[The Most Loathed]

Challenge 2 already of my return. I'm not ready. So, I'm going to keep most of what last challenge was because it's what I need right now. So, I'm going to be boring and do the same things again, because they aren't done. Plus, the things I'm actually working on are, in fact, boring.

 

My BJJ is boring. That's on purpose and it's how I like it. If you roll with me, unless you're on a totally different level than me, it will start with me getting a take down. Then I'll likely leg weave pass or tripod pass with an underhook (pray it is the former). Then I'll look to take mount. From mount I'll put your arm over your head wrap my arms around your neck and arm and you'll tap. I may get derailed from the path from time to time but I'll come right back to it every time. Which brings me to my first focus.

Submission

 

I'm continuing to push my submission game in BJJ. I'm decent (for my experience) at controlling the roll but I don't take enough submissions of off people so I'm committing to honing this craft. I attack submissions now and I'm refining my skills. I will be know as a life taker and heart breaker. 

 

I've been a remote work since 2019 and I love it but I felt the need to prove that I was spending the amount of time I needed to on work and I felt the need to differentiate my work and home life. To not allow the thing to happen where I'm just never not working. So I got into tracking my time. I also got out of the habit of any kind of journaling. So I'm going to try and keep the former and bring back the latter.

Documentation

Personal - try and get in here and just jot down a few selfish, journally thoughts. 

Professional - keep up my time track but try to investigate the Work Admin slush fund I have set up. Figure out what I'm doing in that time. 

BJJ - Last challenge I got in the habit of recording my submissions for a class and writing down the lesson and found it really valuable. I'm going to keep that up. 

 

Mobility

I had mixed success last challenge with working on my mobility so back at it. Initially, let's say 15 minutes x 4 times/week is the goal.

 

 

[The Most Loathed]

Last Week

• Monday - Rest - had a cold
• Tuesday - Rest - had a cold
• Wednesday
  • Gym - Rest - I thought I'd be back at the gym by now but no way
  • Guitar - took my lesson virtual so as to not get my teach sick plus I needed to be back home for ...
  • Hosting - I had a former manager and his wife over for dinner and games. Now, you'll see above that I've been sick. I tried to wave them off in a very Minnesota way, "I'm fine but if you don't want to get sick, we should skip." Well they wouldn't miss it for the world so I made dinner and taught them Power Grid. A better man than me would have just forced the postponement.
• Thursday - Rest
• Friday - BJJ no gi - went fine for first class back
• Saturday - chores
• Sunday - Akagi - I went light but it's never easy

Last week was a bit of a mess as I had a pretty ugly cold for most of it and had some trouble with an overstretched muscle that had me limping around the first part of the week. I'm so happy to see it in the rear view mirror but I'm definitely not 100% yet

 

This Week

• Monday - BJJ (Marathon Roll) & BJJ study
• Tuesday - Rec & Marathon Roll
• Wednesday - BJJ & Assisted Stretch
• Thursday - Rec & Doctor & BJJ Study
• Friday - BJJ
• Saturday - Rec & Chores
• Sunday - Akagi

BJJ Today - Marathon Roll

The first week of the month is brutal. Many of the noon people never go to Marathon Roll on Tuesday night so that Monday we do Marathon at noon meaning, I roll at Akagi then Marathon on Monday then Marathon on Tuesday. I usually take a bonus nap on Thursday these weeks. This is that week.

I could tell I was not 100% today. My recovery sucked and there were times I had to suck wind. However, my jiujitsu was on point. I didn't roll with the blackbelts but among the blue belts I only took submissions. But I don't usually find myself looking at the clock and I was looking at it 20 minutes in today. 

