Our buddy, Stoney, came over a couple of weeks ago to help us enjoy our farewell, final roadtrip before we sell the bikes and head back to SE Asia. We have had the time of our lives, and crammed so much into our 2500 mile ride across 5 states, that I’ll be posting the pictures gradually over the next week or two… So check back often for updates!!

The pictures below span the first 24 hours after our setting out from St. Petersburg to Daytona Beach for Oktoberfest 2009, via Orlando airport to collect Stoney…

Apologies for the quality of some of the photos. I was using my iPhone, and/or the lighting was bad, and/or I was a little unsteady. More to follow…

Are you bored of seeing my pictures of Florida yet? Oktoberfest next week…

Suffice it to say that the weather was fabulous, no — perfect! I took the pictures below from the volleyball beach as we took a stroll along the shore after Octavia had been for a swim, and I had spent a couple of hours whirling sticks around my head… finally pausing for lunch and a pint of Guinness at the nearest Irish pub on the way home.

Nevertheless, anything different is refreshing. I’d started to get used to the thousands of tiny lizards that scurried across my path in Orlando whenever I went anywhere on foot… but this afternoon I had a real treat when I spotted this little guy in our back yard after parking my bike. Any idea what he is?

Update from @dssstrkl on Twitter:

@gvvaughan Its an anole. A male anole displaying his dewlap. I guess your camera is sexy.

This morning, I managed to stay in bed until 8am, so I think I’ve finally shaken the jetlag. After breakfast, Tave and I went for a short walk along the beach, and I took some pictures so that you can see what life as an Internationalist is like.

What’s an Internationalist, you say? Essentially the same thing that other people refer to as being Location Independent, or a Permanent Tourist/Perpetual Traveler. We have portable occupations that allow us to earn a living independently of our physical location, so we live wherever in the world we please, and own few enough possessions that we can pack them all into a suitcase and move to a new country whenever our tourist visas are about to expire…

We spent the last couple of days reluctantly driving it between Orlando Harley-Davidson, our nearby self-storage unit and our home for the next few months in Saint Petersburg. You can clearly see how disappointed Tave and I were at having the car in the pictures below.

To offset your jealousy a little, you’ll note that it sometimes rains even in Florida. Especially in the hurricane season

This is a just a test post to see how well I can post from my phone, in preparation for the good stuff to follow. And a couple of blurry pictures to remind me of the gorgeous Summer days and beautiful country roads of our green and pleasant land, for when I tire of drinking margharitas on the beach under the shade of a palm tree…

I have often sung the praises of Andre Martin, and it is always my privilege to spend time learning from him. Much like the rest of the population of England, Andre has had some ups and downs over the last year, but I’m happy to say that Andre’s only casualty was his website. The MCMAA itself is still going strong, and it is my privilege to train with him for a few hours each week.

Since I last trained at Andre’s MCMAA in June 2008, not only have I been lucky enough to train with some world class instructors in the Philippines and America, but I’ve been able to maintain some regular practice at Pekiti Tirsia Kali alongside my sporadic Tae Kwon-Do. The training at MCMAA is right up there with very best instruction I receive around the world, and I’m delighted to have a few months to train there until I set off on my travels again.

Things haven’t changed too much since last year, but as my first post on FMA training in quite some time, I’m following my usual format for reviews of new schools. Please do leave a comment if you’re interested in making contact with Andre about training, and I will pass on your contact details.

Training Times

Of the two classes held each week, I am attending only the 2 hour Monday session starting at 19:30, as the drive between where I’m living and the academy is an hour in each direction. Most of the students live in the Coventry area and also attend an additional 1 hour Thursday evening class too. Often, classes run somewhat past the alloted time, rather than skip over some of the material that Andre wants the class to see.

Lesson Structure

My first few years of lessons at the Coventry Jeet Kune Do Academy never failed to impress me – not only by the depth and breadth of Andre’s martial arts knowledge, but with the energetic and positive way he passed on his teaching. Back then, even though I enjoyed having my head full to bursting with new information and skills to internalize at the end of every lesson, this was long before I started keeping training notes for myself, so I certainly forgot much of what was taught. In those days, I attended just one class every 2 weeks, where every lesson covered bits of Jeet Kune Do, Jun Fan Gung Fu, Wing Chun and Western Boxing.

Nowadays, the former JKD Academy has long since become the Multi-Cultural Martial Arts Academy, where you can now learn and practice techniques from all of the above, plus Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Combat Submission Wrestling, Shooto, Savate, Ninjutsu, Kenpo, Muay Thai, Silat, Panantukan, Kali Escrima, Dekiti Tirsia Siradas, and my personal favourite system: Pekiti Tirsia Kali. I had worried that with all these systems to draw from, information overload would become a real problem. But, in practice, it certainly hasn’t. Since the days of the JKD Academy, Andre has refined his teaching style to take a theme for each session, based predominantly on one of the systems above, and then to expand on it as the lesson progresses. While he’ll pull examples from any and all systems, the emphasis is now very firmly on the theme of the day. Gone are the days of: 20 minutes Jeet Kune Do drills, 20 minutes of Jun Fan footwork, 20 minutes of Boxing drills, 20 minutes of “Boxing vs Wing Chun”, 20 minutes of hard exercise, 20 minutes of Wing Chun Forms…. overload!

