Maszman Speaks!

have to be hon­est, get­ting my Black Belt in Karate has proven to be the most dif­fi­cult endeavor of my life. It’s not an easy task for any­one but it’s par­tic­u­larly tough for some­one my age who lacks flex­i­bil­ity and phys­i­cal dex­ter­ity. But it’s also not impos­si­ble, and I have no inten­tion of giv­ing up.

As we enter the home stretch, I’ve had to ratchet up the inten­sity. Totally expected, of course. You don’t coast into this, you have to really push your­self hard. I’m tired, ner­vous, excited and a lot more all at once.

Part of what makes this unique is the phys­i­cal aspect of it. I’m used to being able to think my way through things. One of the rea­sons I am as suc­cess­ful as I am is that abil­ity. Over the years a cou­ple of peo­ple have called me a genius, but I’ve never thought of myself as such. Yet I can’t deny I see con­nec­tions and pat­terns in things that oth­ers don’t see. If that’s intel­li­gence, than per­haps I am gifted.

But you can’t think your way through the mar­tial arts. You have to be here, now. Not wor­ry­ing about your last move or your next move but the move you’re mak­ing now. It’s all about how you move your body, and that’s why it’s so dif­fi­cult for me.

Dif­fi­cult, yes. Impos­si­ble, no. And here I am.

The title of this post comes from talks with Sen­sei about get­ting your Black Belt. Some peo­ple say that a Black Belt is sim­ply a White Belt who didn’t quit. In many ways, your Black Belt rep­re­sents the real begin­ning of your mar­tial arts train­ing. So in that sense, my mar­tial arts career is indeed reach­ing the end of the begin­ning; there’s still plenty of road to travel.

Storm Rolls In, orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz.

One of the fea­tures of work­ing in a high rise build­ing is you get to some­times be in the clouds.

Mark Ham­burg, Adobe soft­ware archi­tect and project lead for Light­room, blogs on Lightroom’s Goals. Inter­est­ing to see a soft­ware devel­oper talk about an appli­ca­tion hav­ing a personality.

I’m a Light­room user and I was drawn in partly by being part of the beta pro­gram but also because of the soft­ware itself. With the tools I had, I had a lot of the basic Light­room already, albeit in sep­a­rate soft­ware pack­ages. But Light­room doesn’t sim­ply glom sep­a­rate appli­ca­tions together, it’s a prime exam­ple of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Not every “inte­grated” appli­ca­tion does this, per­haps because they didn’t have the clear goals the Light­room has.

The Cre­ative Com­mons has a FAQ on the Law­suit Against Vir­gin Mobile and Cre­ative Com­mons.

The story in a nut­shell: Vir­gin Mobile used an image that a pho­tog­ra­pher had posted to Flickr using a CC license and did not give him attri­bu­tion. He’s now suing Vir­gin Mobile, as you’d expect, but also Cre­ative Com­mons because he didn’t under­stand the license.

How stu­pid is this guy? The licenses are very well explained and there’s no require­ment that you use them (and Flickr defaults to reg­u­lar copy­right). If you attach a CC license with­out under­stand­ing it, why is it Cre­ative Com­mons’ fault?

What, you mean the strat­egy of bow­ing to the tel­cos every whim hasn’t cre­ated improve­ments? That’s crazy talk!

U.S. Dis­trict Judge Ann Aiken ruled two pro­vi­sions of the USA Patriot Act are uncon­sti­tu­tional because they allow search war­rants to be issued with­out a show­ing of prob­a­ble cause.

The Bill of Rights isn’t quite dead yet.