 

To the best of memory

• Rob (blue) - Rob is the easiest blue belt roll for me so they hardly count. I have to make up challenges for myself with him. I think I took two strangles, a belly down arm bar and one other sub off him in the first round
• Joe (blue) - newly promoted, this was my first blue on blue roll with Joe. I never got a sub on him. I got mounted and he managed to sweep. I fought all the way back to mount but time was up
• Ken (blue) - Only an armbar . I stayed on the attack and he definitely had more energy than me but I never gave him time. My favorite armbar is nasty because I set it up as a kimura and really lock it in, almost making it a compression lock (bicep slicer) before I extend it. 
• Alex (blue) - I had good control but no taps
• Tim (blue) - Tim is so small compared to me but he is strong, fast, and has great balance. No subs were traded. Early on I gave him my back mostly out of boredom and cockiness. He was sure he had me and I just slowly started escaping until I dumped him forward and took top
• Bradley (white) - I forget the details but pretty sure I pulled one and maybe two taps off of him. Let's call it one.
• Rob-again (blue) - this is where I had already started to run out of training partners. This is the problem with being big and working on submissions specifically. I had Rob start in side control top, fought up, tapped him, reset. I believe I got two taps but had to fight up to get there. 
• Xavier (blue) - two taps if I recall. He's a super nice guy and small so I try to roll light with him but I know it's frustrating for him. He's a good sport
• Finn (white) - this is where I got desperate  for partners. I like Finn as a dude but he's in his 60s and out of shape. I was just trying to not take a round off. I gave him any position he wanted and all he had to do is keep me down. Once I took top, we reset. We reset three time
• Rob-rep-again (blue) - this time I gave him back control. I tapped him two more times.

 

Approx taps: Given: 0, Taken ~12

This seems like a great ratio but I'm not happy with it. This are all forgone conclusion taps. I need to be tapping Alex, Tim, and Joe. There are two keys, I think, to this. First. I need to get more effective outside of my two favorites: kimura and arm triangle. I should be about to unlock some new submission on my 4 x 4 video to help with that. The second secret is that all three of those are super high energy rollers who take rounds off because they can't sustain their pace. I need to learn how to pin them down regardless. I sincely believe that in a 15 minute match they'd eventually beg me to tap them because they'd gas but none of my matches are that long. I need to be more effective in 5 minutes. 

 

Outro

Bringing back and old favorite I haven't listened to enough lately. 

 

[The Most Loathed]

Oh, I almost forgot

BJJ study tonight

I wrapped up video 4 which is the finishing details on the arm triangle (kata gatame). I already have some details I need to go back and revisit but those will be for another time. I think that Thursday we will start working on the back take and submission series which I'm looking forward to. I'm terrible at back control and this is part of the overtime rules for my May and August meets so I need to drill it. 

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

Following again.

[KB Girl]

Boring is a good idea more often than I'd like. 

 

11 hours ago, The Most Loathed said:

I had mixed success last challenge with working on my mobility so back at it. Initially, let's say 15 minutes x 4 times/week is the goal.

Are you continuing with those lessons? Or just making your own plan for now? 

[The Most Loathed]

9 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Following again.

Welcome. Welcome!

12 minutes ago, KB Girl said:

Boring is a good idea more often than I'd like. 

 

Are you continuing with those lessons? Or just making your own plan for now? 

A bit of both. I still have my work thing (Hinge Health) and I still have nine more pre-paid assisted stretch sessions but I got the vibe that she is not really going to help me come up with a plan. So I'll do those but I think I can add some stuff from my own resources that will help as much or more. 

[Shello]

Following! 

[The Most Loathed]

On 2/7/2023 at 3:07 PM, Shello said:

Following! 

wilkommen

 

02/07/2023

Rec time

Concept 2 30 minutes

TRX 15 minutes

stretching 10 minutes

 

Marathon roll - I didn't write down my rolls and it's about a day and a half later. I could probably go back and recreate the list but this time I thought the broad themes were more important. My first handful of rolls were my tough ones, a couple brown belts and the better blue belts in. the room. I could feel the fatigue of three rolling days in a row adding up as well as the lingering malaise of whatever this cold  or whatever is. I gave up one tap to each of the brown belts and traded with the blue belts. Once I had worked through the competitive people in the room I found I just didn't have any drive to wail away on the less challenging folks and instead I wanted to play a different game. So I started letting them take my bak and forced myself to work out from the there. Once I got free I'd just give up position again until they got my back again and work back out. 

