Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Motivation

Ah, motivation...

Fencing has been pretty slow recently, we had a few traveling fencers grace us with their presence. That was fun, and challenging. People here are getting better, or maybe I am sliding back into the morass of sloppy fencing. I hope it is the former.

I have decided that I am not going to try to put anyone through exercises and drills. I would rather not have to restart a dozen times with late-comers, but they don't bother me as much as those who prefer to stab over learning how to stab... A fine line I know. As such I have only really taken a few beginners through basic footwork and swordwork, otherwise I am pretty demotivated.

I fence but I feel lethargic, it is usually after sitting in a chair for nearly 8 hours so that is part of the problem. I also have been slacking on running and exercising outside of fencing, and it shows. Last week when there was only one strip and I was working on my own, I managed to overdo it. Go figure. I have a chance, possibly, to go to San Jose at the end of march. I know there are plenty of Salles and clubs in the area, and possibly a tournament. Of course I will have to carefully plan so that I can attend the conference, write up a report, and get a bit of fencing in, but I want to be in good shape so that those with many fencers to fence won't just run circles around me, or some similar idea in fencing.

So, as a project outside of work and connected with fencing, I have decided to try and construct a wireless fencing system. Being a trained computer engineer with plenty of ready-to-use-materials within reach from the amazing DIY-movement that started after I graduated from college, it seems that this could be done quite cheaply and robustly. I am also looking at crowd-funding, a project of about $500, which at least could be reached by asking family and friends, and possibly a few fencers.

A project like this will need special attention that I crave to apply but get petrified trying to think of all the solutions to all of the problems at once. So I have broken it down into a few larger phases: Planning, Advertising, Designing, Building and Testing. Of course all of these are subjective large containers, but right now I am looking at launching the project on March 9th and ending a month later. I think 500 dollars is the smallest project I have seen on sites like kickstarter.com or rockethub.com. I think the next thing is to come up with how to do a video. Just thinking now of doing either a funny video using real people and explaining the "perils" of the floor cords and reels, or animate it somehow. Thoughts and ideas are welcome.

So anyway... ideas, ideas...

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