About a year back I attended a Sunday-morning jiu jitsu seminar at The Academy. Adam has John Will over from Geelong every 3-4 months. I remember John mentioned something along the lines of:

Brazilian jiu jitsu isn’t meant to be for everybody. Some things in life should remain a challenge, and should be difficult to achieve. Climbing Mt. Everest is a big accomplishment, so if somebody was to put an escalator in the side of the mountain, that challenge wouldn’t be there anymore and anyone’s grandma could make the journey. But Mt. Everest doesn’t have an escalator, and climbing it is a big achievement.

He likened the jiu jitsu journey someone undertakes to climbing Mt. Everest - unless you’re very patient (12-15 years for your black belt, versus 2-3 in a traditional martial art like karate or taekwondo) and are eager to learn from your mistakes, and trust me that’s all there’ll be for the first few years, then it’s not the right sport or martial art for you. The obvious upside to this is that you’re achieving something that the average person simply can’t.

Last week I was disappointed with how my jiu jitsu was “feeling”. I thought that I’d hit a bit of a rough spot.

This morning I received this from Adam at the bottom of an email about another matter (the new club website):

On a slightly different subject, I (me) will be presenting the Blue Belts to my students on the thursday prior to the JBW seminar - however, I would still like you to attend and support the seminar wearing your new blue belt.

So it looks like I’ll be retiring the white belt in a few weeks.

I had spoken to Adam about how important it was for me, whenever the time was right, to receive my belt from him personally. Traditionally John has awarded the coloured belts, but I requested that Adam award mine.

I’m very, very excited (and a little-bit relieved)!

I have a Linux server running inside Parallels. After a few minutes of inactivity, the terminal window goes blank. This happens because there’s not been any input for a while, so it presumes that I’m not looking at it and turns itself off. The problem is that I am looking at it; it’s running a Mongrel server (for Ruby on Rails development) and the logs are being sent to the screen as they’re created. It’s an easy way to view server activity.

To stop the terminal from blanking out, I used the following command:

setterm -powersave off -blank 0

It seems to have done the trick nicely. I added it to me ~/.profile so that it’s called on login too.

I rode my bike to work today and used my iPod. Because I’m using the Nike+ running shirts there’s a pouch for the iPod to sit in.

I had a shower at work, settled into some work and put a load of washing on. I thought my iPod was in the shirt still but it turns out I was wrong. It’s now sitting safely in the dock.

Tragedy averted!

A few days back I wrote about some thoughts that were running through my head on Saturday morning around 1:30AM. I was upset, disappointed and Maggie was asleep, so I wrote it out.

I need to clarify that what I wrote about did not actually happen. It was based around truth but the resolution I wrote was fiction.

I chose against making this clear in the post to start with for several reasons. I didn’t want to take away from the impact of my story by adding “this didn’t happen” to the end, though I fully intended to do so later. It was my intention to add an annotation indicating this to the end of the post after a day or so. As it was, I was able to speak with most of you last night and the clarification was given then.

I’ve since had a direct opportunity to deal with the problem directly. As such, the post has served its purpose (in my mind) and has been removed. This was my choice entirely.

I was very happy with the overwhelming support the tone of my post received, which makes me glad to know that the inaccurate views held by some are a minority. The (few) readers I do have all indicated their support against sexual discrimination, which is a subject I’ve shown to be clear to my heart.

I’ll write more about this in the future with the hope of re-educating people that have formed opinions on what can only be described as false information. In the mean time, educate yourself about some common myths about homosexuality. Below is one that I feel is very fitting, as it was the basis for what essentially is a misunderstanding:

Taken from Dispelling Myths about Homosexuality:

MYTH #6: Gay men tend to be pedophiles and molest children.

The perpetrators of child sexual abuse are overwhelmingly men; very few women are offenders. The abuser is usually a member of the child’s family or someone known by the family. Pedophiles, men who have a sexual preference for children, constitute less than 1% of the adult male population. Pedophiles are quite distinct from adult gay men who prefer adult sexual partners. Studies have shown no correlation between a man’s sexual orientation and a tendency to sexually abuse children.

Homosexual pedophiles are considered a perversion of the normal homosexual man in the same way that heterosexual pedophiles are also a perversion. Heterosexual men are twice as likely to sexually abuse children as homosexual men are. There is solid evidence that over 92% of child abuse cases, including same gender sexual abuse, are perpetrated by heterosexuals.

The number of reported child abuse cases have increased over the past five years. It is crucial that we address the issue of child sexual abuse objectively and recognize that this abuse is occurring behind to many closed doors in so-called traditional family homes.

Taken from LOL Myths about Homosexuality:

Myth: Homosexuals are more likely to molest children.

Fact: Homophobic people are unnecessarily concerned about homosexuals molesting young children. One often-stated argument is, “Would you like your son taught in school by a homosexual man?” My answer is, “As much as I would want my daughter taught in school by a heterosexual man.” The question assumes that homosexuals are more likely to molest children. However, 97% of the child sexual abuse is done by heterosexuals. Even if corrected for the proportion of homosexuals in the population, homosexuals are not more likely to sexually molest children.

Educate yourself people, and this shit won’t get out of hand.

The last few versions of Ubuntu Server haven’t liked running inside a Parallels virtual machine. It’ll install fine, but you need to reboot with the ISO image into a recovery mode (after installation has completed) and alter the default kernel. It’s as easy as:

apt-get update
apt-get install linux-386
apt-get remove linux-server

After following these instructions I had a working copy of Ruby on Rails inside the virtual machine. The instructions are repeated below, incase they fall off the internet.

sudo apt-get install ruby rdoc irb libyaml-ruby libzlib-ruby ri libopenssl-ruby
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/29548/rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.0.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.0.1
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails
sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby1.8-dev \
  mysql-client mysql-admin mysql-query-browser libmysqlclient15-dev \
  sqlite3 swig libsqlite3-ruby libsqlite3-dev
sudo gem install mongrel
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo gem install mysql
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby
echo "export RUBYOPT=rubygems" >> ~/.profile
rails path/to/your/app

We bought a bunch of books on Friday from The Pragmattic Programmers. Two of the titles I bought when I was in San Francisco a few years ago, but there’s newer editions. The other two titles target our exact needs, so they’ll be valuable.

Each of the books was bought in paper format as well as digital (PDF).

I’ve got some reading to do this weekend.