So this marathon roll will hurt my tap count for the week and wasn't on focus for my goal but was still productive in its own way.

 

tap count

Given 4, taken 4

 

02/28/2023

BJJ

New month, new topic, submissions from the back. Today we began our focus with how to recover when you have back control but they're getting away.

• Long hook - From back seatbelt (or saddle as some call it), fall to the overhook side. The person flattens their hips to start escaping. Connect your legs around their waist to draw them back in. unlock to plant your bottom leg to bring their weight back on top. Then take them over so your overhook arm is on top to set up the strangle
• Short hook - from back with the seatbelt, fall to the overhook side, the flatten their hips and start to get away over your bottom leg. Plant our top leg between their legs, keep the seatbelt, come up to your elbow, pivot your grip towards the ground and bring your center of gravity over their shoulder, smashing them down. Bring your bottom leg up behind their back. Roll to your butt, pulling them into your lap to set up the strangle. It also looks like you're set up for a nice armbar here.
• Kick - same setup as before but they escape even further away, mostly over your bottom leg. You have to still have the upper body under control or this won't matter and it's time to do something else. Top foot hooks under their near leg and kicks away, throwing their hips away. . The recovery is the same as previous, come up to your elbow, pivot your grip to the ground, bring your knee up and roll across to the strangle.
• Bonus armbar - your in the strangle with danger arm on top. The go for the defense of pulling your arm over the top of their head. Use that arm to frame the face away, bring your leg around to take over the frame, keep the arm for the submission

Rolls were just to the escape from the back. I rolled with Ben and Ken. No submissions were had but this is good practice for my meets this year as that is one of the possible overtime conditions.

Tap count 0

 

 

[The Most Loathed]

fell off the wagon a bit this week on keeping up. I'll explain towards the end.

 

02/09/2023

No Rec time today. I'll explain some work pressure at the bottom.

 

First physical in at least 3 years...because of pandemic but also moving

I went into this physical assuming all things would be normal, per before, but wanted to set up conversations on back health and get my GP established after all this time.

My blood pressure came back very high 150/90. There are probably at least ten namable reasons why it may have been high this one time. However, it could also be real. So I'll be back in a few weeks to test again and we'll just see. Not gonna pretend it's nothing but not gonna stress about it. I mean, all the things I should do to improve it are all the standard stuff so. meh. Hard to have feelings.

 

02/10/2023

Private

I did not get an opportunity to record these right after my private so I worry that I have lost details

The arm triangle from mount:

• Clearing the near side elbow
  • Walk hips down to hip on hip then walk up to clear arm
  • Same as above but they get the elbow in, attempt a compression lock on the elbow. Head side hip down to compress forearm into humerus. This can cause a tap by itself. This also prevents any kind of a hip bump when I choose to mount
  • pass north south, make miserable until either of the above two work
• Mother's Milk (suffocation)
  • move to high  mount with a good single elbow wrap. For your non-wrap arm come past the tricep to wrap a hand around the side of the face. This allows you to turn the face up. Place your body over the face and keep them face up until they stop twitching
• Arm triangle
  • Can not be executed from high mount. That was one of my big take aways. 
  • Single chest wraps, but take yourself further down than feels natural 
  • Dismount and ratchet down further as needed then put them down

 

Class

So I disrupted class a bit. In my private I mentioned needing to work on armbar escapes. We ended up doing that for class.

