MS I.33

I've taken up studying the I.33 manual, using the book Medieval Sword and Shield. I don't normally like fighting with a shield, usually using a mass weapon for SCA fighting. However, the buckler is something requires a degree of skill that a normal SCA shield doesn't.
In addition it provides offensive and defensive options that the normal SCA heater doesn't. I've always felt that the SCA heater was too big and too restrictive to be practical. Fighting around it pretty much restricts you to point blank fighting. I've never liked this, for a lot of reasons.
Interestingly there is only one stance that is used here in Atenveldt that is not covered in the I.33, and that is the "midguard". Where the sword forms a triangle over the top of the shield, which the fighter looks through. THis is obviously not a period guard, since this leaves the hand exposed, however because of the basket hilt it is considered invulnerable. This seems to be closer to Left Shoulder, then Vom Tag in terms of possible strikes.
Half-Shield seems to be working quite well, and I haven't tried any of the other Left Shoulder counters yet. With Half-Shield, make sure you start out of range, that big shield gives them a lot of cover. A good solid lunging thrust through the triangle is a great opening move. The heater fighter has several options:

1. Raising the shield to blind himself.
2. Dropping the sword to trap your blade.
3. Moving the basket over to block.

Raising the shield seems like a silly thing to do, however, an experinced fighter will combine this with a strike into the arm, over the top of the shield. This I found out the hard way :) Be sure to have your buckler on top of your arm to cover this. Immediately bind that sword with the buckler, and strike the heaters arm yourself. Be careful, your sandwhiching the arm with the heater.
I haven't had an experience fighter try to land a flat snap on my leg yet, as I've always used the leg on the oppisite side of the sword to lead with the lunge. Leading with the other leg may not work out as well. When the heater gets tilted up to block, it changes the dynamics of the shield, and what the heater needs to do to get around his own shield. A long blade seems like a really good idea, even if the heater fighter is also fighting with a long blade.
Against inexperienced and slower fighters I've had excellent luck in slope stepping to the sword side, and pinning the arm. This was supposed to be a bind with the buckler, but so far it seems that I end up trapping the arm against the shield, or with the buckler against both shield and body. This leaves them open for a wide variety of shots.
Against expereinced fighters I'm mostly making the same mistake. I want to stand and trader blows, which I can't do with a buckler. I have to attack, and retreat. The retreat has to be on a different line then the attack as well, or I'm in a lot of trouble. As I retreat I have to also make sure that I end up out of range again. My attacks need to make good use of blade length, and footwork until I'm ready to close. I also have to make sure that I cover my sword arm, and that I hit theirs whenever possible.
It will be interesting to see what happens as I continue to learn and master this interesting style of fighting. I'm sure that everything I've written above will change, but they're starting thoughts so that's not a surprise.

The silliness of blaming terrorism on anything but militant Islam

Why are the radical Islam nut jobs pissed at us? Because we're not Moslem.
The Pope quotes 13th Century Byzantine emperor in a speech about rationality and religion, pointing out that violence is antithesis of rationality. That as Catholic we belive that our God is a rational God. If we believe in God we must almost be rational people.
What do the Moslems do? They riot. Hmmmm.....
Ted Koppel points out that one of the reasons we may not have been attacked is because under Islamic law, first you must give the infidel a chance to convert. Apparently several leading Islamic clerics disapproved because Osama didn't give us the chance to convert. See first you offer them a chance to convert and then you can kill them.
In every Christian country on the planet, you can be a moslem and no one will care. In every Islamic country, if you are a Christian, you are forbidden to openly practice your religion. The anti-terror war folks call this being open minded.
The anti-terror folks seem to think that all of this because we don't understand them. They're poor, dis-enfranchised, downtrodden. They seem to ignore that many of the terrorists are from the Middle Easts middle class. They're engineers, doctors and lawyers. They're not poor.
The Middle East should be among the richest nations on earth. They invented the number '0', and were at one time the guiding lights of philosophy and technology, while Europe was in it's Dark Ages. Everything they had, they've lost. I wonder if you were to trace the downfall of they're civilation to the rise of Islam, if there would be any correlation?
We're not the only ones with issues with radical Islam. India has had problems with them attacking the Hindus. They created Pakistan as a place for the Islamic people. However, today, if something blows up, it's because of a Moslem. The same in France, and the rest of Europe.
So why do the Democrats believe that this is not a war? Why do they think that we can solve this diplomatically?

Argh

So, after looking deeper into Req Pro, and skimming some of the other requirements management tools out there, I'm becoming more and more disgusted at the lack of features in Req Pro.
There is no analysis package available. You can't mark requirement types as global. The integration with Word is not so good, especially if your requirement are in tables inside the document.
The one feature that I thought would be obvious, importing a Rational Rose/RSA model into Req Pro for Use Cases doesn't exist.
I had hoped that Rational considered to be the best of the tool vendors, that this product would not only be better, but harder to beat with one competent programmer and a few hours a day of development time.

Working with Rational Req Pro and their tools

At work we're trying to get Req Pro working. This is a great piece of software for managing requirments. As long as you don't have projects that interconnect. And you don't want to be able to search your entire company's requirements for data mining.
Here we are, in the middle of the IT world getting into the whole data mining, and the IT industry's so called premier tool can't do it. I get so tired of the cobblers children syndrome. We can't build cool software without tools, and if Rational is the best there is.... we're still buildling cottages and not skyscrapers.