Chatter Of The Squirrel

Evolution of Inter-Personal Communication

Such is the evolution of inter-personal communication.

• Snail mail
• E-mail
• E-cards
• Personal Messages
• the Poke

Either people just have fewer and fewer things to say. Or communication has become so sophisticated that you can read volumes of nuances in the inflection of a Poke.

Yaaaawwnn!!!

Movies to review: The Kite Runner. The Children of Huang-shi.

Books to review: Shopgirl & The Pleasure of my Company by Steve Martin. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Misc blog-debt: Two and a half bikes. Aikido. Kendo 2.

Miniatures to paint: Raek, for a painting competition due end of the month. A shipful of pirates. A clan of Trolls. Regiments of infantries. Battalions of war engines. A dozen plus characters.

Weight to lose: 5kg

And it’s only Wednesday. Still managing to stay afloat at the new job. Feeling like a spook though. First day, and I find that a boss has researched my political leanings. (Could supporting Maimun Yusuf label me as an anarchist and an anti-establishment?) Second day, and I’m tasked with hacking a staff’s notebook. Third day’s good. Maybe the fourth day I’ll discover that my blog is compromised too.

Already looking forward to the weekend.

A dinner to send off a Kempo sensei tomorrow. Might join.

May be buying a dogi on Saturday. Also checking out what cool stuff on sale at the martial arts store. Perhaps a cheap punching-bag, just for fun. And Sunday, may also sign up with my friend for my first class of Aikido. Looking forward to bruised shoulders. Bike hash this month postponed to the first Sunday of May.

For now, I’ll do what I can… ie. recover some sleep debt.

Kempo - Joint locks HURT!

Wrist locks hurt. A lot!!

Today, the blackbelts helped us revised the moves to break out of a wrist grab. Then took the escape move, added a variation, and turned it into a wrist lock.

It’s deceptively effortless, and causes a shit load of pain!! Especially when the bloke got carried away, (demo-ing to a young Jap girl, while I’m the guinea pig) and showed the follow-up move of the lock. I don’t know what the hell he was trying to do cos I was distracted by the extreme pain in my wrist!

Need to do a lot of stretching exercises for my hands from now on. There’ll be worse to come, I’m sure.

Even the first wrist-grab escape move I learnt in my first lesson, I picked up more nuances in the move when I practised with an old guy. There was greater confidence and intensity in his forms.

Having the right ’sparring’/training partner is KEY to learning Kempo right. When sparring with a frail girl, or a comic book store clerk with a history of neonatal biliary atresia, the ’sparring’ becomes as pointless as a tango. But with a real Kenshi, you see everything that you’re doing wrong. When do you pull the arm to your shoulder, or do you move the shoulder TO the arm etc…

I think I had a productive day today, since there were so few beginners and thus got more attention from the seniors.

And nothing hurts today. No muscle or joint aches. Excepting for the wrist, of course.

Pay Per Post

Came across this website while I was just surfing around.

Being able to make money blogging doesn’t sound like a bad idea. If it works, that is. And if you believe testimonials, then it really is working for a great number of people.

I’m going to give it a spin, and see how much money I can get out of it. Will keep everyone posted. They promise to pay USD$20 just for this first post on my blog telling people about this. It’s a nice neat number, and I just so HAPPEN to need $20 of Paypal right now to buy something from http://miniaturementor.com

Earning opportunities will be relative to the popularity, and Google Ranking for the website. So far, I think my Google rank is still 0. I may have a dozen readers, but very few people linking to my website.

I wonder if I can elevate the ranking by hosting Edison Chen’s photo album…

Advertisers will give PayPerPost the details of what they want. And if your site meets their requirements, mostly your rankings, then you can take advantage of that opportunity. Book it. Write something about the product that the advertiser is trying to push. And then get paid.

Such opportunities can pay anywhere between $5 -$150+. That I’ve seen anyway…

Review: The Forbidden Kindom

Been waiting for this movie for a good couple of weeks. Jet Li and Jackie Chan!! What’s not to like!? Yarr, it’s got a corny title. Want to know what’s the Chinese title? Translated, it’s “King of Kung Fu”. Sheeesh!!

Jackie is a talented stuntman with very flashy and entertaining kungfu. But seriously, he’s old, and he can’t be a match for Jet Li, a real Wushu master. This was my misgivings.

But a name popped up in the beginning credits. Collin Chou. Seraph from Matrix Reloaded. The evil Vietnamese gangster fighting Donnie Yen in Flashpoint. He has a vicious and ruthless fighting style! My hopes for the movie soared immediately! But why didn’t they give him a more prominent spot on the poster! He deserves more recognition!

The movie has two obligatory oriental beauties to lend it an air of mystique. A displaced traveler on a quest. An item of power that has to be taken to a mountain. An evil warlord with purple eye-shadows.

Nonetheless, the kungfu made up for all this. And the Monkey God too. I was happy to see the Monkey God as an element of the plot.

The drunken master faced off the shaolin monk. This fight was very entertaining to watch, but it didn’t have the intensity of a Donnie Yen fight. Jackie Chan is old. You just can’t get that thought out of your head, no matter how well he disguised it.

There’s the ‘traditional’ scene of the kungfu master abusing his student. Very nostalgic.

Then a pretty decent Jet Li vs Collin Chou fight. In between, there’s plenty of random theatrics. The gwailo, and the girls were just forgettable supporting-dancers in the background. No need to pay them any attention.

The Karate Kid ending was really stupid. But the movie has already earned a lot of good will, so I can overlook it. Besides, I DID enjoy Karate Kid when I was two decades younger. So I can tolerate this homage.