Starting from the arm bar in place, top play has at least one arm elbow deep, legs across the chest and head

• Pop the top leg up - I usually set this up prior to the armbar even being in place but assuming my hands are connected and I'm resisting, job one is to pop the head side leg over my head come up into their closed guard. Not a great position but several degrees better than one I was in 
• Hitchhiker - so the are starting to separate my hands. The arm bar hand goes thump towards my head and I try to put it in their pocket then rotate feet to feet and escape
• There was a third specific one here but I'm having trouble calling the details to memory. The gist wast, an armbar doesn't work if my elbow is free so. Anything I can do to drive my elbow to the ground can save me. But I think there was more nuance than that.

 

09/11/2023

Chores and errand. I was also feeling my vaccines from Thursday so I skipped the rec.

 

09/12/2023

Akagi

I don't think I got a single tap. Also, I almost exclusively rolled with purple belts. Also, I've been in a weird mood lately. All week I felt more like escaping than dominating so I gave up my back, neck, and arms to everyone. Other than the one black belt I rolled with, no taps. 

tap balance: taken 0, given 1

 

Work stuff

This week I got pulled of all of my regular work and put on a project that amounts to "everyone wants to know where money is being transferred to, all we have are the vague description field of the transaction, can you do it"? I honestly didn't know so I set out to see if I could do it. I settled on a method used by AI for Natural Language Processing, call tokenization. The idea is that you break out all of the pieces (words, letters, numbers) and see if they tell you anything. Unfortunately, no one I know has ever done this before so I just had to invent it from a mere concept. Weirdly, I succeeded. I built an entirely new way of processing data for which we had no system before and I did it in 2-3 days. 

I ran into a few challenges. My system is not efficient (it's brand new, I wouldn't expect it to be). To run it on one month of data take 4-6 hours. It generates something like a million rows of data per month. In the future that would be no problem as we'd screen for some things up front, cut some things out, but it's brand new, so it's a lot to deal with. The other challenge is that in this process they want me to find a magic bullet as to why these transactions are occurring. From a gross level, there is both and obvious reason and no obvious reasons. The obvious reason is cultural and no one likes it. The non-obvious reasons are in the data. There is not magic bullet in the data but it fits the pattern of the cultural reason(s). 

So I created a whole new system that we can use over and over and improve on but also, no one cares because it doesn't deliver the magical answer. 

Anyway. That was a huge push this week and kept me from sparing the mental cycles to come over here and post or keep up.

 

 

That is all.

Back tomorrow to set up a new week

 

[The Most Loathed]

02/06/2023 - 02/12/0223

• Monday - BJJ, marathon roll 2 of 3, BJJ study night
• Tuesday - Rec Time, Marathon roll 3 of 3
• Wednesday - BJJ, assisted stretching
• Thursday - no training, first general check up in years
• Friday - bjj
• Saturday - no training
• Sunday - Akagi

Sub Count

Given 5 Taken 16

 

Documentation

Poor

As I got busy at work I occasionally forgot to start my timer. For example, below, for Thursday I worked a long day but was so heads down I didn't start my timer.

Additionally I stopped posting here for half of the week and lost some of the details from my private lesson due to not documenting

 

 

Mobility

I got in only two sessions. The first was only ten minutes, the second was the hour of assisted stretching

 

 

02/13/2023 - 02/19/2023

• Monday - BJJ
• Tuesday - Rec Time, Marathon Roll
• Wednesday - BJJ, Guitar Lesson
• Thursday - Rec Time
• Friday - BJJ, Date Night In
• Saturday - Rec Time
• Sunday - Akagi

Goals

• Submissions
  • 20 submissions taken, fewer than 10 given.
  • I want to pull at least 5 submissions off my fellow blue belts (purple belts counts for this as well)
• Documentation
  • post here on 5 separate days
  • Log at least 25 hours of work time
• Mobility
  • 4 sessions of at least ten minutes
  • 2 of those sessions will have to be done at home, not coinciding with rec time (something I haven't succeeded at yet)
  • 1 hour of working on what my movements will be

 

Play us out

BecauseI grew up in the 90s

 

[Kishi]

17 hours ago, The Most Loathed said:

This week I got pulled of all of my regular work and put on a project that amounts to "everyone wants to know where money is being transferred to, all we have are the vague description field of the transaction, can you do it"? I honestly didn't know so I set out to see if I could do it. I settled on a method used by AI for Natural Language Processing, call tokenization. The idea is that you break out all of the pieces (words, letters, numbers) and see if they tell you anything. Unfortunately, no one I know has ever done this before so I just had to invent it from a mere concept. Weirdly, I succeeded. I built an entirely new way of processing data for which we had no system before and I did it in 2-3 days. 

