Those two videos have been brought to my attention within maybe two weeks of each other, and I hate thinking of random coincidences.. So here they are, together so I can find them again in several years. <a href=" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM">Playing for change: Stand by me</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY">Where the hell is Matt?</a> The first one fills my heart with a warm feeling - the song was recorded by all these people around the world simultaneously (or so they say, but it sure is well edited in any case).

In the past couple of weeks, I'd gotten to spar progressively harder with a blue belt who is twice my age, but has been in dojos where sparring and self-defense were more important than kata. As a result, I consider him somewhat dangerous to spar with.. And, well, I let myself get caught up. I stopped being the watcher.. I hid behind the excuse that I was just sparring as hard as he wanted to spar, and so it just escalated.

A friend of mine wrote about shoulder relaxation.. Apparently we both had the same mental block, but he solved it first - shoulder relaxation (and by extension, all relaxation) can be done up/down and … forward/back! At first I didn't think I had that issue, my western mind automatically went "Nah, I don't have that issue, my shoulders are nice and straight!" .. And then training kicked in and the answer came : "Well, maybe they're not supposed to be straight!

So, I've been trying to keep my stances down a lot more now - it's making me much more aware of when I get tense.. Because I rise, because my ankles, hips and knees just don't flex. It's an interesting experience. Two people are testing.. During sparring, that evening was the first time that I made a conscious point of "the first thing I do is move - and then answer".

As is, this code will create an array of arrays - Directories with the same 6 first characters will be grouped in the same sub-array. I am using this for log directories, name format 20081125 for instance - you can just replace the logic to be whatever you need, of course. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 dirs = [] Dir['*'].