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Combined Skills Course Weekend- The Review

/ hsoi / 12 Comments

I spent the weekend of September 12-13, 2009 in a Combined Skills class.

The premise of the class is to provide students with skills that can help you stay alive: skills to avoid violent confrontations in the first place, skills to deal with a violent confrontation should it be necessary. The reason it’s “combined skills” is because a lot of such classes are geared towards a single issue: tactics/mentality, gun handing skills, or empty-hand combatives. This class, as the name implies, combines these things into a single lengthy, advanced-level course. This is not a class for beginners.

Read on for my perspective on the class. I’ll cover who did it, what we did, how I did, what I learned. Yes, it’s a long read, but it’s a good one chock full of information. Note this is all coming from memory after two hard and exhausting days of working, so most should be correct but I may have a detail about a statistic wrong or a quote incorrect. If I do have something wrong, I hope someone will correct me. But you’ll not be able to correct me if you don’t read it all, plus if you skip any of it you might miss the awesome pictures. 🙂

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Combined Skills – Done

/ hsoi

Back from from the Combined Skills weekend.

I’m too tired to blog right now. 🙂

Full review and things learned forthcoming.

Was a damn good weekend.

To tide you over, my buddy foo.c was in the class too and has some brief write-ups on day 1 and day 2.

Combined Skills – halfway there

/ hsoi

It’s late… I need to get to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a full day in the Combined Skills class. I shall have a full review of the class afterwards.

A few quick things.

  • Tom Givens is a no bullshit guy. He’s funny, but he runs a no bullshit and serious class. He’s trying to put you in the mindset of fighting for your life, and there’s no room for bullshit in that. I can appreciate that.
  • You will fight like you train. This is training for fighting.
  • SouthNarc has some wicked strong forearms.
  • Rain is wonderful. Kinda screws with plans a bit, but on the whole I’m thankful we’re getting it because we need it so badly.
  • I can draw from concealment and get 2 hits in the proper target zone (between collarbone and diaphragm, between the nipples) at 5-ish yards (forgot exactly how far we were from the targets) in about 2.3 seconds… draw in 2. That’s pretty good, but I need to do better. I know I can do better.
  • Even when he’s not 100%, Karl Rehn is still a damn fast shot.
  • Dry fire is essential, but you still gotta get to the range and throw some lead downrange now and again. Curse this ammo shortage.
  • SouthNarc’s tactical stuff is solid work. Managing Unknown Contacts (MUC) is something everyone needs to know.
  • Simplicity. It’s where it’s at.
  • To borrow an old Kuk Sool thing, “I need more practice, sir.”

More later….

Yikes and away

/ hsoi

It’s been raining pretty heavily over Central Texas the past 24-48 hours. One area about 90 minutes drive north got 13″ of rain in less than 12 hours and had some pretty bad flooding. Some predictions today are 6-12″ of rain to the west of where I live (into the Texas Hill Country). There’s been bits of flooding here and there… small stream beds that were bone dry are now full. Storm drains are backed up with debris and can’t carry the water away fast enough. The ground is so parched that it just can’t soak up the water as fast as it normally could…. but at least with the sporadic rain events, it gets some time to soften up and that should help moderate the flooding.

At least we had a break in the action last night and were able to go to the Parish Fair for a few hours. I got to have a funnel cake. Life is good. 🙂

Right now it’s coming down at a very strong rate. At least the lawn is happy.

And… I’ve got Combined Skills class.

It’s still going on. Just not sure how things are going to change based upon this rain. I suspect if it’s coming down there as hard as it is here, we just can’t be doing range drills…. cardboard targets will not work.

Tomorrow is supposed to have rain but far less chances.

Well, it’s going to be an interesting day. 🙂

The waiting is the hardest part.

/ hsoi

With apologies to Tom Petty.

That’s all I’m doing right now. Waiting.

Waiting to see how much it’s going to rain this weekend.

Waiting for Apple Developer Technical Support to get back to me with answers to the problems I’m encountering in the product I’m working on.

Waiting for the updated documentation to be delivered so I can integrate it into the product.

Waiting for the work day to end so we can attend my church’s parish fair. Which also means about the only time with the Wife and Kids this weekend. So, waiting on being able to spend my time with my family.

Waiting for the main event of my weekend to start.

Just waiting….

As long as I’m thinking about the Combined Skills class….