I ran into a few challenges. My system is not efficient (it's brand new, I wouldn't expect it to be). To run it on one month of data take 4-6 hours. It generates something like a million rows of data per month. In the future that would be no problem as we'd screen for some things up front, cut some things out, but it's brand new, so it's a lot to deal with. The other challenge is that in this process they want me to find a magic bullet as to why these transactions are occurring. From a gross level, there is both and obvious reason and no obvious reasons. The obvious reason is cultural and no one likes it. The non-obvious reasons are in the data. There is not magic bullet in the data but it fits the pattern of the cultural reason(s). 

So I created a whole new system that we can use over and over and improve on but also, no one cares because it doesn't deliver the magical answer. 

Anyway. That was a huge push this week and kept me from sparing the mental cycles to come over here and post or keep up.

 

I feel this in my soul. A lot of the issues we've had with my job lately have been tied to a bunch of people wanting simplified, magic bullet answers to a bunch of processing statistical problems and how they're tied to our incentives. Thing is, there actually is a simple, magic bullet answer to our problems, but nobody with any authority wants it done. 

 

But hey, that's huge that you found the answer. And even if they don't care now, they might just as this new process iterates and improves, and you'll be the one who gets to take credit for it. That's really cool.

[The Most Loathed]

5 hours ago, Kishi said:

 

I feel this in my soul. A lot of the issues we've had with my job lately have been tied to a bunch of people wanting simplified, magic bullet answers to a bunch of processing statistical problems and how they're tied to our incentives. Thing is, there actually is a simple, magic bullet answer to our problems, but nobody with any authority wants it done. 

 

But hey, that's huge that you found the answer. And even if they don't care now, they might just as this new process iterates and improves, and you'll be the one who gets to take credit for it. That's really cool.

Ugh. sorry to hear that you have the same currently. It'd be nice to imagine a fantasyland where that's not the case but there's always a little something. 

The latest ask was, could I send a timeseries to some mucky muck of all the tokens in a certain category. I can but there are two challenges. 1) there is no definition of said class and 2) If I use any definition I can make of said class, there are between 20 and 50 groups, which makes any visualization noise. I asked for clarification and sent and example to the request of what it looks like without us choosing. a much narrower definition that they are comfortable defending. I guess, the one good thing I will say is that of all the places. have worked, I trust my peers and leaders to at least have a conversation like that when I say we need to have it. I've been other places where they just dig in their heels and nothing gets done. So that is a bit of a victory.

 

BJJ - maintaining back control and finishing from there. 

• from back control seatbelt, falling to the strangling arm side - elevate your head by coming up to your down side elbow. Once up there then grab the lapel. To arm goes underhook to grab the opposite lapel and pull like a clock choke style. Draw the down side elbow back, tricep extension on the top side. Maintain chest to chest connection
• Set up as above but you catch them trying to switch their hip down. Top side leg gets a sticky hook (toes pulled up) to briefly elevate their top leg. This makes it hard to turn the hips down. You can't maintain this forever but it's good to buy a little time to set up the strangle
• Same as above but they ball up (I tend to do that) so you can't really control the leg, hook your top leg over the top and connect your feet then extend your body, hipping into them. This not only opens the ball up and sets you up for hooks but also can expose their neck nicely 

