Interests and Hobbies

Besides my photography and design in the design portfolio which you can also find on my DeviantArt page, I have many other passions and interests.

My foremost passion is the training of self-defense. I have been practicing martial arts since 2000, starting out in Tang Soo Do, forming the Martial Arts Club at BSU, training in mixed martial arts, and now currently training in combatives and self-defense. The Path of Protection site and the accompanying thesis were created for my honors project on improving self-defense training. I like to focus on realistic self-defense skills, modern physical conditioning combined with bringing back the missing spirituality and morality to the martial arts. You can see some of what our group does in my combatives page.

During my training in the martial arts, I became an firm believer in kettlebells, the russian strength training tool. You can learn more about them and Pavel Tsatsouline at DragonDoor.com.

I've also become a part time practioner of parkour, and you can look me up as Uroscion on AmericanParkour.com

I'm interested in many other aspects of programming and computer science. Besides my tech blog, I edit wikipedia and freebase (as uroscion of course). I became interested in computer science as a natural progression of my hobby of playing computer games. Hence you can find me on Steam and that's why I keep avid watch on Gamespy for some of the best technology news out there.

I'm a voracious reader of fantasy literature (and other things), you can see a complete list of all the books I've ever read here, along with other interesting data-tables I keep around, including a vocabulary list and a random word of the day.