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October 29, 2011 

Choosing Martial Arts for Fitness

I wrote a blog post for the Stack Exchange Fitness blog about my experience with fitness and exercise as a child, teenager, adult, and young professional. The point I wanted to make was that choosing an activity should be a person own action, that is should come from within. My experiences with fitness growing up have largely been either in the control of others or a reaction to what (I perceived) people were doing for fitness. The full post is called “Finding a Fitness Niche” at the blog, and I wrote it to hopefully give others a stepping stone to find out what kind of activity they might choose for staying healthy.

I think the Fitness and Nutrition Stack Exchange is a great source of information and definitely has a lot of potential despite being in beta for so long since its proposal on Area51. There have been ongoing issues with the definition of what fitness, health, and nutrition mean for people. Nonetheless, I still think it (and the whole Stack Exchange network too) is a great resource and community for people to go for information.

February 12, 2010 

Contending with WordPress

My latest personal project was to migrate and update the site of my kung fu school. My sifu had asked me for input on the website since the original administrator was moving to a different hosting provider. Ideas were thrown around, and I suggested moving the site to a WordPress configuration.

There were two roadpaths with WordPress: have it hosted on WordPress.com, the commercial enterprise owned and started by the same people who created WordPress; or use WordPress.org which has the downloadable free, open-source blogging platform software. After having used WordPress.org for years and years, I decided to explore the WordPress.com option.

There are differences between the “com” and “org” incarnations of WordPress. I have been a user of WordPress for years, running it on my own hosting provider (actually sharing it with someone else). I had also signed up on WordPress.com (for an Akismet account) and thought, at the time, that it was very limited. I do not know what changes have taken place since then but I explored the options available, and liked them better than the base package Google Sites or Windows Live provides.

All I did to migrate my school’s website was create an account, set up some pages, picked a theme, uploaded some files, copied content, created a new banner image, and then mapped the domain. I didn’t have to worry about back-end administration like databases, backups, disk space, themes, and so on. I can do the same thing on my own, but I didn’t want to take on those responsibilities at the time.

WordPress.com already provided everything (or nearly everything) I had done with my own blog and Youth A.C.T.’s website and not to mention that most features are free right from the start. A simple website doesn’t need much more than that. However, as feature-rich as WordPress.com is, they are still rather limited in terms of how much control you can exude over your site.

After some initial discussion with my instructor, we determined what we wanted in the website and the feasibility of implementing ideas. I decided that it would be best to move the school’s site off to its own WordPress-hosted service where we could control the site on a deeper level. This largely meant being able to utilize other themes not available on WordPress.com, install plug-ins that suited our needs, and being able to customize the look and feel.

The new (new) site has up and functional for a few weeks now. A lot of people I solicited for feedback have said it looks very nice and professional (their opinion, not mine) and that information is much easier to find. I can’t take complete credit for what I did; WordPress has great community support and dozens of plug-ins and themes, and the authors deserve lots of thanks for their efforts.

October 26, 2008 

The Kung Fu Life

Recently, my sifu has asked me to help out with the kung fu school just to have an extra body. Partly the reason why I chose my current apartment location was to be closer to the school (and work) and avoid driving lots of extra miles each day. Since I am so close anyway, there isn’t any reason for me to not help out (barring availability) so I have been showing up on Saturday mornings to help throughout the day.

The one bit that has been feeling very awkward is the pee-wee class which ranges in ages from 3 to 6 years old. The reason why it feels so awkward teaching them is that I have no idea how to deal with them. I’m not even really teaching them per se as I am refining little things and generally helping the kids get the idea of what they’re supposed to do. Eventually, I learned that sometimes you just need to physically pick the kids up and move them. Some of their vocabulary isn’t fully fleshed and without any guidance, they will just end up staring at the ceiling or lying down on the floor. I don’t want to yell at them (not that there is any reason to), but I don’t understand to what degree I can “scold” them. Having some of the parents there makes it even more awkward, but it wouldn’t be that much different if they weren’t there either. Teaching some of the older youths is not so awkward and much easier. They have the capacity to do various things on their own and comprehend what you’re doing. Communicating with them is also easier.

Still, there is somewhat of a disconnect between my new role (even as limited as it is) and how I feel right now. I’m still a student of the school, but taking on this new leadership role is forcing me to become more proactive too. Beforehand, I had always just let other “staff” or “senior” students handle things. It really hasn’t felt like much time has passed since I started doing kung fu even though it’s been a little over a year, and I’m somewhat a “senior” student. It’s a number of things that contribute to that — being an adult over 18 years, the level and progression of material I know, and the time I’ve spent there.

When I was growing up, I always thought that I would try to stay a kid. I still need to mature a whole lot mentally (I’m just starting to shed my “college kid” mentality), but this new role is also starting to make act more “adult” so I can be a role model for the younger kids. For the ones in high school, the difference is a little more blurred between me and them. They’re still kids, but they’re also in high school (and most of them are beyond my current level anyway). Sometimes I feel old, but it almost isn’t an issue since we bond over so many other things. Age only really comes into play because of we adults have more experience and wisdome (hopefully) to impart on the younger ones when the need arises.