Rolling

• Rob (blue belt) - back control to escape or submission, it's allowed to go from back to mount without leaving the drill. I think I tapped rob 4 times. This was just a gift to my weekly tap counter. Rob's a pretty soft blue belt, I've got 40-50 lbs on him, probably close to 6 months training, and just whole lot of physicality experience on him. He escaped once, I think, but since we were allowed to transition between back and mount, this whole drill was kind of built for me.
• Ken (blue) - I got one tap an him. I really felt he was letting me work. Ken is my uke for privates so he knows what I'm working on and was able to give some good feedback on the arm triangle, which took several attempts to dial in
• Time (blue) - 0 taps exchanged. Tim is really small, like under 150 but he's crazy strong and fights hard. I thought I was going to get him but he was not going to give it up easily. I couldn't pry his arms away from his body for long. I went for the smother but there just isn't enough time in a 5 minute round to smother someone with spirit. 
• Josh (purple) - I gave up an embarrassing pressure tap at 10 minutes. Whenever Josh makes it in, he wants a roll with me. I had a good run of tapping him for several months but the last two he's taken. As much as he feas my half guard, he's gotten good at shutting it down by pinning my off hand to the mat with one hand and keep his body weight position over me. In each of the last two rolls I have mounted him and made a pretty good go at strangling him but he eventually succeeds at getting the reversal and I don't have a good answer in that moment. Then he pins me down for about five minutes, trying to grind me down. This time he eventually got mount and just got heavy and eventually fear and lack of room to breathe beat my mind into submission and I tapped. The lesson I think I need to take from that is to be more patient when I'm on him. There's no reason to chase the strangle on him, I can hold the position and make him give up the pressure tap. I've done it before. 

Tonight is supposed to be BJJ study I really just want to go to sleep so I'm letting it slide. I won't be attentive. I'm using my check in here to both catch up on peoples' threads but also just to keep myself from going to bed too early. 

[The Most Loathed]

02/14/2023

 

Marathon Roll

1. Ken (Blue) - 0 taps. Held mount but next quite got the arm positioned
2. Charlie (White) - 0 taps. Props to Charlie. I couldn't pry his arms away from his body. I tried and tried I should have gone for a different strangle
3. Dan (Brown) - 0 taps. I started on Dan's back and he was never able to completely clear me. Dan is much, much better than me so I count this as a win
4. Professor (Black) - 1 tap given. He was letting me work so he didn't take more from me.His tidbit was that when I'm trying to get peoples' arms away, I'm going straight up not out
5. JD (Brown) - 2 taps given. JD sees me as a challenge and will take any taps he can. 
6. Mislail (white) - I had been told by professor to roll with some white belts to make sure getting reps on tapping people. Mislael was my first victim. He's much smaller than me but trying to be competitive. He has the problem of trying to do the new meta all the time instead of learned one solid package of techniques
7. Carter (white) - it's Carter's second week. It didn't seem fair to just tap him. He also seemed kind of uncertain. So I told him to take mount. If I got on top we'd reset, he didn't have to worry about me tapping him. I climbed up four or five times
8. Joe (Blue) - 0 taps. It was close. I was mounted and he was trying hard to throw me but I kept mount but his efforts prevented me from getting the tap
9. I forget - I should have one more here because I did ten rounds but I genuinely can't recall who it would have been. 
10. Unnamed (white) - at least three taps. I can't remember this guy's name. People don't like to roll with him because he's super heavy and not very good so he just lays on them. However, prior to this round I couldn't get a partner. I looked around and I had rolled with all the upper belts. The white belts wouldn't meet my eye for the standard challenge. I put my hand in the air, the universal sign for "I seek a challenger". Nothing. Finally I pointed at this guy screwing around in the corner and pointed at him and said "you". I got the "me" points to self. "Yes, you." I gave him any position he wanted to start, he took mount. I tapped him and we went again.

