Sunday Morning Tai Chi - reverse breathing

One of my favorite technological activities is Tai Chi. I've been studying with my current teacher in Pittsburgh for about 20 years. It's interesting to see both how people change and how attitudes/styles of teaching change over that period. But more importantly, what things remain the same. The Tai Chi.

One of the more interesting aspects of Tai Chi is reverse breathing. Studying this assumes that you've studied breathing at all, and have internalized it into your practice in a big way. This is generally referred to as abdominal breathing, focusing on the abdomen as the principal breathing muscle, and on the abdomen (or, lower, the dan tien) as the target for inhales, pooling of chi. Yang Style tai chi emphasizes breathing with movements: yin movements are associated with inhales, yang movements are associated with exhales - always breathing, always moving.

In beginning to learn Wu style from Larry, my teacher, he says that breathing is less emphasized than in Yang. But, interestingly, in the warm-up exercises (which I'll list later for you), one set of four exercises emphasize reverse breathing: inhale on a yin movement (turning inward), exhale on a yang movement (turning outward). Okay, now I've confused myself. Which is the reversal? Time to admit this to my teacher later today! :-)

Some of my Tai Chi links for your perusal:

My Geocities RainForest page.
My teacher's current blog.
A nascent blog started earlier this year in prep for a related (but unstarted) podcast.

..alex.

how about a little Technorati?

Just posting to "stake my claim" to this blog for technorati.

Click this link, Technorati Profile, to see my Technorati profile.

One thing (of billions) I'm missing from my portfolio of new media skills are all the technorati & digg style link sites. I'll be working to correct that. ;-)

..alex.

Minute Tech Submitted to iTunes this a.m...

FYI: Minute Tech has been posted to the iTunes site catalogue this morning. Let's see how that boosts stats in Google Analytics. :-)

Minute Tech 015: What is a Help Menu?

Where have all the podcasts gone?

No, seriously, there are some excellent podcasts out there, some of which I listen to and some of which I hear about newly each week, variously from Twitter posts, other podcasts or the blog/websites related to those podcasts. Today, I talk about two extant podcasts, MacCast and This Week in Media, but also lament the potential fade of VentureCast, an excellent random walk down Sandhill Road.

The outline for this Sat/Sun podcast:

- GIMP 2.4 loosed on the world;
- What is a Help menu?
- MacCast; TWiM’s Ninja; VentureCast?

Go to my iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.

..alex.

Learning Accelerates - addendum 1

Now that I think about, now that I'm sitting at work at my "Windows" PC, using "IE", I wonder how much of my GA stats are due to my PC at work, in addition to my Mac at home???

On the way in to work today, I visualized a good way to avoid adding to the stats inadvertantly -- only interact from behind the scenes: copy URLs from links in the Blogger edit utility, never from the actual page. Perhaps this'll not impact the GA stats as they accumulate day-in & day-out. I'll have to revisit stats in a few days to see how they are adjusting, if at all, to this theory.

..Alex.

Minute Tech 014: What is an Excel formula?

A slighly more full podcast this morning, scrunched (that's a technical term) into about 8 min 50 sec.

- Podcamp Boston this weekend;
-- the podcamp that started it all!

- Apple Leopard today at 6 pm;
-- Apples newest OS, coming to the masses and the servers, finally.

- What is an Excel Formula?
-- we dissect why to & how to create an Excel formula.

- Infinite Mind on NPR;

- Jennsbl’s blog.

Go to my iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.

..alex.

Learning Accelerates Itself - GA & this new venture.

I don't yet know what my audience feels about this podcast...but I'm glad I instituted Google Analytics on day 1 of the podcast, as I can begin to see traffic patterns. From reviewing GA this evening, I can see:

I've had, in the past ten days these raw stats:
- 92 pageviews;
- 61 unique views;
- 52.08% bounce rate
- 68 pageviews of the root (or index) level
- from 3 to 8 pageviews of non-root pages
- a peak amount of 14 visits on Monday, October 14th.

-- from this (specifically the 68 views of the main page) I can see that when I post URL's on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace I should probably give the specific blog URL rather than the main page URL. Also, what accounts for the 14 visitors on Monday? I think alot of that could be due to an e-mail I sent to colleagues at work about the Williamsburg podcast from the just-past weekend.

Fun stuff (does this mean much?):
Browser & OS - % of visitors:
- IE on Windows - 45.8%
- Safari on Mac - 39.6%
- Firefox on Mac - 8.3%
- Firefox on Windows - 6.25%

My main concern: how can I tell how much of this is from me checking my blog site, or from me editing the blog, and then "viewing" the results? Any of it? I'll have to cross-check my browser, OS, ISP and screen-resolution (all data that GA tracks) and try to weed out the effect of my own visits.

So...learning about analyzing stats on a website. What does this do? It allows one to see how the web industry is gauging itself, how it might be doing various things to optimize it's collective or individual presence on the web, and how a business might spring up from the need to interpret these Delphic wisps of vapor for the general business user who may be missing some very important statistics about his or her company's impact via their web presence.

More later as I learn it. :-)

..Alex.