Dmitry Kalashnikov

I am excited to start building a CB550 “cafe racer” style bike.

I’ll show you guys a couple of bikes it is highly inspired by…

Continue reading “CB550 Cafe Racer Project”

Can you imagine driving on a freeway by only looking at a rear view mirror? Can you imagine being so afraid of something behind you, that your sole objective is to avoid it. Inevitably you’ll crash!

Now imagine a professional race car driver who is focusing not only on what’s in front but also what is ahead many turns from now. He is making long-term decisions about what lane to be in, when to break and accelerate to achieve the fastest possible lap time and stay in control:

Meta-program is a higher level (in abstraction) pattern of thinking that guides the thought process itself. Essentially every decision we make is based on two criteria:

1. To move away from some (perceived) pain.
2. To move toward some (perceived) pleasure.

Whatever you focus on, whatever you shine your attention on is what you’ll see in the World. Attention is selective and is completely biased by your memories, interests and other factors — you only see what you choose to see.

Continue reading ““Away From” vs. “Toward” Meta Program”

A long time ago, when I first moved to US, the very first thing I remember that was really odd to me is the way milk tasted: it tasted like water and didn’t go bad. Most people here are made to believe skim milk is actually good for you. Pretty much all milk you can buy at the grocery stores (including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, QFC … and others), including the most expensive “Organic” kind is crap. Sorry. Read on …

What:

• Real milk comes from old-fashion bread cows such as Jerseys, Guernseys, Red Devons, Brown Swiss or older genetic lines of Holsteins, or from goats or sheep. Modern-day bread cows are genetically engineered to produce lots of milk as quickly as possible.
  
• Most “organic” milk is no different — cows are not living on pasture or eating grass.
  
• Real milk is not pasteurized. Much commercial milk is now ultra-pasteurized to get rid of heat-resistant bacteria and give it a longer shelf life. Ultra-pasteurization is a violent process that takes milk from a chilled temperature to above the boiling point in less than two seconds.
  
• Real milk is not homogenized. Homogenization is a process that breaks down butterfat globules so they do not rise to the top. Homogenized milk has been linked to heart disease.
  

Continue reading “Real Milk”

There are no bad answers … there are only bad questions

The Quality of your questions literally creates your World. It determines the state of all areas of your life: Spiritual, Mental, Emotional, Intellectual, Physical, Relationships, Work, Fun and so on.

We experience the World with our thoughts. Our perception of Reality it skewed by many things. We never see things as they really are. I’ll go so far as to say nothing in the World even comes into existence until you observe it.

Thinking is nothing more than a process of asking a question and coming up with an answer. Questions are interesting because they impose a frame within which you attempt to answer them. Questions are like railroads tracks — they have presuppositions. Questions guide our awareness and thinking process.

Continue reading “Asking Questions”

Intro

Let me backtrack a bit a give you an overview of what this post is all about. My whole life I’ve been asking myself questions like:

• what is success?
  
• what makes people successful?
• what is my purpose here?
• how can I go after things I desire and at the same time bring good to others?
• what is the very best thing I can do with my life and my time?
• and so forth.

I realized that questions themselves define the frame. By frame I mean your mindstate, the frame of mind through which you look at the word. Just by asking questions you essentially placing your mind in a box, a “framework” within which you’re attempting to answer them. Most important questions are outside of reason and logic. I’ll type this really fast, in one shot, so bare with me if you find typos :).

Continue reading “Best Life”

Check out this vid of my friends and me dancing in lo fi:

Check out my friend Fredo’s video:

Today was so much fun! My friend Kevin and I drove to Bremerton Motorsports Park for a full track day with Porsche Club to practice slalom, skidpad, accident avoidance, figure 8, autocross and open events.

Getting ready for autocross event.

Safety first

Kevin’s white Carrera 4, and my Evolution MR.

It started to rain! AWD is so much fun on a slippery road.

They brought a water truck and sprayed the course for the “skidpad”. The right side of the circle was very slick. This exercise teaches you that you can turn and control your car just by adjusting acceleration. When you let off the gas, the weight of the car transfers forward, AWD catches on and the rear end gets whipped around. Sometimes you get into an understear (car keeps going forward even though the wheel is cranked to the side). If you smoothly turn the wheel get straight to get the tires rolling again and bring it back to the side, it will catch on immediately.

