Thursday, May 25, 2006

The Information Superhighway?

I found this quote to be hilarious =D
Credit goes to a comment on Slashdot by the user spun.

"There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway". They don't know didley about the Net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor.

Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the net...

A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection.

No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions.

Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.

AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawn mower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitroglycerin and idle at 120.

No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirt guns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.

NO OFFRAMPS. None.

Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.

Author (maybe, it's hard to track down sources on the Net): Jim Wiedman"

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Martial Arts Podcasts

I have been listening extensively to a couple martial arts podcasts recently, and they have been very helpful and informative for me. The Applied Karate Show is hosted by Des Paroz, a very experienced and insightful karateka of the Shorinjiryu school, in Sydney, Australia. This show focuses primarily on master karate practitioners.

The second podcast is West Seattle Karate's Martial Secrets, hosted by Kris Wilder, the head instructor at this Goju-ryu karate school. This show interviews martial arts masters of all traditions, all around the world. He asks very good questions and he likes to interview people who can give a very particular insight that is different from what his previous guests could offer.

So check out a couple of these if you're interested in exploring the martial arts, its history, and what it means to practice and master the martial arts.