The theme for last week’s lesson was “restriction training and Panantukan” (Filipino boxing). We first practiced some basic open hand strikes with focus mitts, and then moved through a series of progressively more complex drills adding in more strike angles and longer combinations, and working out how to deal with multiple attackers and/or under various restrictions: What is he’s armed but you’re not? What if he already punched you and knocked you to the ground before you realize you have a fight on your hands?… and so on. The lessons are all the more interesting for this, and the focus and progression makes it a lot easier to digest what is being taught.

Students and Instructor

In all the years I’ve trained with Andre, the class sizes have never been above a dozen students or so. Not because students are uncommitted, or because the school isn’t attracting them in sufficient numbers… on the contrary, Andre vets every student personally to ensure each has the right motivation and attitudes, and also deliberately limits places to keep the classes small enough that each student gets a significant amount of personal attention in every lesson. This means your skill levels ramp up, and fast! Plus, you know that will his years of experience as a doorman, this stuff really does work.

In addition to streamlining his lesson format over the years, Andre has earned such a broad array of experience in so many different styles and systems that he’s developed a knack of re-explaining things in whatever terminology is best for each student as he moves around the class to give everyone their personal attention. I was fumbling my way through the footwork for a Panantukan striking drill, until Andre came over and reframed everything in Wing Chun terms for me… and suddenly everything clicked and I was able to perform much better. The drill was the same, but I was able to apply the body mechanics more efficiently once Andre spotted that I was thinking about things from the wrong mindset.

Also, there is a good mix of abilities in each class from beginners to instructor level, so it’s not difficult to find a partner at your own level (or preferably a bit more experienced to ensure you’re pushing yourself that little bit harder all the time).

Considering the small classes, and the excellent quality of instruction, the cost (currently at £10 for a two hour plus lesson) is exceptionally good value.

Style and Techniques

I’ve already talked about Andre’s lineage through to Bruce Lee, and how that connects him to Guro Inosanto’s system of Jeet Kune Do Concepts and blends from one style to another as ranges and circumstances change. Central to all of this, is the fact that Sijo Bruce always said that “you should take what works and discard what doesn’t work”. The more systems and styles you can expose yourself to, and the more techniques you can practice and drill with various partners, the sooner you will be able to collect a broad selection of techniques that suit you well, and from which you will be able to build your own personalised style — as expounded by the concepts of Jeet Kune Do, and more importantly encouraged by the Instructor and fellow students of MCMAA. You will not find so many styles and techniques taught and integrated under one roof as you will here at Coventry Multi-Cultural Martial Arts Academy. Do your mind, your training, and yourself a huge favour and secure yourself a coveted slot as one of Andre Martin’s students.

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How old were you when you first started programming?

Now, that really would be telling and would give away my age. Let’s just say that I was lucky enough to get a Sinclair ZX81 for Christmas 1981, and never really looked back.

How did you get started in programming?

All my friends were getting Atari games console’s, but I got a stinking ZX81 with 1K of memory… actually a bit less than that, since a few hundred bytes were reserved for system variables, and had to write my own games.

What was your first language?

Afrikaans. Followed by English, and then Sinclair BASIC.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Mars Mining Corporation. After 6 months of typing in other peoples BASIC code from printouts in magazines, I acquired a 4K RAM Pack for my ZX81, and wrote a fun text only simulation for making money out of running a mining company on Mars.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Chronologically, as best as I can remember:

Sinclair Basic, Z80 assembler, BBC Basic, 6502 Assembler, Amstrad BASIC, Pascal, LPC, MUF Modula-2, APL, Forth, C, YACC, Oberon, Occam-2, Modula-3, C-shell, C++, Prolog, Bourne Shell, sed, Emacs Lisp, AWK, M4, Scheme, Tcl/Tk, Cobol, PCL5, D, Brainfuck, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, SQL, PHP4, Lua, AppleScript…

And then there are a whole slew of XML based and inspired languages I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with over the years:

SGML, CSS2, CSS3, XHTML, XSL, Glade XML, YAML, RDF, DAML+Oil, JSON, DTD, RSS, Atom, SAX…

Plus some proprietary languages I can’t remember the names of, and quite probably several more languages that I’ve forgotten about.

What was your first professional programming gig?

My first job after graduating was fixing bugs in support software for Independent Financial Advisors, back in 1994.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

I would have started sooner if I’d been able to talk my Dad into buying a PDP-11…

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Study other people’s code. Free Software is an education!

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Libtool, obviously. How could I not enjoy writing M4 code that generates portable Bourne Shell code on the developers machine, which in turn runs on the users machine to generate C code to interact with code libraries? I was meta-programming before I even knew what it meant

Who’s next?

James Urquhart