Today I bought a Lego train set. My brother had an old 9V battery opperated model from the late 70's and it's interesting to see how much they've changed. Note below how the tracks are swinging about wildly as I crank up the juice.

I have a Santa Fe locomotive coming from Europe later this week; I wonder if I can get it sideways?

Here's a video of the Lego Ferrari I was recently given by Lego. Note the working steering column and life-like piston action.

... and rounding out the list are the flags at the BWM dealership in Burswood. I think they look cool at night with the shadows flickering on the street.

Guess who just signed up to You Tube? :)

Last night I did my usual hour-long BJJ class from 6:00PM but instead of coming home I went up the hill to meet Sifu Radford for a Kung Fu lesson. After chatting with his students about our impromptu martial arts afternoon a few weeks back (we had a roll around in the grass) he suggested that I come and train in some Kung Fu and share some of my BJJ with his class. Sweet!

Last night was the first of the two lessons and with the cold weather it ended up being just Mark and myself. Whilst it would have been good to see Mark teach a class, it turned out being a private lesson for me so I wasn't complaining :)

Mark initially went through some stretching that really worked my legs in preparation for some kicking we did midway through the class. We started with the most basic "walking" stance and added both a jab and reverse punch. After some drills up and down the hall we used the punching mits and practiced hitting a real target. Then we did some front and side kicks, again following up with some use of the contact pads.

It was interesting to see some of the "bad" habits I still have from when I studied Karate as a kid. I say bad, which isn't entirely correct. They're "good" Karate habits, but are generally considered bad habits by modern standards. Things like not retracting punches and breathing out of time, or having longer stances with immobile weight distribution.

I woke up this morning with some sore legs, and while it only lasted a few minutes, it was a reminder as to just how different our arts are. I'm really looking forward to running through some grappling with the class on Thursday (tomorrow), though the hard surface will limit what we can do... though it also give me a good reason to get some (portable) foam flooring.

Apple are again running a series of seminars throughout Australia and New Zealand in a lead up to the World Wide Developer's Conference in San Francisco. I've registered to check out what they're doing at the Perth seminar.

It is running on Monday the 26th of June at midday for two hours and I'm interested in what the developer tools are like on a Mac. There's a chance we'll get MacBook Pros over the Thinkpads so it'd be interesting to know what's available.

On Saturday I completed my second grading in BJJ. I now have a second blue strip on my belt. I had to complete the white-1 and white-2 gradings to get my second stripe, and next time I'll do the white-1, white-2 and white-3 gradings. It carries on like this all the way to the end.

Something I learnt only recently is that the number of stripes available at each belt reduces towards black. This means there's four blue stripes you need to get on your white, and three purple stripes on your blue, and two brown stripes on your purple, and one black stripe on your brown.

I have a long way to go, but I'm on schedule. It normally takes about two and a half years (of training 2-3 times a week) to get your blue belt. That's my intention.

On Sunday I had a two and half hour seminar with my coach's coach - John Will. He comes over every four months to coincide with our gradings so that he can award the coloured belts.

We spent the first hour doing escapes from back control, starting with the ideal situation where you've managed to start the escape early on and they don't have your neck, and later progressing through to the worst case scenario where you're about to get choked out. I really liked how we progressed from best to worst case with a few in-between situations. Things are never cut-and-dry on the mat so knowing that you can get out of a situation regardless of how deep in you are is powerful.

John gave a really good analogy about the differences between white belt beginners and more experienced BJJers. It was in relation to a comment that someone made about the escape from back control when they have your neck (worst case) being "hard". He said that it wasn't meant to be easy, and that a black belt has to work just as hard to get out of that situation as a white belt, the difference being that the black belt is less likely to let the situation get that bad to start with. It's one of those things that makes sense when it's pointed out to you - because they've got a coloured belt they don't get super-human strength, so if they have to hip-escape away from someone who's 100kg it'll be just as hard for them as it is for me.

He likened it to boggy ground. The white belt takes a few steps and ends up wading in up to their neck before realising "hey, wait - this isn't good". The blue belt goes in up to their waist, the purple gets their legs wet. The brown puts their foot on the ground and doesn't like the squelch so backs out immediately and the black doesn't take any steps because they just know it's boggy.

The second half was guard passing and I found this really useful. I always get caught with an arm left inside when I perform a basic guard pass which means I get triangled easily. As a result I'm looking to expand my guard passing techniques and Adam's shown me a few from the blue belt syllabus which have helped. It was interesting because we were learning foot locks and legbars which are usually reserved for blue and above. As a white belt you don't have the control to apply these locks safely so you're not taught them. You have to be a purple belt to use a leg lock in a competition. From the taste I had though I think those locks will be a lot of fun to learn.

I bought a DVD that John and another black belt from the US have produced which focusses on Mastering Armbars. It gave me a good opportunity to learn how to rip a DVD under Linux, because I wanted each DVD chapter as a seperate file on my Xbox. In the end I used dvd::rip which worked a treat, even through the interface is clunky. My CPU sat at 100% for about 6 hours but I now have 33 individual AVI files totalling 1.4GB ;)

Last night I had the pleasure of watching X-Men: The Last Stand with Carrie. We both enjoyed the film, and you should check it out if you liked the first two.

A few weeks back I mentioned the Juggernaut, Bitch video. When the Juggernaut character was on screen for the first time a massive cheer errupted from the crowd, along with a few "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!"

But the best part was when the actual Juggernaut character is chasing down ShadowCat (she's the one that can walk through walls) later in the film and says... "Don't you know who I am? I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!"

Yes, from what I can tell, the script was changed to reference the viral internet joke. Too funny!