What do I want to get out of it? Education. Tom Givens and SouthNarc are among the best in their field. I just want to learn. I just want to further my skillset. I want to open my mouth as little as possible and open my ears and mind as much as possible.

And if it’s raining a lot, that I don’t flub up my draws too much. 🙂

Mac OS X x86 debugging

/ hsoi

It’s been ages since I’ve had to do anything dealing with assembly language. And while I may not have to do much programming in it, it’s still a useful thing to know when it comes to debugging.

Today I’ve been trapped in debugging hell. We’ve got some code that works fine on Mac OS X versions prior to Snow Leopard (10.6) but seems to hang under 10.6. The code flat out executes differently. I watch how our code is invoked and things just don’t happen in the same order across the OS versions. Apple must have done some major under-the-hood changes to NSBrowser and NSTreeController. And since we’re using Cocoa Bindings, it’s a bitch to debug. Everything that’s happening is happening because of Key-Value Observing (KVO). I get somewhere into the bowels of NSBrowserBinder and it appears to be looping… looping… and never exiting the loop for some reason.

Now that we’re in the new x86-based world order of Macs, I went looking for some tips to help me work with debugging the x86 assembly so I could see what the OS was doing. I found a few useful resources.

Greg Parker at the Hamster Emporium has a great article about crashing in objc_msgSend and how to decipher the crash. I wasn’t crashing, but still there are some nice gdb commands and interpretation of the registers.

Then over at the Google Mac Blog, a 2 part article on spelunking. Part 1 and Part 2. These aren’t debugging articles (more like trying to hack around and discover how undocumented functions work), but they still explain a bit about how the x86 ABI works, AT&T syntax, and how Mac all mesh together. Note that Avi Drissman previously published the same article in his own personal blog, but edited it a bit for republishing in the Google blog.

Clark Cox provides a handy table on how to inspect Objective-C parameters in gdb.

And you thought the only thing I knew how to blog about was guns. 😉

Combined Skills prep

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

The Combined Skills class is just a few days away.

I know there are slots still open for the class, but in all honesty I hope the class stays as small as possible. I know, selfish of me to say, but if there are fewer people it means a better teacher-to-student ratio. Better chances for more direct instruction, more time with eyes on me to help teach me and correct my problems, and hopefully more time on the line… don’t have to have 3-4 groups to rotate through, maybe just 2 groups.

But on the same token, I want to ensure that Tom Givens, SouthNarc, and Karl Rehn all get paid for their time and effort, enough to consider it worthwhile to do this again in the future.

That all said, foo.c and I have been preparing for the class. The weather is looking mixed. Temperatures should be pretty good, probably in the high 80’s to low 90’s at most — far better than the mid-100’s we’ve been dealing with all summer long. But rain chances continue to rise. While in some respects training in the rain will be good for us, I also don’t know how much it might screw with the class running smoothly or if it might flat out change some things done in the class… the weather may prevent certain things from being done at all. I don’t know, just have to wait and see. The way the rains tend to be working is heavy and sporadic. So some place will get dumped on for an hour, then that’s it for a while. But it can vary as some spots get nailed for a long time and get a lot of water dumped. This morning, the town of Wimberley (a bit south and west of me) got 3-4″ of rain just this morning. Ouch.

Consequently, a lot of foo.c and my planning is around the rain. Bringing additional guns, hoping for a chance to clean/dry the guns out during the course to contend with rust, bringing multiple changes of clothing in addition to rain gear and towels. It’s going to be… interesting.

I’m looking forward to it tho. It should be quite an educational experience. Long and tiring, but educational.

Why did Apple do this?

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

No sorry… nothing about today’s Apple fan-boy event. More as to why I didn’t post much today.

Apple’s new OS version is 10.6, named “Snow Leopard.” Snow Leopard brought about a lot of under the hood changes to the OS. One of them is fairly well covered on this page of the Ars Technica review.

Basically, Apple did some stuff very very low level to help with reclaiming some disk space but also taking advantage of the volume format layout of HFS+ and how they can use that to their advantage to speed things up… RAM and CPU’s are wicked fast these days, and disk drives are still abysmally slow by comparison (physics can only go so far). So Apple did some neat things to improve speed and access times, and for the most part it works out great. Most people will never notice.

But in the line of work I do… I’m not most people.

