Editor's Corner

Welcome to the fall edition of USAF Aikido News. I hope you had a terrific summer. We want to thank all of you who attended summer camp for making the trip to southern New Jersey this year. It was a wonderful week, and we recieved such great feedback from so many people about their positive experiences. We truly appreciate all of your efforts in coming to camp for either a day, a half-week, or the full week. We look forward to seeing you again next year, and will keep you posted as those plans progress.

As you will notice, I have presented the seminar photos in a different way for this edition. Since I create this newsletter in straight html code and I do not use a program, the process of formatting and coding all the seminar pictures in the past has been very arduous and time consuming. But this time I think I found a wonderful solution, and I hope you enjoy the new method by which these photos are displayed. Thanks to the help of Kjartan Clausen from Aikido of Park Slope, I now use "jalbum", which is a simple way of creating and presenting photo albums. I am still getting to know the program, but I think it's a much nicer way to view the pictures, and a much easier way for me to prepare them! Please let me know what you think.

I would like to use this opportunity to clarify a few details about Hombu's promotion regulations. A very important fact is that they will not pre-date a promotion. They record the date of your test as the date they received your application, which means that if you hold off mailing it to me then you will lose the time towards your next rank. I am mailing the forms to Japan about once a month, so that should not effect you. But several people wait a year or more to send in their applications. Please just be aware that this will effect the date you can obtain your next rank. Also, a reminder: all dan applications must be typed. The deadline for chief instructors to submit the New Year's promotions by recommendation to me for their students for 2009 is October 15th. This is for 5th dan or higher. Shodan through yondan can be sent to Homnbu throughout the year. Any of the higher ranks will be denied if not received in November, and the applicant will have to wait another year. If you need help finding the proper forms, just send me an email and I will make sure you have them right away.

We have had some unfortunate trouble with the www.usaikifed.com website. Everyone has been so accommodating and understanding, and that is greatly appreciated. Our site was infected by a very aggressive virus in the spring, which corrupted the database and actually corrupted several people's computers when they accessed the database. For now, all seminar submissions or any information for the webite should be directed to either Bob Zimmermann or myself until the problems are solved. We hope to have the interactive element up and running in the near future, and deeply regret the inconvenience this has caused so many of you.

The never ending effort to maintain accurate email and website addresses continues. Please check www.usaikifed.com and make sure all the links to your dojo work correctly. Also, if you are a chief instructor and you do not receive my informational emails, please let me know so I can insure that you are on my list!

Thank you once again to all who contributed to this newsletter. The next edition will be online January 15th 2009, so take notes, take pictures and stay in touch!

Laura Jacobs Pavlick