Dakao v. 2.0 - The Crooked Cut

Return of the book!

Ξ November 17th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Work |

Gawd, it’s the book that wouldn’t die…

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Notebook paper

Ξ November 10th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Philosophy, School, Work |

In 9th grade, my health teacher delivered a tirade on the first day about one of her pet peeves — notebook paper enabling.

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Hair

Ξ November 2nd, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Work |

I’m a guy. What’s the big deal?

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The power of branding

Ξ October 6th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ School, Work |

Cokes outsold all other six sodas by a factor of better than 4 to 1 this past week. In a very personal way, this emphatically underscores the lesson every single one of my four marketing professors has drilled into my head — build your brand on solid product(s), then protect the brand with everything you’ve got.

Banana wars

Ξ September 10th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Food, Work |

I like bananas. Ripe and spotty.

So does my father.

And therein lies the bitter conflict, which has raged for countless months.

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Cost of business

Ξ August 22nd, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Philosophy, Work |

It’s not so hard as one of my fellow managers makes it out to be.

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All kinds of green

Ξ April 18th, 2006 | → Comments Off | ∇ Work |

Well, I’m still looking for the princess whose puckered lips will turn me into a svelte, slick, banjo-playin’, tune-hummin’, porcinephile amphibian.

…But, I got a new job. Pay is modest (only 3.2 on the green-O-meter), but I really like the environment (har har), the team I’m working with (7.6 green-O-meter), and the company’s overall direction (8.5 green-O-meter). So check out www.greenmountain.com, sign up, and give ‘em my name as agent. You can go to www.consumerchoice.com and www.powertochoose.org to see what other companies’ rates are for electricity. No, we are not the cheapest. Yes, we are getting cheaper (cheaper than Reliant, for sure!). And we’re the only company in TX to buy all our power from nonpolluting, renewable sources.

Now that I’m done pimping my job, I can share the upsides of it. I’ll be working the International festival and Earth Day related events, and there’s the Dragonboat festival coming up next month. Can’t really roam around, but it’ll be fun getting out to places that I don’t see from my workshop. Goon ta hafter leirn the tricky ways o’ navigatin’ doon toon, a’ weil.

Miscellanities

Ξ February 15th, 2005 | → Comments Off | ∇ General, Work |

In no particular order:

Physical labor = serenity

Moved two Uhaul trucksful of stuff out of my father’s office on Sunday. My hands and forearm tensors (?) are still sore. Last night, I tried to hold up an iron under the faucet (so’s to fill the reservoir), and I nearly dropped it (was helping Mark with his jerkin and pleiderhosen for the Estrella event in .. Atenveldt?). Haven’t felt this good since I was regularly armoring for 3-8 hrs / wk.

Serenity = jolly good entertainment

David B. and David C. independently introduced me (and some others) to Joss Whedon’s Firefly series. Andrea and I have been independently watching it sort-of together (she’s in MD, I’m in TX). For a first-season TV show, it’s darned good. Even more impressive, when you consider it’s SF. An additional major selling point for me was that it’s the first SF series I know of, which treats the SF future as merely a projection of our present, petty, dirty, noble, conflicted selves in new digs and duds. Screw the Federation and their prosthetic noses. :D

Weather shifts

Last night, driving to Mark’s around 10, I saw some wisps of fog curling around the lamp posts on 610. By the time I left around 1 a.m., a curtain of mist had descended on Houston. I’m sure if I lived in Maine, I’d hate fog. But as it is, I thought it was very pretty. Fog mutes and softens harsh angles and lines, puts a halo around lights. As I drove home, words crossed my mind, like: roiling, curling tendrils, swirling…

Valentine’s Day

Oddly enough to some, perhaps, I have no melancholy musings on this day of days. Just an anecdote:

On Sunday, I reminded someone that it was the 13th, b/c it was the day before V-day. How funny, then, that I completely forgot about it on the actual day. I was still at work around 7:30, when the janitorial staff (a girl and an older woman) came in, right on schedule. We usually only exchange a “Hi,” no more. So I was a little nonplussed when the girl posed a question: “What, you’re still here? Why aren’t you taking your wife out to dinner?”

