Personal – Page 2 – James Crisp

New Zealand Holiday ’09

On April 26, 2009

Soosun and I had a lovely week in New Zealand, and great weather. We visited the North Island, landing in Auckland. We drove straight to Rotorua, arriving in time for dinner. The next day, we visited White Island, the most volcanic area in the Southern Hemisphere. Pretty amazing, had to wear gas masks. Steam, acid, sulphur and bubbling pools everywhere!

Then on to the Tongariro Crossing, probably the best bushwalk I have ever done – 19kms of amazing scenery, steep climbs, volcanic craters, lakes and the “Mount Doom” volcano from the Lord of the Rings. Although it took all day, it was not a walk that ever left you bored – so much variety, ending finally with rainforest.

We went adventure caving in Waitomo (the Black Abyss), which started with tight abseil down a chimney, swimming and sloshing through wet caves in a wetsuit and floating on tires, some tight squeezes and we finally got back to the surface climbing up another chimney. Great fun!

More New Zealand photos here.

An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale

By James

On January 9, 2009

In Book Reviews, Personal

While in the Cook Islands, we went to the National Museum and it was there that I first heard about Tom Neale and saw reference to him on a census of island populations from the 1950s (“Suvarov: population 1” with a footnote saying “Tom Neale”!). He was the only inhabitant of Suvarov, an atoll in the Cook Islands, having done what many people only dream of. He left civilisation and moved to a beautiful, deserted island in the Pacific, replete with coconut trees, jungle, and an azure lagoon. Not only that, but he survived and prospered there and wrote an amazing autobiography of the time, called “An Island to Oneself”.

I tried to borrow “An Island to Oneself” from the National Library on Rarotonga (there is only one library on Rarotonga!) but unfortunately all copies were out. So, I turned to Amazon (the long tail poster child), and was very happy to find they could source me a copy. I don’t want to spoil the tale, but recommend you have a read if you have ever thought about what life would be like on a desert island, surviving only by your own wit and skills, hundreds of miles from civilisation!

UPDATE (6 Jul 2016): Thanks to Don Hirst for this link to the full book online.

Wing Chun Notes

By James

On December 28, 2008

In Personal, Wing Chun

Stance

Lift up through body. Imagine your body is hanging from a thread from the middle of the top of your head
Shoulders should be relaxed and down
Knees springy (ie very slightly bent so you can bounce up and down)
Tie gung on – tensing core muscles and rotating pelvis up slightly (bottom of pelvis goes forward)
core muscles tensed, rest of body relaxed

Moving

Get into stance
Move with weight centred between legs, not on one foot or the other
When you move forward, your core/waist should move forward in time with the leg. Ie, leg should NOT lead and then pull body forward.
Waist should be driving the leg movement, which means your weight still stays balanced between your legs
Legs should be light and relaxed, body is being drawn up by the stance

Speed
When punching or kicking, you arms and legs should be completely relaxed, although tie gung should be on. If completely relaxed can move faster. Imagine swatting a fly.

When moving in, trust your wing chun. Moving in should be almost like getting pushed from your waist from behind. Legs relaxed, high acceleration, full weight moving forward, taking the space they currently occupy.

Pivoting
Pivot so that both feet finish moving at the same time. Move from the waist.

Guard
Guard should be with arms relaxed and fingers pointing forward towards your opponent’s centre line where the neck meets the trunk, to give even time for high and low attacks.

Defending against head punches
Think primarily of hitting the opponent with your punch/strike, as this will cripple the attack. The dai sau is secondary. Dia sau should keep sheering upwards on contact. It should be a rotation in the shoulder joint, your angles should not collapse. Your shoulder should always be down and the ball of the joint rotating at the back of the joint. Dia sau should be inscribing an even circle of your space. Contact should be shearing with the hard side bones of your arm against the inside of their wrist. Wrist should always stay on centre. Your fingers may be pointing towards the opponent’s head near the end of the move, or your hand may be above your head, depending on strength and hookedness of the attack.

Hook Kick
You really need to swing your hip into a good hook kick. Your leg should go up quite high as it swings around and then drive down into your opponent’s thigh / leg. In close, you may contact with your knee, with more distance, you should be contacting with the front of your lower leg (above ankle, but below knee).

Cook Islands Holiday

By James

On November 20, 2008

In Personal

The Cook Islands are an awesome place to visit to chill out and relax. We stayed there for two weeks and had a great time, coming back much refreshed. We only visited Rarotonga, the largest island which has about 14,000 people, and a coast line of around 32km. Basically it is a volcanic island surrounded by a large, shallow reef with bath-water warm water and lots of little uninhabited motu (islands) to explore. Around the edge of the island are beaches and flat land where people live, usually in houses with large gardens, lots of coconut and mango trees, and vivid tropical plants. In the middle of the island are tall mountains covered in jungle. It is a great place for water-sports such as kayaking, fishing, swimming and snorkelling, and there’s also some fairly hard core walking tracks to explore in the jungle. Prices are reasonable, though food tends to be quite expensive as most of it comes in from New Zealand. The Cook Islanders maintain their culture very strongly and put on enjoyable performances and feasts that you can attend (often called “Island Nights”).

