being a hardback by M Feldenkrais: who was one of the first non-Japanese to obtain a Black Belt in Judo. I think that Feldenkrais was Russian Born but spent a lot of time in France and was a very intelligent man. In 1917, he played a major role in what is known as the Balfour Declaration: The Zionist movement for the ‘relocation’ of the Jewish community into Palestine, which had previously been ruled by the Ottoman or Turkish Empire (wow they certainly have been in conflict for a long time haven’t they?). Anyway, that’s about the extent of my knowledge on the history of the region which is probably a good thing, lest I bore you with unrelated garble and yet more inaccurate historical references.

Back to the book. It’s fantastic and offers hours of study opportunity with intelligent and precise technical illustrations as well. It really is a great book for those after a deeper and more scientific understanding of the art by a man with a deeply scientific approach to the method. It really gets the brain working, and is far more stimulating to me than the Sunday paper on any weekend. I’ve gone back through the same chapters on many occasions searching for yet greater understanding of the techniques and the principles behind them.

It would seem to me, that no matter what understanding I have of a particular technique, I am merely looking at it from one side of a multi-dimensional sphere, where I’m never quite certain of which angle I am peering through. Sometimes, one side seems much like another, but I am certain they are worlds apart, as they are not static... Floating in and out of one world of possibility to the next. Always dynamic and never ever tiresome.

Anyway, I could go on like this for hours, but I won’t. It’s bed time as another fantastic day draws to a close and my beautiful wife is calling me to get out of the ‘martial arts zone’ and back to the ‘hubby zone.’ Thanks for reading! Cya next time.

Format is a dirty word.

The word ‘format’ often signifies defeat to the technician. It is the final solution, but it is often the cheapest and most practical one for both the client and their computer...

Over the past 10 years, I have experienced first hand how difficult it can be to solve a software issue on computers. Occasionally, there comes a point at which the inevitable must be recognised. Format is the only way of ensuring that a clean slate can be drawn on which to build the system or restore it to it’s former state.
In recognition of the perils of this journey, Microsoft have endeavoured to make our job easier. But the problem is often complicated by faulty hardware and other external pernicious influences, such as Bots, Trojans and sometimes poorly written (but malicious) software that open the gateway for other harmful data that is usually designed to integrate with the operating system (so as to keep the user unaware of it’s presence in the machine) and or software present.
It is almost impossible for the average user to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent or misleading applications offered on the World Wide Web. Due to ‘Social Engineering’ considerations and the increasingly complex and professional appearance of ‘antivirus’, ‘anti-malware/spyware, ’ the end user is often left with no idea at all surrounding the question of trust and authenticity of an online identity. Who can you trust more? CA antivirus or WinAntivirus2007? To the novice, CA sounds dull, where Winantivirus 2007 sounds modern and specific to the operating system that 98% of home users are accustomed to... Not only that, but Winantivirus will always find a problem... Guaranteed. Install it on a freshly updated XP SP2 OS, and it will find vulnerabilities and exploits that haven’t even been discovered yet!
So, from this we can determine that a large percentage of computer users fall subject to the old electronic ‘sucker punch.’ People are always attracted to the ‘free stuff’ (or in the case of Winantivirus2007, actually pay for it), believing that the stuff you get for free is just as good as the commercial product. Now in theory, there is no reason why this should not be the case. However, in practise, there are few software engineers that would develop world class software in the name of charity alone.
‘Social Engineering’ relies mostly on the end user’s habitual behaviour. Things like skipping past long winded license agreements, and terms and conditions of use. The other thing that developers of malicious and so called ‘companionware’ software prey upon, is the end user’s unrelenting search for the ‘next’ button, knowing that at the end of the tunnel, there is the magical ‘finish’ button, that will restore their faith in computing technology. –Yeah, um right.

Well, people it’s time to wake up and smell the roses...

Nothing is for free (that will fit in an ip packet anyway), and guess what?

Sometimes webpages are bogus, and hey!!! Yes you! The bank is not really emailing you, and no, sorry you really haven’t won the lottery.

Sorry to get all negative on you kids, but it’s time for some sobering facts.

'Genuine Microsoft Software’ shipped direct from China at half price might not be a good idea (or even genuine).

The Sultan of Brunei has not left you his inheritance

The best antivirus programs are definitely not Free. Free stuff in general is always stuff you can do without and remember that Trojans will not prevent STI’s.

Facebook is no substitute for real life experience and not all Indian men are airline pilots for Garuda...

Your PC is not infected! You have Winfixer: The worlds best antivirus and registry error fixer. LOL... No, Limewire is not part of windows, and no, windows updates are not received via bit-torrent! Your eight year old computer will not get any faster, no matter how much money you fork out for performance enhancing software... In fact, your new performance enhancing software will probably slow your eight year old Pentium computer down by about a third.

The very fact that you have downloaded all that crap onto your PC (that promises to fix every one ofthe problems), means that it’s time to let a professional give it the old ‘F word’ Format Baby, format. Start backing up your precious photos and quicken files now, because once it’s sick, your PC is slowly but surely going to die and Winfixer (and all of that other crap out there on the web) will only speed up the journey. May the force be with you!