Um, because I don’t have one?

“Well, what about your girlfriend?”

If I had one, would I be here?

She laughed, and they left.

It occurred to me afterwards, that conversation might have been brought on because it was V-day in particular. Strange to think that I *am* at an age where it’s better than even odds that people my age’d be married or attached in some other way.

On that topic…

Emotional growth (?)

I do feel like I finally graduated from high school though, in an emotional / relationship sense. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t bother with such trivial things back when I was a 16-year old, mixed-up cauldron of confusion — desires, hormones, etc. I certainly didn’t have a good sense of who I was, or what I wanted then.

That’s not to say I do now, but I certainly have a better sense of them.

Other, supposedly-knowledgeable folks might argue that I doth protest too much, and that it’s better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all. I can’t gainsay them on either account. :) But my older friends all agree with me, in their own ways, that certain Kantian principles apply to relationships, and even to full-blown, rose-tinted, dancing-on-clouds love. That is to say, love / sex / relationships are meaningless if we treat them as an end to be realized (with people being the means to this end) instead of as a means to greater intimacy with people we like and admire.

Put like that, we can then see those empty truisms for what they are. I’d have to say that it *is* sometimes better to not have loved. Hrm. Maybe I just did try to gainsay the starstruck lovers (or at least believers of Love). And maybe this qualifies as melancholy for some people. Not me. What d’ye expect, of a man who remained ignorant of the ‘05 Indian Ocean tsunami for 3 weeks? ;) Priorities, man — I don’t have yours.

And I’d started thinking through this a couple weeks ago, so it’s not a newly-birthed pondering. You might say it was rather ponderous, in fact.

Randomly, I’m reminded that David Watson (aka Iolo) said this in the context of making crossbows: The more you know, the more you need to know. Dunno what brought that on.

Techno ambient / chill

I love this Shoutcast streaming MP3 station.

Becoming a productive member of society

Ξ December 10th, 2004 | → Comments Off | ∇ Work |

Well, this is my first entry under the “Work” category in at least 10 months.

Started work last week. Doing business development, commercial contracts, and general office monkey work. I think some of these duties are what they call “paralegal” work. Finally, I’m making use of my MBA education!

I’m also working in the dark, b/c the lights in this office are all triggered by motion sensors (never have to flip a switch), but they turn off automatically if they don’t detect motion within 30 minutes. And the switch for the desk out here is around the corner. ‘Scuse me whilst I go flap my arms at the sensor.

Blades and bleariness

Ξ October 21st, 2003 | → Comments Off | ∇ Fitness / HEMA, School, Work |

Oorgh, I was still pottering around at 7 this morning — wrapping up a Marketing paper. Now my body thinks I’m in the Kuala Lampur time zone. For those of you who don’t track my schedule, I’m usually 4 hours into my sleep at 7 a.m. :P

So this week, I started getting a handle on school and work, and I don’t have that vaguely drowning sensation anymore. Or rather, I can feel the incipient onset of the bends as I ascend too swiftly from the depths of Workload Trench.

…Which is perhaps employing a touch of hyperbole, since there are those people with longer hours and more classes than I’m taking on. ;P

But they say a writer writes what he knows. Or in this case, perceives.

On the drive home tonight, the sweet smell of vaguely overripe fruit accompanied me for about 4 miles of freeway driving. Either some hooligan squashed a pear in my front grill, or I’m having acid flashbacks. Oh, wait. I never did acid. :D

Over the weekend, I met up with John and Nicole Trojanowski, and Rod Fleming, at an elementary school. They all dressed up Renfest-style, and ran through a couple little skits with rapiers and swords. Stage combat type stuff, with some dialogue and etc. Good stuff.

