The Museum Of Modern Thinking

Ok, finally got the YouTube links working I was training last Wednesday and was trying out the kick shown below. It’s a round kick to the head, but after faking a big front kick. The idea is to draw your opponents guard down to block the kick, and then twat him in the head with the round kick instead It’s coming on, but I really, really need to work on my flexibility as it will help with the whipping across of the foot at head height.

Here’s another kick that I want to add to my repertoire, a butterfly kick. It’s a great tutorial from the guys at 3Run, I keep practising the moves but need to go back to the basics as per the tutorial:

Oh, ok, one more. I believe this is a chap called Espirro Mirim, a capoeira mestre. Just watch the video and be inspired

We were fortunate enough to have a babysitter Friday night, so “my wife and I” headed out. After sitting in the car a few minutes deciding where to go, we headed down the M1 heading towards Fosse Park, Leicester. Just on the outskirts, we decided to go into for some dinner. After negotiating the fun one-way system, we parked up and my wife mentioned a restaurant she’d seen when she used to work in Leicsester, so we headed down to it.

The restaurant was called Prezzo, and it’s at 22 Silver Street (Leicester, LE1 5ET). The interior was very pleasant, big comfy sofas to wait in if required, tastefully decorated and comfy seating at the table. The service was very good, even though we were out of the way – they had two large parties in, but they managed to squeeze us in.

The food was very reasonably priced for the portions, and more importantly, it was very good. My wife had a chicken and mushroom risotto, and I had a huge pizza, full of chicken, chorizo and chillis – very nice. We had ciabatta with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and a handful of very tasty olives.

The bill for two mains, the starters, a large glass of wine and a beer came to just over £30, which I thought was very reasonable. If you’re in Leicester, it’s worth checking them out.

 On Sunday, we all went to The Risley Park for Sunday lunch. My wife and I (must stop using that phrase) both had the Chicken Napolean, again a huge portion of chicken smothered in a mushroom sauce and peppercorns, with plenty of hot fresh vegetables – my son had his standard sausage, chips and peas, and some roast potatoes from ours. The food was also very good and surprisingly filling – from the presentation of the food, it didn’t look very much, but there was quite a lot there.

For pudding, I had an excellent apple and toffee crumble with ice cream and my wife had a lemon cheesecake-type thing, also very good. My son had a “Punky” ice cream, which was plain vanilla ice cream in a tub shaped like a penguin. However, to make it a bit more interesting, they shoved a couple of sugar waffles in the penguin and put some chocolate sauce swirls on the plate – far more thoughtful and really shows a nice touch.

Oddly enough, the bill came to just over £30 again for the three of us, with drinks and the two courses. I was impressed with the food and will be going back again – give them a try…

Like me, you’ve probably have a couple of sites you visit on a regular basis for news, information, free code that you can just drop into your app without crediting the author, that kind of thing I had more than a couple of sites to check, truth be told, and checking them on a daily basis was becoming a PITA.

Fortunately, RSS provides a way for sites to alert interested parties that their site has been updated. An XML file is published with a list of summary items containing a brief description of the new content, images, and links. An RSS reader checks this file on a periodic basis and alerts you to the fact that there is new content.

Other RSS readers are available, but after reading about Robert Scoble’s approach to RSS reading on Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week blog, I thought I would give Google Reader a try (because it’s what Robert Scoble uses – I’m such a fanboy).

Google Reader does require a Google account, but all that’s just an email addy and a password. Once you’ve signed up you can start adding RSS feeds. I found the easiest way of doing this is to surf to the site I’m interested in and click the “Detect Feeds” button on my browser. From there, I just copied the URL of the feed (e.g.  http://www.mkingscott.co.uk/feed/), flicked over to Google Reader, clicked Add Subscription, pasted the URL and clicked the Add button. Google Reader then goes off, verifies the url, and grabs the first few items in the feed.

Here’s where it gets really useful: it displays a list of all your subscriptions (to the RSS feeds), and a count of how many unread items there are in each subscription. You can choose to display all feeds, or just feeds with unread items. When you read an item and scroll past it, it’s marked as read. The really cool bit is it’s all done in-browser using AJAX (don’t ask). This means that as you’re reading, new content is highlighted in your subscription list as it comes in. In other words, you could leave a browser window open all day to keep an eye on your feeds – but then you’d never get any work done .

Go and give it a try, it’s cetainly changed how I get information. Be wary of having too many feeds though, try and keep it under fifty otherwise it’s just too much information. Google Reader has a stats page which can help you weed out your unread feeds if need be.

It would appear that Tony Blair will have his revenge from beyond his tenancy of No. 10 – the Telegraph reports that Mr. Blair will sign the UK up the new European constitution treaty before he leaves, leaving Brown with a problem. That problem being (hopefully) thousands of hacked-off people who could have sworn they were going to have a referendum on the constitution treaty.

As usual, it’s been spun that it’s not a constitution, it’s a treaty (in case you hadn’t already picked that up), so there’s no need to have a referendum. We have enough crap foisted upon us by Europe which we’ve not agreed to, so there’s no change I guess. The whole ballyhoo about satellite tracking cars for road charging is due in part from the cack-handed european Galileo project, which aims to provide an alternative to the United States GPS system. Problem is, it’s cost so much, they need to get the money back somehow, so…

Anyway, I suppose I should not be surprised at Blair’s latest disregard for voters, but I hope Brown will have no such truck with it. Bwha-hahahahahaha, who am I kidding?