Trying to get your car paperwork changed from Virginia to Pennsylvania is just an absolute headache. Why is this so hard? There are about a billion steps, and you work with many different agencies who don’t cooperate with each other. I went to get the state inspection because I was told I needed it for plates, but the the inspection place told me I needed the plates first. I tried to call Toyota Financial and apparently their entire office was at home yesterday. WTF? In fact, the only logical guide that I found helpful was the one on the University of Pittsburgh website.
It’s bad enough that most of these places aren’t open during the weekend of after 5 PM. I don’t really want to take time off just to sit in a chair and wait for my number to be called (and then find that I skipped step 7.0.1.b and have to return to wait in line).
Why isn’t this just the push of a button to get a form printed otu, and then a quick verification with ID at a DOT facility? I just absolutely hate the DOT right now.
We did knife point-counterpoint exercises last night at karate, and my right arm feels like it is going to fall off. There weren’t many students, so the exercise must have gone on for over 40 minutes. In fact, just swinging the knife while fighting off the blocks of a guy twice my size was extremely tiring. However, what made it worse was that getting my right hand blocked in the exact same area for that long has just destroyed the left side of my forearm. The area is all red, and it feels like I have three layers of bruises in the area; moreoever the arm feels rather stiff and my hand motion is limited. I had to tie an ice pack to my arm all last night, and that’s probably the only reason the arm isn’t just black, blue, and purple.
As for the exercise itself, it was pretty cool. From the demonstrations on draw-cuts, I’m not sure how long you could defend against an attacker with a knife, and the sensei stately point-blank that no matter what you will get cut a lot in a knife fight. The difficulty of picking up the blocks really hammered home the point that the defender wants to end the fight as quickly as possible (kick to groin ASAP), because in real life the attacker will not pointlessly attack until his right arm is completely tired out and bruised.
We worked with training knives that were rather short, each having maybe a 3-inch blade. The speed of the short (and concealable) weapon is rather intimidating, and you cannot simply trap the weapon hand because the attacker could simply pull his hand back and give you a very nasty cut. It really only takes a short tap to throw your block off, and that split second is usually all the assailant needs to stab you. I’m no expert in knife fighting or defense, but if you are being attacked with a knife, running is definitely option #1. After that you’ll probably only get 1, maybe 2 blocks in before everything spirals out of control. Aside from keeping your body away, you’d probably want to counterattack as soon as possible, because time is really not on your side. Also, some of those large wooden training knives you see are just ridiculous because no one is going to jump out at you with a bowie knife or a machete.
I thought that this was an interesting read, and matched up pretty well with my experiences so far with knife exercises.
As usual, I took the day off for my birthday yesterday. I don’t like office birthday celebrations, so this saves everyone a lot of trouble.
To celebrate, I got myself a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard. Since now all my computer hardware is black and my desk is black as well, I had to ditch my old grungy “white” keyboard. I had originally planned on getting a wireless keyboard, but I realized that having wireless capabilities would not really do anything useful for me. The fact that many of them come bundled with a crappy wireless mouse was also problematic, since I already had an awesome wireless mouse. Finally, I didn’t want to have to deal with changing batteries on my keyboard as well.
The split keyboard design did take a bit of getting used to. It felt very different, but much more natural. Now when I type on standard keyboards, my hands feel crampd and keys feel so small!
Yesterday night was the fantasy NBA draft and I somehow ended up with the first pick. So naturally I snapped up Lebron James. I did like the back-to-back picks on every wrap-around, but it was a looooong wait in between picks. Overall, I’m not sure i’m happy with my picks, and I have too much team overlap at the moment. The overall draft results can be found at the bottom of the first page of this thread.
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General | Kabitzin 10/27/2006 | 
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