I’m not sure how to start this without being melodramatic, so I’ll just spit it out.

Tonight at jiu-jitsu I choked Aaron unconscious. It’s the first time that I’ve ever held a choke to completion. Immediately after I released the choke I thought that I’d caused him permanent brain damage.

The general rumour on the mats is that if the blood supply to the brain is cut off for ten seconds or more you run the risk of doing irreversible damage. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I’ve heard it often enough that I consider it fact. It sounds reasonable and there’s no such thing as too much safety. As such, it’s important to tap early from chokes as soon as you know they’re sunk in, otherwise you’ll pass out.

The roll started out the same as any other – I fell back to guard and Aaron tried to pass. I saw an opportunity to take Aaron’s back and because of a small mistake he made I was able to capitalize further and secured a crucifix hold on him. It looked somewhat like this (though I secured his left arm with my legs instead):

We both laughed about how Aaron had given me the hold and then we got stuck back into it. I had the choke on fairly tight and he waved his hand around so I thought he was submitting, but I wasn’t sure. I let the choke off and checked that he was in fact tapping, but he said that he wasn’t.

I don’t like it when people (usually senior belts) let a submission off before you have a good chance to escape it. They think they’re helping you by not slapping something on really hard, but I secretly think it’s to protect their ego a little in case you evade, but that’s another story.

I locked in the choke again and set about putting him to sleep. He was fighting it but didn’t really have anywhere to go, and by the time he admitted defeat to himself his eyes were rolling back in his head and he was starting to splutter.

I’ve not held a choke for long enough to have seen these symptoms before, but I was pretty sure they weren’t good or safe, so I immediately let the choke off and untangled myself from him. As I released the choke he had what looked like a mild siezure. There was some shaking and stiffness that lasted for about 3 or 4 seconds. I was still holding him at this point with his head on my leg. I rolled him to his side thinking that the recovery position was probably a good idea, but he was coherent before I finished moving him.

We owe Emma thanks: I’m sure his mouth guard prevented any damage to his teeth during brain-reboot breakdance.

The confusion was apparent – he had a really scared and shocked look on his face and asked where he was and what was going on. I explained that he had passed out and that we were at jiu jitsu, and that he was OK and to take a deep breaths. Once he was fully concious and talking we went and talked to Adam and I told him what had happened.

His first question was “how long was he out for before you let the choke off?” This BJJ stuff is clearly dangerous.

We sat out for a few minutes and had another roll later but I wasn’t feeling it anymore. I didn’t want to engage and was setting stuff up and letting it go, so I thought that it was a good time to leave. I was like Maverick after Goose was killed, where Sundown is all like “we had him man” and Maverick is all like “I will fire when I am god damn good and ready.” Except nobody died in my story, and there were no F-14s. My hands were shaking when I was talking to Roseann and she asked why I was looking pale. The whole thing shook me up.

So who’s fault is it? Aaron has taken responsibility and told me several times he doesn’t blame me, but I still think I have to shoulder some of it. It does take two to tango after all, and I was the one who put him to sleep. Hell, there’d have been no sleeping without me.

The fear I had was that I held the choke for too long, but the more I think about it the more I am certain that as soon as I knew he was out I let it off.

There doesn’t appear to be any damage done – Aaron is as dumb as usual. I was twisted with the thought that ego might have slipped into my jiu-jitsu and that I was trying to make a point. Reflecting on it all though I know there was no malice and no ill intent. It was just part of the game and Aaron should have tapped sooner.

Reading this it might sound like I’ve made a mountain out of a mole hill. It’s hard to express that sinking, horrific feeling that I had, thinking that I could have just seriously hurt someone I love.

I joined the Stack Overflow community a few days ago and this question came up today:

What is the strangest/weirdest program you’ve ever made?

I didn’t have to think long before I knew my answer, which I’d like to share with you now.

My father was in radio communications on submarines in the British Royal Navy when he was younger. He’s in his mid 60s now, but about 10 years ago he came across a defense job opening with ASIO (the Australian spy agency) keeping tabs on the radio chatter coming out of Indonesia. This was pre-Bali Bombing, so maybe ASIO knew something was going on back then.

I wrote a Pascal application that converted text strings into Morse code and played it out the PC speaker so he could check his Morse abilities. He could also use the spacebar as an input to “send” messages.

He didn’t end up applying for the job, but he got a chance to show off his skills to us kids. He was proud that I could program the computer to talk Morse; I was proud of him for talking Morse without a computer.

I get my share of email each day, all of which gets filtered by our IronPort anti-spam and anti-virus server (and yours can too).

I was looking around the IronPort support site when I read some information about their online e-learning offerings. I signed up for a 17 minute course on Sawmill and the confirmation email came through. My email client marked the email as suspected junk, which I thought was highly, highly ironic.

IronPort, the makers of arguably the world’s finest email gateway appliances, were suspected of sending junk email? I don’t think so.

Shakespeare, apparently.

Maggie’s teaching Shakespeare’s sonnets at the moment with one of her classes and we were talking about them last night. She mentioned that there was some controversy over the fact that he wrote these love poems, yet the adressee was apparently a male.

This raised a couple of questions. How long has this been suspected? I’m guessing it wasn’t worked out in the last ten years so how come I didn’t get taught that at school? Was I just not paying attention that day? Does anyone else (Mark, Emma, Radford, Jack…) remember “Big Bird” or any other English Teacher letting on to the fact that Willy had a thing for boys too?

We definitely studied them at high school, but I can’t remember if it was year 10 or during English Literature, in year 11 or 12.

I was educated at a government school a dozen years ago, and here Maggie is teaching at a Catholic school modern-day. I wonder if things have changed that much in ten years or if it was just a case of different teachers and their styles or boundaries.

My favourite sonnet is number 20, where the story goes that Mother Nature made this woman that was so beautiful that she fell in love with her, so to get around the issue of girl-on-girl action she added a penis to her and made her a dude. Way to go Billy.

I don’t have iPhoto installed on my Mac. When I installed Leopard from scratch I decided I didn’t use the iLife products so there was no need to reinstall them. That created an issue when I wanted to get the photos taken on my iPhone onto the Mac. Normally iPhoto will sync all the photos for you automatically.

I was trying to sync the photos through iTunes, but that didn’t pull the camera roll off. I found that the application that I needed to use is called Image Capture. It allows me grab the photos off the camera roll and puts them into a folder I specify.

I’m guessing that somewhere along the way I told the Mac to stop bothering me about what to do with the iPhone every time I plugged it in, so I probably brought this confusion on myself.