Congratulation to Ozawa Sensei!!!!

It was exhilurating to hear from a friend that Ozawa Sensei had just passed, what is said, the most difficult examination in Japan, the 8th Dan kendo test. I asked another friend to check the internet to see if it was indeed real, when he confirmed it. I was so excited! Finally!! There were 1530 total examinees over the two days and only 21 people passed.

I called Ozawa Sensei to congratulate him, and he sounded very happy, but "tiring" he said. I bet! The next thing that entered my mind was, I need to practise harder and not disappoint Ozawa Sensei nor Ho Sensei or anyone whom I look up to.

What is RSS feed and how to subscribe?

I apologize for this non-kendo related post. This is for the site features and future reference only. Note that the real date of this post is 8th July 2007.
What is RSS/Atom Feed?
RSS or Atom are technologies to make easy the transfer of information across different platforms. It makes the information on a web site or a blog machine-readable, so by using a third party program one can manage and be kept up-to-date with the informations posts on these web sites.

How to subscribe to a site with RSS/Atom?
First to make sure the web site you want to subscribe to supports RSS/Atom, look if one of the icons at the top-left exits. Some publishers prefer to use just a plain text link saying something like, "Site Feed" or "Subscribe in reader". They are all the same thing.

The second thing you'll need is a "reader" or, sometimes called, a "aggregator". This is the device with which you can read and manage the news websites or the blogs you subscribed to. You can either download these programs, most of the time for free (for example, FeedReader and Omea Reader), or use online based readers such as, Google Reader, and Bloglines, etc. My Yahoo also has integrated feed reader. I recommend Google Reader to start out with. It's probably the only one you'll ever need.

Once you have the reader, you want to subscribe. Simply go to the web site you want to subscribe, and click on the feed icon or the link described previously. This will take you to a much simpler page with the same content. This is essentially what you are subscribing to. Copy the address of this page, and add it to your reader. Now you're done! You'll get notified if there is a new post on your subscribed website.

For example, click on the icon on the side bar of my blog. (By all means ha ha. ;-D)

The rest depends on the functionality of your feed reader. But basically it's like the newspapers being delivered to your door, free of charge!

To know more, visit wikipedia.org, and search for web feed, RSS or Atom.