The software I develop in my day job does a lot of working with the file system. So all of these changes that Apple made are actually wreaking havoc and hell on me right now. Long held maxims like a file’s logical size will never be larger than its physical size…. out the door. That calculating sizes is now base-10 instead of base-2 (i.e. 1 kilobyte is now being calculated as 1000 bytes instead of 1024 bytes)… changes a lot of things.

I’ve been reevaluating our entire codebase (which is huge) and this just doesn’t play well with us. All I can do at this point is formulate a lengthy email to Apple’s Developer Technical Support and ask for some help and guidance.

It’s been a trying couple of days.

I’m glad I have Kali class tonight. That should relieve a little stress. 🙂

It’s a good day

/ hsoi

So far, it’s a good day.

It’s the Labor Day weekend. It’s been productive for me, despite my overriding desire to be lazy all weekend long.

I just came in from a workout. I’m so happy with where my martial arts work is going. The Kali, JKD, Silat, Muay Thai, and boxing stuff… it all blends so well with my defensive handgun work. I don’t expect a self-defense situation to be a pure gunfight or a pure empty-hand situation. It always could be, but chances are it won’t. It’s wonderful to have many options at your disposal, and for these things to blend well into making your own system. I don’t regret my Kuk Sool training at all, but some of those aspects don’t really lend towards my current goals. But I envison later in life that I’ll find myself studying different martial arts again just for the sake of studying some art; for instance, Baguazhang holds appeal to me due to its Taoist underpinnings.

But for now, I’m riding a high of everything coming together so well. Serendipity. 🙂

Hopefully later this morning the family will take a trip to the best Korean grocery store in town and pick up some things. Need my kimchi fix. They also have a little diner in the store, which should make for a good lunch. Not sure what I’ll have yet, but if nothing else my default of a bibimbap would be just fine.

Then home, relax, have a beer, and just enjoy the rest of the day basking in the joy of my family.

It will be an even better day. 🙂

Joined the club

/ hsoi

Yesterday I finally was able to get out to the Austin Rifle Club’s range orientation meeting.

ARC is a private club; you must be a member. Membership isn’t difficult. You need to attend the orientation meeting where they’ll discuss club rules, policies, how the club and ranges work. You need to have a background check (or a CHL). There’s a range safety live-fire evaluation exercise. Then you pay money, fill out forms, and at the monthly general meeting you’re voted in (or not).

So as of now, I’ve done everything but had my membership voted on. So I’ll know in about a week and a half if I’m truly a member or not.

I’ve wanted to be a member for quite a while. ARC is one of the better facilities in town for shooting. Many pistol ranges, 100 and 200 yard rifle range (they used to have a 300 yard range but that was removed due to the action bays, tho there’s talk of a 400 yard range right now), ranges for silhouette. They are a little weak for shotgun but you can do some basic shotgun, just not a lot for things like skeet and trap due to the sheer space that tends to require. And the brand new action shooting bays. From how they were talking last night, they’re growing at a rate of almost 30 new members a month, primarily due to the action bays. That’s great news. Part of why I’ve wanted to join is the action bays, especially if they get opened up for regular member use (i.e. not just limited to being used in formal matches). I’d like to be able to go there to practice shooting on the move, working with my AR transitioning to handgun and back. I’m not sure they’ll do that because while membership tends to be on the better side of gun-handling (background checks and the range safety eval help), there’s no question that membership isn’t always the best. Witness the holes in the ceiling and eyebrows of the 15 yard plinking range, the fact the target holders on the plinking range get shot to hell (shotguns are prohibited on that range since they destroy the target holders, yet people use them there).

In my class yesterday, there were about 30 people. The age range was pretty wide, from a few teenagers to a few seniors. I’d say probably a third of the people were female. Mostly white folks but a few other flavors as well. I’d say probably half of the people had CHL’s, but I believe I was the only person that was actually actively carrying. I’m not sure what to make of that. Perhaps some of them normally carry but opted to disarm for this function because they weren’t sure how the procedures were to be handled? Perhaps some were carrying but opted to shoot another gun? It didn’t seem like that tho. Most appeared to not be actively armed, except perhaps one other gentleman who had an OWB holster on… but it was odd because his Glock was slide-locked back and in the holster (when did he do this?). Bottom line: if you’ve got a CHL, you ought to be using it for more than an adornment on your wallet.

Glad to finally (well, almost finally) be a member.