Blogs

Thursday dawned for breakfast on our first day at WMAW. Breakfast consisted of some sort of small bran or apple muffins, a collection of dry breakfast cereals, butter and jellies (what passes for jam in the US), some sort of scrambled egg or frittata dish, fruit and fruit juice, oh and something that almost but didn't quite qualify as yoghurt. If I had to describe it, it would be runny strained baby custard with Acidophilus for flavour. Thus began our introduction to American food. It was an inocuous start to what turned out to be an experience in the horror that is American food.

Well WMAW 2009 has come and gone, and I really enjoyed the conference.

For the last 5 years Renaissance Fence has been serving the WMA and Historical Fencing community of Australia and New Zealand as a supplier of quality fencing equipment. Over that time we've been running both a retail side, as well as our research and teaching side.

Well, the bag is mostly packed, the fencing kit is packed and the nerves are sky high.

I'm off to WMAW 2009 and really looking forward to it but really nervous. Here in Australia or NZ I'm pretty much the most knowledgeable guy in the room for fencing stuff, or close to it. This event is going to be the first time in quite a while that I'm at the same event with a large number of people who understand fencing to the same level I do.

Here's the teaching notes from the recent classes I gave at Brisbane Swordplay 2009 convention.

Enjoy!

MORNING LESSON

Introductory Material

1 How to hold the sword
Forefinger over quillon, allowing pommel to move from thrusting grip to cutting grip.

2 Distance
Gioco stretta
Gioco larga
Out of distance
Circle of Engagement

3 Times
Before
Middle
Just As
After

4 Movement
forward
back
left
right
passing steps (change stance)
triangle steps (the sideways pass which is the predominant footwork)

This semester I've been skipping Stoccata training, and getting to the SCA Rowany training night instead on Mondays. It's a novel experience for me.

The small core of people turning up are all concentrating on analysing and learning various bits and pieces from manuals. There's one set working through I.33, another set doing Spanish, and me being a general answer resource.

I've taken to commuting to work these days on the train, instead of driving. It's about 90 minutes each way, which is only 10-15 minutes longer than if I drive, but I don't have to deal with the car park known as Homebush Bay Drive / North Ryde Road. Since I'd have the time on the train, I bought myself a Acer Aspire One Netbook from OfficeWorks, the D250 model to be precise, and as per usual dropped a decent OS on it instead of the Winblows it shipped with.

If you've been checking these pages recently you may have noticed I had the anonymous user commenting switched off. Well, I'd been getting a huge amount of spam to administer.

There's a reason I like Drupal, and that's because it's a community that experiences the same problems. Enter Captcha, the Drupal solution. I've just installed the module, and I'll be trialling the results. Comments are still being administered for anonymous users, as I want to see what the results are like first. Hopefully this will solve the spam problem.

OK, so I had some fun running a Jeopardy style trivia night during the Saturday Feast at Fencing Fest. Just for those who couldn't be there I'm posting the questions.

There were 6 categories, with 5 points in each category. I had fun, and people were still fuming about the questions the next day.

So without further ado, onto the questions....

Last weekend I was up in Brisbane teaching Bolognese material at Fencing Fest 6. It's a lovely little event, and this year moved to the Vigoro Club in East Ipswich. Up to now it's been held at the Riverhaven Hall in Lutwyche. It's the first Fencing Fest that the MediumMe Slugboy has travelled to, so it was fun to see him playing against people not from Sydney. He actually did the best of all the Sydney folk playing in the tournament, and bounced afterwards since he beat Owain (one of the Guildmasters in Canberra).