It’s amazing just how much everything I’ve learned from Aikido applicable to racing. It is the purest application of “Stillness in movement”. You’re keeping your mind calm and fluid while things around you are moving incredibly fast and chaotic.

The instructors also kept talking about “looking ahead” and being smooth, the same way in Budo you do not let your mind get fixated on opponents blade (or any particular thing).

 This is where we attended ground school in the morning with driving instructors.

We saw a Mercedes-Benz SLR McClaren supercar at the track. What a beautiful car!

Kevin made a video of the entire event. Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=606632132181&ref=nf

Masakatsu, “True Victory”.

Agatsu, “Self-Victory”.

Katsuhayabi “Victory right here, right now”.

“If your thoughts are antagonistic toward the cosmos, those thoughts will destroy you and wreck havoc on the environment. I know not how to defeat others I only know how to win over myself!” (Morihei Ueshiba, Creator of Aikido)

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” (Philippians 4:8).

Morihei maintained that the real and most dangerous opponents we face are fear, anger, confusion, doubt, and despair. If we overcome those enemies that attack us from within we can attain a “True Victory”.

“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:31)

“The most important thing for a human being is not what is between his or her ears; it is what is in his or her heart. If the spirit is strong, one can accomplish anything.

 You only live once. Keep yourself in the present. The past is gone, and the future is unknown.

 Do not try to cut off all your passions. Passions give birth to heroic activity. Fulfill your passion and that will bring bliss.

 Do not think of work — any work — as duty. If it is a duty, it will become a burden. How do you turn a burden into a pleasure? Live respectfully, correctly, positively, and boldly.

 When you rise in the morning, greet the day with vigor. During the day, refrain from thinking or saying “I am confused”, “I’m weak”, “I’m sad”, “I need help”. At night before you sleep, release all thoughts of sadness, anger or irritation. Think of pleasant things.

Do not overwork yourself.

Reflect constantly on your state of mind.

Approach others in a positive bright manner.

Always be grateful, honest, kind, and pleasant.

Speak truly and honestly.

Body and mind form a single entity; life follows basic natural laws that should not be violated.

Your attitude towards life determines its outcome.

The best attitude is based on respect, boldness, truthfulness, and purity.

Foster the life force by being healthy, courageous, decisive, resolute, and vigorous.”

-Tempu Nakamura

As usual this was a great comp: lots of awesome problems and strong competitors!

I went to Olympia bouldering comp with my friends and we rocked the house!

I am (re)reading a book on Aikido called “KI In Daily Life” by Koichi Tohei.  Aikido has a very deep personal meaning to me and it has definitely shaped the way I go through life and interact with others.

This is a great book on some of the basic principles, such as mind and body coordination, strong will, and power of “positive thinking” (this phrase doesn’t translate well).

Here are some interesting quotes from this book: “The brain is always working while you are alive, you cannot eliminate the waves of the mind. It is impossible not to think anything. The waves of the brain, however, can be calmed down by half infinitely.

When the waves are calmed down infinitely toward zero, it is called concentration. “Think nothing” means concentration or calmness. It is a state of mind like a clear water surface which reflects, clearly and without error, everything and every phenomenon of the world.

In this complicated modern age, it must be valuable to learn how to acquire calmness of the mind which can distinguish right from wrong clearly.” -Koichi Tohei

Found this video as I was looking through my old pictures. In 2005 I was coaching Melissa Main for US Junior Nationals. Melissa places 2nd! Made it into US Junior National team and went on to compete in China in World’s Cup a month later!!!

This is the womens finals route … I decided to play on it and see how many holds I can :)

Melissa won and gave me her Prana hat:

Its pretty sweet, very *very* limited edition :) It was made for the 2005 US National Climbing team to compete in Beijing, China (World Cup).

Dancing with Free and Orbitron (Circle of Fire crew), and other local bboys at club “LO_FI” (Seattle):

Orbitron is freestyling on the second half of the video.

Listen to 4:23

“… great to see release - my man goes
Dmitry is in the circle — he spins and let goes
with the palm on a hand over jacket
grant stand I can grand slam when I got here
Tip the beat, rock and nod, spot the block, till I get off to my forehead
Ya’ll know where its at, ya’ll spin on a hat …”

My ankle is feeling much better! I can finally start dancing again!!!

Just uploaded some footage to youtube

Continue reading “Klimb Movie Project: Random Footage!”

I was uploading our climbing movie project and found this video of me on youtube. I think it was shot by UW students for studying dynos?

After having a discussion earlier today about this, as I was driving home … I realized something about this saying - its just not true.

Any kind of excitement and anticipation make it feel like time is sloooowing down. Think about it. Lets say you’re so excited to do something with your friends on Friday. You have these huge plans. The whole week is going to feel like a month, because you just can’t wait for it to be that day!

Continue reading “Time goes by faster the older you get?”

What do you guys think? Should I keep the stock wing, take it off, or get a little “trunk lip” for my car?

Stock Wing

So, here is a picture of my car (first pic). I think the stock wing is kinda big and silly, but it is functional … if I am taking 90-degree corners at 160 mph.

This car isn’t meant to be “pretty” — its all purely functional. But I think taking a wing off might make it look more subtle.
Continue reading “Evolution: Keep the wing or go wingless?”

Tags: carbon, evo, evolution, fiber, ix, lip, mitsubishi, mr, rexpeed, type-c, wing, wingless

Campusing is a climbing exercise or “move” depending on your style :-) where you climb up the wall without using your feet. You don’t have to be able to do this in order to climb — There are plenty of climbers who can climb very hard but can’t even come close to doing what you’re about to see in these videos.

Climbing is not all about power and strength, but it is sure nice to have endless supplies of it!

Continue reading “Campusing Training Videos (Climbing without feet)”

Tags: bouldering, campus, campusing, climbing, finger, strength, tendon, training

I am going to share some of my very personal ideas on being balanced and staying on top of things. These things I figured out on my own a while back and I have been perfecting them every day. Being a software developer, I constantly trying to find an improved “algorithm” for … well, Living. I can’t give it all away because it’s too personal but here are a few practical tips and ideas:

Continue reading “Finding a balance in Life”

Tags: emotional, family, get things done, gtd, happiness, health, love, spiritual, wealth

As many of you already know my friend Johnny Goicoechea and I are making a climbing movie. We have been going climbing every weekend in areas around Seattle (and further) and capturing the best climbs we can find.

It’s all being shot using a very nice hi-def camera, so 10 years from now when everything is in HD, we’ll look back at it and be glad we did :) The plot of the movie is about us, and is about our training for climbing, using gymnastic rings, campusing and other methods. After showing different exercises, we are showing how they apply in real-world situations.

Continue reading “New Climbing Movie Project!”

Jackie Chan loves EVOs (Mitsubishi Evolution) and owns all generations of them (which is 1 through 10). Most of his movies have an Evo chase seen - watch “Who am I”, “Thunderbolt”). As you know, he does his own stunts and most of he is also a great driver.

Continue reading “Jackie Chan and Mitsubishi”

Tags: chan, evolution, ix, jackie, mitsubishi, mr

People are always wondering what I eat, or if I do any other training besides climbing. I do lots of other stuff, like martial arts, dancing, gymnastic rings, etc. But as far as foods, I actually do have a system that balances my energy.

Continue reading “Foods to get you ripped”

Tags: climbing, food, lean, ripped

Hagakure is a very interesting book I picked up — it has a lot of historical value since it describes life during ancient japan, when the shogun and samurai ruled the country. I’ve been a student of Aikido and other martial arts for some time now, so this is very interesting to me. Some of the stuff in this book is too wild and gruesome to mention but I thought these quotes were great.

Continue reading “Hagakure”

Bummer! I injured my ankle while climbing at Stone Gardens. They just got done upgrading the floor at the gym – now it has a padded floor. No more rocks. As I came off the wall, my foot got stuck in-between pads and my body pivoted around it. I’ll be on crutches for a week and wear an ancle splint for a month.

Continue reading “Sprained Ankle”

This weekend went to Leavenworth again and I’ve had a really good day of climbing. It was one of those perfect temperature zero-gravity days. I warmed up by ripping a hold off the problem that everyone was trying. Haha. Felt kinda bad about it, since we were all going to do it. Then we went up the hill and I ended up flashing some v8 and also flashing the harder, direct version of it!

Continue reading “The best climbing day of the year”

My very first experience with UNIX/Linux was Red Hat 2.1, when it first came out in 1996. Since then, I “lived and breathed” it. When I was in high school, my friends and I started a Linux User Group in Spokane, and later on, founded Toolbuilders Labs LLC. After our business moved towards security/cryptography applications, I switched exclusively to OpenBSD for a few years and used it as my primary desktop and development platform, so 1998 was the last time I actually used Linux (as a desktop machine). Since then, I’ve also purchased 3 Macs, so basically, I’ve been using BSDs all of this time (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin/OS X) but I’ve always been curious about whats going on in Linux World.

Continue reading “Ubuntu 6.10 impressions on Toshiba Satellite A105 S4134″

Regular expressions (regex) let you search for a particular pattern. Regex consist of literal characters, and special characters, also called meta characters. Regex syntax has 2 modes, one inside of character classes, which is inside [ ] and one outsided of character classes. Continue reading “Regex Notes”

Today was one of those memorable days I’ll always remember! My bboy crew, “Flovolution” performed at Big Easy for the RedBull “Flight Club” theme party. We shared the stage with breakers from Tri-Cities, and the “Circle Of Fire” (Seattle). Crazy Legs was there too, but he didn’t perform. Everyone was pretty sore from his workshop a day before. The Red Bull and Big Easy kindly provided us with Davenport hotel rooms, hats …

Continue reading “B-Boy Performance at Big Easy for Red Bull “Flight Club” party!”

I got to teach a hip hop / footwork class tonight because my buddy Shanner was gone. Heard some great news … “Crazy Legs” of the Rock Steady Crew is going to be teaching a workshop at our dance studio (Simply Dance). I am pretty psyched about it. This guy pretty much invented breaking, windmills … etc.

Continue reading “Crazy Legs of Rock Steady Crew will be at our studio”

Tags: bboy, breakdancing, crazy legs, rock steady

If you’re a big emacs fan like me, and you like good things, then you should check out jEdit. Is an open-source editor written in Java that is super-fast (unlike most of Java software that is typically bloated). I am a very long-term emacs fan. I’ve written emacs modes, and all kinds of elisp tools for me in the past. The way that I look at it, jEdit is just the next Emacs. It takes all of the things we love about emacs a step further. Continue reading “jEdit for Emacs fans”

CakePHP is a MVC (Model-View-Controller pattern) framework that tries to mimic the way RoR (Ruby on Rails) does things. After developing a large web application on CakePHP platform, I decided to write a little bit about it and compare it the real thing. Haha, as you can tell, I am just a little bit slightly biased towards Ruby.Being a ruby programmer, and having to make a web app that uses php+mysql I immediately started looking for something similar to Rails. There are many rails-like frameworks for php, and I ended up narrowing down my search to cakephp and symfony. Because my client specified php4 (symphony only works on php5), I went with Cake. Continue reading “CakePHP vs Ruby On Rails”

When I was in college, I had two computer classes in which we had to do a major final project. One of them was on relational databases and another on Java/Swing GUI programming. I also needed some kind of journaling software to keep track of my climbing and training. I wanted something that helped me visualize my progress and help me train more efficiently. So, I made Klimb, the very first Rock Climbing Training software. It helped me pass my classes, train smarter for comps and make some cash on the side!

Continue reading “Making of Klimb, Rock Climbing Training Software”

Today I started on the new Ruby On Rails (RoR) project. Its a personal/business productivity suite of web applications, packeged as a service, that will be released in the begining of next year. I got a lot of ideas for it from Dr. Covey and his awesome books, such as “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and other sources on personal productivity.

This weekend we did a breakdance performance at Simply Dance Studio (Spokane). The studio did a show on every type of dance they teach … salsa, swing, belly dancing and hustle.

Tags: breakdancing, flovolution, simply dance, spokane