About My Older Site/Archives
September 3, 1999 - At the time there were a few free website hosts, the 2 most popular I recall were Geocities and Tripod. I signed up with Tripod on this date. Tripod was around since 1995. Geocities shut down for good in 2009 after 15 years of providing people a free web presence. Glad I picked Tripod because of the easier to remember URL and it's still around!
http://stickgrappler.tripod.com/
Since then, I've come across articles I've archived to my old archives site that made it into Wikipedia pretty much word-for-word! I've come across 2 books I'm aware of which lists my Tripod site in their Bibliography. Various forums post links to my archives in their discussions. I'm deeply honored! My archives served its purpose!
I started my Tripod Archives mainly because I wanted to put all these various great posts by instructors about techniques/concepts/styles/history into one location for easy reference for myself. Since I was going to do it, I may as well do it right and share with the Net.
About This Site/Blog
I didn't originally jump on the blogging bandwagon as it started out as mostly people posting stuff about themselves like an electronic diary. I was turned off by it as I'm not an interesting person. I kept chugging along and worked on my Archives until I maxed out on the free allotment of 20mb from Tripod. I made a second Tripod site and started working on it. I violated the Terms of Service and they deleted that site.
June 2006 - I looked at blogging platforms and noticed they had a "Tags" feature. This seemed perfect for my needs. I signed up with Blogspot as it seemed easy to use. But at the time the features did not include "Labels" aka "Tags" where it would make it easy to cross-reference the information I was archiving. It had a built-in search function, the links to the entries were automatically generated, instead of my manual HTML posting like on the Archives. So I had the site/blog but didn't get active on it until I noticed the Labels feature was implemented.
There were times I was actively posting new content and there were times where I languished ... busy with Real Life. But as of this writing, Jan 22, 2013, I am endeavoring to post at least once a day.
About Me
I am but a beginner in the martial arts. I started when I was about 10 years old, have been in and out of training since then (more off than on). As of this writing (Jan 2013), I'm 48 years old, I've been married for 17 years and have 3 children (2 princesses and a prince aged 14, 11, and 9 respectively). I am predominately into the Filipino Martial Arts (primarily Dog Brothers Martial Arts) and have a Jeet Kune Do Concepts philosophy mindset. I am mostly interested in self-defense.
I am not an instructor and have no inclination to be an instructor except to teach my children some basics of awareness and avoidance, and if need be, dealing with violence for their self-defense needs. I understand that a student's learning at some point will hit a wall and in order for that student to progress, they take up teaching. I am not qualified to teach so I won't take up teaching. I just want to learn enough to take care of myself and pass that onto to my wife and children. I have no desire to earn a living by propagating a style/system, nor come up with my own system and teach it for pay.
I am not out to sell you anything. I have no financial incentive to start this site. I have no products I'm marketing. I am not out to make money from this site. Because of these reasons, some parts of this site may not look like a "professionally designed" website. To keep this as low-cost as possible to me, I have used various free resources from the Internet e.g. free picture hosting. At times, those free resources may have met the free monthly quota allotment of bandwidth and my pictures/files/etc may become unavailable until the next month. My sincerest apologies in advance should that happen. Please contact me should if it does happen and I'll look into rectifying it.
For a little more about me, please check out:
http://www.stickgrappler.net/2006/06/who-am-i-or-wtf-is-stickgrappler.html
http://www.stickgrappler.net/2006/09/i-will-always-remember-91101.html
Very truly yours in the Martial Arts and Self-Defense,
~Stickgrappler