Nicole also graciously provided me with a bunch of cabbage heads and honeydew melons for cutting fun. What a mess.

This is a warning to all my fruity foes out there: take the putrefying remains of your luckless comrades as a warning, for I have mastered fruit-fu!

Seriously, I was a little sword-shy, I think, b/c I kept missing the silly things pinned on the end of a PVC tube stand. Then I overcompensated, and clove straight through one PVC tube and nipped about 3 inches off the other stand.

We met a Jason Gunn there, who by chance has been studying rapier for the past … 5 years? But he said he’d been out of it a year, and was rusty. Still, we provided him with a mask, and I fenced him for 10 points. He successfully used some beat attacks and low ward attacks on me, but I edged him out in the end. David would be moderately proud: I successfully gained Jason’s blade several times — sometimes on straight lunges, sometimes on feints.

I’ve been doing too much sidesword (is there such a thing?) lately, though. I kept wanting to slash his weapon aside and enter in for a follow-up strike.

By 4 p.m., I wasn’t ready to quit yet, though. I took everything over to Grant’s place and set up the target stand (made of 2×4’s) on his backyard deck. We filled up well over a dozen plastic jugs and bottles of various sizes, and had a cutting party. It was very satisfying, and Grant A) did quite well for his first time, and B) had a ton of fun.

Grant noted that I was hesitating slightly in midstroke, more often than not. This might explain why I kept screwing up my cuts and missing.

The solution, I think, is to relax, focus on the follow-through of each strike, and have more cutting practices. :)

Tonight at practice, I started some more interactive drilling in longswords, to be built up to slow free assaults, much as we’ve been doing with sideswords, but slower (since longswords don’t have any hand protection). I also noted that we’ve gotten about 3 new, regular recruits for this year, which only barely compensates for annual attrition due to graduation or moving away.

We need more visibility, perhaps. I’ve got some crazy ideas, but I probably need campus police authorization or something. ;)

Oh, so on multiculturalism:

Call me an elitist, but I totally feel superior to a lot of Americans who’ve never been exposed to — much less lived with — a second culture. This doesn’t mean that I am superior, mind you. It’s just that I keep running into people who pour on the superlatives in their first encounter with some positively mundane cultural artifact. Witness the cheap red plastic kiddie stools imported from China: they’re cheap, they’re red, and they’re ubiquitous in certain institutions. But I heard someone describe them as “vividly charming” the other day. My first thought was, “You don’t get out much, do you, lady?” It’s not that I’m blasé about life, is it? I can appreciate the splendour of a fiery sunset, or the unconscious charm of a girl rising from her seat, or the whimsy of a child at play.

I see wild and crazy Hmong minority clothing color schemes and woven patterns, and have incorporated some into a portion of a museum exhibit. I routinely enjoy dishes from multiple culinary traditions, any one of which beats the pants off of TGI Friday’s or PF Chang’s — if not in ritzy presentation, then in the vibrancy and immediacy of the pho noodle house, or the Turkish restaurant on the corner (or my mother’s home cooking, with a dash each of Vietnamese, French, American, and whatever’s-in-the-fridge). There’s also Norse proverbs and literature, or crazy-cool African gold ornaments.

These have all touched me in some way. I think they’re all wonderful. But I won’t hesitate in saying that this particular cultural music or that particular cultural proverb is unsophisticated or crude compared to some other thing I hold as a standard.

Hrm.. So what am I saying? I have perspective? I can appreciate the good and bad points of things in life?

Do I really have a good perspective on things? If I did, would I need to reason out why I irrationally feel superior to someone who waxes enthusiastic about crude tribal art? What if they’re just as capable of seeing the simplistic quality of said art, but merely choose to not bring it up?

And goodness knows there are aspects of myself that I refuse to confront. ;)

Who’s lacking perspective now? Ehh, I’m going to revel in the perspective of my closed eyelids now.