Sawing Wood

How much wood can a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck chucks a lot of wood?
A lot, if it's got a Japanese saw.

All my life I always complained how it was a pain in the ass to use a hand saw. Pushing this thing through logs or boards, with the blade buckling despite the thickness meant to prevent it. Complain, complain, whine and complain, but of course, never thought about inventing a pull saw. Luckily, someone did it for me many, many moons ago.

A few years ago I took a wood working course in which my instructor introduced us to the Japanese-style pull saw. Yes -- PULL! This was frickin' amazing. What a wonderfully easy and user friendly way to saw wood. Why didn't I think of this before ... (ahem).

I now use that saw for everything! It's like cutting melted butter with a Ginsu.

But the main thing, between using a Japanese-style saw, and learning kung fu, is that I've begun looking at the world quite differently. It's akin to looking at an object and the shadow it casts, and then standing in the shadow and looking at the object and the light source. It puts everything in a brand new light (however dim, you are after all, in a shadow now).

The east tends to work with it, as opposed the west's fix it or get around it or pave over it attitude. Neither on their own complete the picture, but both philosophies together offer the world the best solutions possible.

I can't abide by people who always know what's best (including myself). Those people tend to stay out of the shadows and never look at the light. They can't possibly know what's best.

You can't tell me your grass ain't greener until you've seen it from the greener grass over there.

How do you know until you've tried?

SPAMOTICA

Ok, so you've all seen the spam:

• Enlarge your p e n 1 s
• Rolex watches
• prescription drugs from Canada

But this is new to me, in spam and content!

Now I want you to pay attention to the picture...

If you're trying to stop this sort of thing, wouldn't you think about dead and rotting puppies or something, rather than a nice pair of hooters? No wonder this guy needs help.

Just thought I'd share.
Peace, love and (woops, there it goes again, sorry honey, I tried to hold it back) ... cleavage.

PS: the best part of this spam? I'll be thinking about this guy's thoughts all day.
PPS: If you're looking for your own copy, the subject line was "Discover the Secret" from WWW news.

Blog Plagiarism is Lame

Here are a couple of popular ways personal blogs are used:

• as a journal, writing your personal thoughts down in your own words


• as a collection of quoted excerpts or links to articles/sites you want to share, maybe adding comments about what you found interesting or what you disagreed with

Then there's a different way to blog:

• find content you like that other people have written, copy it and change a few words here and there, and post it to your blog as if you had written it, without crediting the original author

Wikipedia defines plagiarism as "the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." Another term for this in relation to web content is "content scraping".

I haven't been blogging for very long, and I don't blog frequently. I can type quickly, but I write slowly. It can take me a long time to come up with phrasing that I'm satisfied with. So it's disconcerting to see a post from my handful of posts "remixed" on someone else's blog (and I do mean handful; this is a shared blog).

Whether it's called plagiarism, drive-by scraping, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", or whatever, I call it lame. If you like what someone else has written, just link to it and give 'em their props.

Sneaky Learning

So my kid and I watch kung fu flicks from time to time, and I get to point out all the cool moves and we talk about good guys and bad guys and all that. As a kung fu practitioner (that's my sifu in the picture, many moons ago) I thought my son would also be interested in learning.

"Nah."

Well, for someone who is uninterested in learning kung fu, he's getting pretty good... Just the other day we were jumping on the trampoline and he asked if I wanted to see his new kung fu moves. "I've been practicing," he says.

Intrigued, I readily agreed.

Sure enough he shows me a kick and some punches which look suspiciously like they came from the forms I practice. Somebody has been sneaking peeks at me while I practice!

This is funny because there are a lot of kung fu movies where the kids have to sneak peeks because the father won't allow them (for whatever silly plot-induced reasons) to practice kung fu. But sure enough, they watch in secret, learn, and when they grow up, must avenge their parents' murder with the kung fu they learned in secret.

Hmm, on that note, it doesn't seem so funny anymore. At least there is a difference: I would like him to learn. Perhaps that will be enough to steer away any murder plans coming my way.

Anyway... just goes to show, your kids are learning whether you see it or not.

Pitagora Suicchi - yeah!

We discovered a Japanese TV kids show called Pitagora Suicchi (Pythagoras Switch). Aside from the awesome Rube Goldbergian contraptions, they have other fun segments, like "Algorithm March".

This clip is a compilation of the contraptions:



Here's the "Algorithm March" with ninja: