I’m going to take a moment to pimp del.icio.us. If you’re the guy who’s always finding cool links and sending them around to your friends, if you use more than one computer and have to maintain bookmarks on both, if you ever can’t remember that awesome site with the stupidly long url, you should be using it. It’s deceptively simple. Create an account, drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s linkbar. When you find a link worth mentioning, click the bookmarklet, categorize the link with a couple of tags and submit it. When somebody hits your page (here’s mine) they’ll see all your submitted links. If they pick one of the tags on the right side, they’ll see your links in that category. If they want, they can view all the links that everybody marked with that tag. Not only that, every single user has an automagic RSS feed, so you can subscribe to my linkdump with your feedreader. Or you can subscribe to a particular tag, like if you just want to see the links I submit that are about politics. Or if you want to see all the links about politics. The implications are subtle and powerful.

If you’re a Firefox user, you can even use the Live Bookmarks feature to subscribe your browser to your various feeds. I’ve got my daily tag livemarked so that I can hit it easily. I’m going to build a little sidebar that pulls my last five martial arts links and displays them over on the side of the blog. I’m dreaming of a way to have the Linktank aggregate feeds and parse tags. The potential that this system has is pretty cool.

Not only did I get my green belt last night, I also got my copy of Practical Chin Na in the mail. I’ve only flipped through it briefly, but it looks really great. Lots of detail on principles, anatomy, and it’s packed with actual techniques. I’m looking forward to getting into it.

The self defense seminar on Saturday morning was almost a bust. We ended up getting started more than half an hour late because we were waiting around for people to show up, and even then only had seven people, and four of those were already students. I’d expected a much larger turnout after the demo at the mall. Oh well. It was pretty much the same as the last one I attended. We covered a radial nerve strike rather than the headbutt, which I think is probably a better choice. I have the bruises on my forearms to attest to that technique’s effectiveness.

On Sunday afternoon we had a review class to go over our yellow and gold belt material, since we haven’t touched it in the last few months. We also ran through Yun Tung and Chen Ch’eng individually against the clock, just the way we’ll do it for the test. It was the first time I’ve ever tried Chen Ch’eng with a time limit, so I had no idea how long it would take me, whether I’d be able to get in under the ninety second limit. It turned out that I can manage it pretty sharply in less than sixty seconds, so for the test I can slow down quite a bit to make sure it looks good.