Last night at jiu jitsu our coach Adam informed us that the club has a grading coming up next Thursday. During the class Adam told Aaron that he wants him to grade to his first blue tip and me to my fourth.

The grading for my white-4 will be exactly the same as the grading I have for my blue, which should be within the next 4-6 months. If that's accurate it means I was a white belt for 2 ½ years, which is about the standard that the club is pushing now.

This gives us just over a week to prepare, which should be heaps now that we're part of the (non)exclusive West Perth Outdoor Grappling club.

Last Sunday Adam, Tully and myself went on a 30 minute joy ride around Perth in a helicopter. This helicopter to be precise:

We took off from the Perth City helipad which is near Trinity College at around 1:15PM. We then followed the Swan River to

One of my goals for this year was to have some lessons, and I've finally done something about it. My first lesson is booked for 8:30AM on December 8th. All up it'll cost about $25k to get a private pilot's license, but I don't know that I'll go that far. I suspect I'll want an hour or two every month. Laurie (Adam's dad) suggested taking the lessons as blocks of 3 or 4 hours every 3 few months to preserve the knowledge, which is great advice.

Last friday Aaron and I tested out the concept of "outdoor grappling" for the first time. It's a pretty simple notion: you find some space outside and you wrestle. He's blogged about it already if you want his thoughts.

This was our "mat":

There's a waterfall off to the side, and we were even visited by a bunch of little would-be grapplers (their mum wouldn't let them join in:

Yes, they're little ducklings.

We wrestled for about 40 minutes and, surprisingly, we didn't get too destroyed. Normally you get to have a rest after every few rolls but with there just being the two of us it meant we kept going. The ground was a little damp which meant we had mud stains rather than grass marks to get rid of. The washing machine can only take one gi at a time, and it's a front-loader so it takes about 90 minutes to do a load. This means we have to get our wrestling done 3-4 hours before we go home if we want to be able to wash our gi (and trust us, we need to after each session).

Goal-wise I'm going to use this as an opportunity to work movement and escapes rather than focus on submissions. Similarly, if I get a control position on Aaron I'll work on helping him escape and move his body in the right way. That's what I want to get out of this BJJ; I'll leave the submissions and fancy stuff for the gym.

We're thinking of starting an outdoor grappling online forum where we could promote the idea for others to follow: what do you think?

Our subversion repository today reached version 1000. This means that we've submitted 1000 changesets to the repository over the last 18 months or so. Each changeset represents a significant development on a project.

Way to go development team!

(And to be truthful, when I saw it was at revision 999, I made a trivial check-in to take it to a round one thousand ;)

The Australian government has further clamped down on the over-the-counter supply of medications that contain pseudoephedrine. They've even given their idea a catchy sounding name: "Project STOP".

I understand that they want to reduce the volume of methamphetamine being locally produced, but I really have to wonder if it's necessary for me to have my details taken when purchasing one box of non-prescription cold medication. The fact that I asked for something specifically containing pseudoephedrine no doubt made matters worse, but it's not my fault I'm an informed consumer ;)

I''d be curious to see if by allowing potential drug manufacturers to purchase medications containing pseudoephedrine (one box at a time) they actually reduced the volume of ice being made. How? Because the people would be tied up visiting multiple pharmacies to get their ingredients... so much so that they don't have time to cook up the drugs. Also, I wonder how many burglaries result in cases of Sudafed being lifted, now that it can't be bought legally in volume.