Hi Everyone!
I have added www.thejudopodcast.eu to podcast alley, which is a huge directory of podcasts.

It could really help raise awareness of the podcast so please head over to PodcastAlley.com and click on the VOTE button, please.

Thanks.

P.s. I just noticed the Intro to episode 5 is wrong, I'll try and change it as soon as possible.

Last night, Sally & I attended the local karate class, Uechi-Ryu.

It was really interesting!
Uechi-Ryu is one of the only Karate styles that openly acknowledges it's Chinese origins. It would appear that the founder of Uechi-Ryu learnt some form of chinese "Kung Fu", in fact was I understand the first Japanese to teach Kung Fu inside China.

He then moved/returned to Okinawa where Uechi-Ryu has grown from. It is very interesting to watch and try. The style is very much an inside fighting style, with a very unusual stance and lots of circular movements, quite un Karate like.

As a Judoka and coach, I found the class very interesting.

A scary, but interesting section was the "Body conditioning". It started with a very Kung Fu-esque technique that looked a lot like "push hands". Then there was basically lots of hitting your partner.

No really!

Punching the stomach, hitting of forearms, hitting chest, legs.
Oddly, I though it was one of the better parts of the class. One of the attacks leveled at Karate and so forth, is that they never really hit anyone, all that pulling punches stuff.
It is very odd and quite an interesting process to both hit and be hit, balancing carefully how much you and your partner can take. As someone who has never really hit anyone, it was very odd to start with. I can see it as a really good exercise leading towards sparring. You really start to know how hard hurts.

A bit like Judo that you have to learn how hard you can throw or be thrown before it hurts.

All in all a very interesting evening, may well attend again next week.

Well, work wise I have been really busy as we have been a man down. In between the work I have been trying to do something about backing up my MacBook Pro.

So...
I have been playing with Amazon S3 and rsync.
Amazon S3 is basically a giant disk on the web. I downloaded Jungle Disk and was trying to use aRsync to backup my pictures etc. But it wasn't working, so I've gone old school and am using the CLI.
Works really well, although my poor 512/256 link is SLOW!
I'll probably do a whole post, or page on the website when I have it all sorted, I'd like to cron job it or something.

Second, is CoPilot. CoPilot.com is an alternative to Webex, cheaper and as of this week MUCH cheaper. $5 USD for 24 hours access. And, it works with Mac now. Way Cool!

Finally, I read a cool post related to my backup paragraph above, someone who moved their iTunes library to S3 using Jungle disk. Excellent, might try it.

There we are.

My little PHP hack to read the BBC RSS feed for the weather and send it to my NabazTag bunny has been added to the backstage.bbc.co.uk website.

Woot!

Heres the linkage:

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/a ... echno.html

WOW! Uploading now to www.thejudopodcast.eu/podcast.php is the first episode of 2007, where I am joined by Nuno Delgado, former European champion and Bronze Medalist in the Sydney Olympic Games.

I really enjoyed this episode, Nudo was very kid and generous and shared how he experienced his day in Sydney, winning Portugal's first Olympic medal in Judo.

We also spoke about the state of Judo in Portugal, how a small country has both pluses and minuses. Where the future of Judo might be and much more. We talked about what is needed of a Judoka, a Coach, a Federation and loads more.

It will be up on www.thejudopodcast.eu very soon, it's going up as fast as I can okay! :)

Once again, thanks to Nuno for his time, patience (I had a power cut half way through), and great words!

His (rather nice) website is over at http://www.nunodelgado.net

Enjoy!