Cook Islands Fruits of Rarotonga

Cook Islands Water

Cook Islands Motu

Cook Islands Sunrise

Cook Islands

Our Feet

Cook Islands Jungle

Soosun of the Jungle

Cook Islands traditional dancing

Cook Islands beach at sunset

Also, more Cook Islands photos here.

F-Secure Optus Internet Suite – To be avoided!

By James

On July 6, 2008

In Personal, Technical

Optus, my ISP, is kind enough to give subscribers a free copy of F-Secure’s security suite which offers anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall. I read some half decent reviews of the product so I thought I’d install it and give it a go. Unfortunately, it was fraught with problems. First of all, after installing I got a blue screen on reboots. After uninstalling AVG (my previous anti-virus) in safe mode, my computer could boot. Next, I tried to do a full system scan, but the F-Secure automatic update kicked in at the same time and it crashed the scanner. So, I rebooted, and tried a full system scan. I tried twice, but each time, it hung on a random .class (compiled Java) from GlassFish. Not great. So I went to the F-Secure website to submit a bug report. I filled in the form, and couldn’t submit it because one of the drop down lists which was mandatory was disabled in Opera. I then thought I’d try the site in IE7, but IE7 just hung, presumably thanks to F-Secure’s firewall.

Overall, I would strongly suggest that you do not bother to try the F-Secure product suite, even if it is offered to you for free.

Wedding Reception in Sydney

By James

On June 14, 2008

In Personal

On 10 May, we had our “second wedding” in Australia! It was awesome and we had a really good time with friends and family 🙂

More photos here:
http://flickr.com/photos/soosun_and_james/sets/72157605121741281/

Ginger Beer Recipe

By James

On June 8, 2008

In Brewing, Personal

Home made ginger beer is awesome, and not hard to do at all. It takes a few hours to prepare all the ingredients, then several days fermentation, then another hour or two for bottling. Usually I make about 8 or 9 1L bottles of ginger beer in a batch, and I like to make it less sweet than the commercial stuff. It is slightly alcoholic (1-2% approximately) and has a really nice gingery bite the goes well with pizza, spicy food or just about anything else! I use a recipe adapted from the Ye Olde Ginger Beer Recipe. It is as follows:

Ingredients

4 lemons
900g sugar
9L of water (enough to fill a demi-john)
1 packet / 2 teaspoons of Ale yeast (you can use bread yeast if you’re desperate)
200g fresh root ginger
4 heaped tea spoons of tartaric acid (Cream of Tartar)

Equipment

A large pot that can boil four litres of water
A jug
A glass
A coarse cheese grater
A wooden spoon
10L carboy (10L water container does nicely) washed & sterilized with bleach
A bubble seal for the carboy
A lemon juicer
A lemon zester / fine grater
A fine sieve
9 X 1.25 litre soft drink bottles, empty, washed & sterilized with bleach

Method

1. Fill pot with water and put on to boil

2. While the water is coming to the boil…

scrape the zest from one of the lemons
grate the ginger on the coarse cheese grater
add the sugar to the ginger and lemon zest in a bowl
cut the lemons in half and squeeze the juice into the jug
add the tartaric acid to the lemon juice
put the yeast into some warm water with a little sugar in a glass

3. When the water has boiled ….

add the sugar, ginger and lemon zest to the water, turn off the heat and
stir
allow the water to cool to roughly blood heat, stirring occasionally
add the lemon juice and tartaric acid to the water
add the yeast mixture

4. Use the jug to pour the mixture into the carboy and top up to 9L with boiled water (cooled to blood temperature)

5. Seal the demijohn with the bubble seal (I use salt in the water to sterilize the seal)

6. Stand the demijohn in a warm place for 48 hrs or for several days in a cool place

7. After 48 hrs pour the mixture through the sieve into the jug and fill the bottles leaving an air gap for the pressure to build up in (1L into each bottle). Screw the caps tightly onto the bottles

8. Leave the bottles at room temperature for 24 hrs (to generate the C02 fizz)

9. Put the bottles in the fridge for 2-3 days to allow the yeast to settle

10. Drink and enjoy 🙂

Notes
If you ferment the mixture in the carboy for longer before bottling, it will be less sweet and more alcoholic.

Photos from Sapa, Vietnam

By James

On May 29, 2008

In Personal

I put holiday photos on my screen saver, and these favourites just came up. I thought I’d share them with you…

Loan Calulator: Monthly repayment and interest breakdown

By James

On April 14, 2008

In Finance, Personal, Ruby / Rails, Technical

Wondering if your loan repayment calculations have been performed correctly this month, taking into account interest rate rises and extra repayments? You might be interested in giving my monthly loan calculator a go.

As my home loan provider doesn’t show balances online, and only sends statements every 6 months, I like to ring up every month or two to make sure things are on track. I used to calculate interest, new balances etc in a spreadsheet / calculator but spent an afternoon writing a little Rails app to calculate it for me. Hopefully my little monthly loan calculator is of some use to you too.