I'm known to be a slackobo. For those who know Final Fantasy games, it's a mix between someone slack and a chocobo...

Anyway, because I finally checked my blog and saw that Hannah still checks, and wishes to know what is going on, I'll try to continue to write.

University goes on.
I have started my PhD successfully, and am in the process of completing my first paper for presentation in Brisbane. The paper is due May 9th, and I am still collecting experimental data for it... a little bit of pressure, but it's not hugely major, so it's not like I'll be devastated if I don't get it done or published.

As I have signed a confidentiality agreement on my work, for the purposes of Intellectual Property and Patenting rights, I am no longer at the freedom and liberty to discuss the finer aspects of my project, in case someone steals the idea, and puts in more faster work to get it to a commercialisation stage and makes money off it.

Archery is going pretty nicely.
I recently came back from Melbourne from the 58th Australian National championships.
It was a pretty tough week, and I shot reasonably ok.
I had the fortune of shooting against Olympic Bronze Medalist Tim Cuddihy in the individual matchplay and I lost 117 to 152 or something like that. We both scored 50 points in the last round, and he was up by 6 points in the first round. My second round was pretty poor and his was alright, but that was the costly part for me.

In terms of placing, Kirsten came in a 22nd overall, which was pretty good considering she's never shot that much before and she even managed to injure her self on the 2nd last day of shooting, so she didn't shoot in the final event, and her placing was still not at the bottom.

I came in 17th overall for the week, out of 40 in my division, which is pretty good, but the Australian Institute of Sport members (essentially the Olympic squad) are not permitted to shoot non olympic style events, so they automatically lose a stack of points.
Even still, 17th makes me pretty happy.

The new thing I've started is Kendo.

It's kind of like Japanese Fencing.
Kendo -> Ken = Sword, Do = way of. => Way of the Sword.

It's a ancient martial art, and requires a lot of physical and mental work and discipline.
And it's actually getting me fit a little at a time.
One of the things we do during warmup is "hayashiburi" which is a jumping cut exercise.
You start a basic guard stance "kumai" and you do a little forward jump, both feet simultaneously. As you jump, you lift the sword (made of bamboo) above the head, and as you land, you cut down and jump back. This is done non stop for how many cuts is dictated.
Normally we do 100 hayashiburi at the end of the warmup, and we also do 150 various cuts before the hayashiburi.

When we first started, I was dying when we got to 80, and really struggled to get to 100.
Today, at training, we did 200 (sometimes we do 200), and on saturday we did 100.
I can get through 100 well, and today I managed to get to about 160 before I started to really feel the burn. The other thing that is good about the hayashiburi is the shouting.
"Kiai" is where you shout what you are doing. This is the expression of ki/chi/qi depending on what form of martial/culture you want to refer to, and has the intent of the attack.
When we do hayashiburi, the kiai gets louder as we go, and we count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1, 2, .... 9, 20, 1, 2, ...., 30 etc until the end. Usually, when we get to 90 (if we're doing 100), the last ten are shouted at the top of your voice, and it's quite unique to be with 40 people at the top of their voices in unison shouting with sweat, pain and effort....

It's very hard to describe the martial art, but if you do a google search on kendo, you'll find heaps of stuff on it.

I'm trying to save up money to buy myself a set of armour as I have now completed the basic beginners training. The set I want (and since I'm a man of quality) is from Chiba Budogu, in Chiba, Japan, about 100km from Tokyo.
It will cost me 256 300 Yen plus postage to Australia. That comes to round $3200 AUD plus the postage. You can work it out for whatever currency you like I guess.
And it takes 6-10 weeks to manufacture as it is all custom made.
The reason why I want it is because it's one of the best you can get without going overboard. You can easily spend twice that amount on master crafted armour, but only the high level elite teachers and practioners have the right to that kind of armour....
And as our club president said, "How much is your head worth?"

So, if people are lucky with the lotto, and can spend some dosh, please let me know, as I am scraping the barrel to find that money hehehehehe.

So that's the update for now, hope you're all satisfied! =)