Take away

Based on Monday I was more patient in mount and never got swept from mount. Now I need to work on getting the arm triangle set up more efficiently. It's slow and steady to get those all the time, easily

Tap Counter 7 - 3

 

I have a hypothesis that has entered my brain. Last week, at my doctor's visit  my blood pressure was high. I will fully admit to eating terribly and particularly salty leading up to that. However, I also suspect I am in an overtraining state. I'm having trouble sleeping more than 4 hours at a stretch while simultaneously being exhausted at night and having trouble staying awake to a normal bedtime (for me). I'm going to keep my training schedule the same but may try to ramp down the rolling intensity 20% and see if I sleep better, feel less generalized fatigue and other things. 

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

Did you ever fall asleep? Have you woke up yet?

[The Most Loathed]

 

Just now, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Did you ever fall asleep? Have you woke up yet?

 

good timing. working on an update as this came in . Appreciate you keeping me accountable

 

[The Most Loathed]

I've been super busy this week and I'm falling behind on posting/keeping up. Before I do my bookkeeping, why have I been buys?

I mentioned this a bit last week but it's continued and I'm going to take a minute to ramble.

 

tldr: I built a thing that I have been told they assumed was impossible. But I let it take over more of my life than I should and I'm a little sassy that they are kind of running me in circles to  find the answer they want, not that one that presents itself.
 

Spoiler

A couple weeks ago some managers came to me and said "We want to know where our customers are transferring money from our company to. All we have is a description line that sometimes says the target company or bank and sometimes it doesn't. Do you think you could do something?" I did think I could do something. So, last week I started getting creative. I built a system that breaks down the description into all of its parts, basically each word is now. data element. This didn't answer their question but now I can begin to address it.

 

My next step was to just run a quick analysis on what words are most common, have the most transactions, have the most money associated. I can then look at the most common words and see what other words are associated with it. So, let's say "University" is in the top 25 words. I can now look and see if it is commonly associated with "Minnesota", "Alumni", or "Bank". If it's "Minnesota" I can look at the descriptions that match that and see exactly what those descriptions say. However, this was confusing to people and didn't give them a clean answer like "Our customers are transferring their money to Wells Fargo"

 

So I took a different approach, but still related. I went looking for the words "Bank" or "finance" to see specifically which banks and financial institutions we're transferring to. However, this didn't scratch the itch because the answers I found weren't what they expected. So, this week I said, "You tell me where you think it's going" So they gave me a list of 25 institutions that they think the money is going to. So I built a system to search the words (tokens) and parse which lines are those institutions and rule out false positives. I was totally unsurprised to see that the sum of all the hand selected institutions was 20% of the total. Because I would have found them already if that were not true. So they want to know why it's not more.

 

Well, it's not more because I already told you what it was. The truth is, people send their cash a lot of places. They pay bills, they give it to their kids, they pay their taxes surprisingly often out of their cash. I built an entire system that can effectively decode these descriptions and either allow people to statistically figure out what is in there or interrogate specific phrases. But I kind of let it take over. I have started my day before 7 most days and ended right around 6. I do take my couple of hours midday to get my roll on but I've even skipped over a couple of rec visits.

 

Oh, and now they want it to run faster. I have explained that I can bring down the entire database server if I get too aggressive. They don't get it. "But you've done it once now, it will run fast next time?" No, This is not an efficient process. We are processing 800,000 rows of data into closer to 8 million, analyzing the 8 million to recontextualize them back into 800k. There are probably ways to speed it up but just taking the throttle off will simply blow things up. I would need a rebuild, which I can do if we want to prioritize this but as of right now, this isn't technically a project yet. 

 

 Ok done whining

Wednesday 2/15

BJJ

Going to skip notes here, I'll talk about them when I talk about friday

 

I took a nap in the afternoon for an hour because I couldn't focus

 

Thursday

No rec - only work

I was crashing hard that night. I could barely stay away. I tried to write a post for the day but just couldn't focus. I didn't do any BJJ study. Instead, I fell asleep at 8:30 or 9 while Laura was out doing singing or plant stuff, I forgt.

 

Friday

BJJ no-gi

lessons from Wednesday and Friday, because we did a lot of the same things in gi and no gi

 

ok, have to table this because it's Saturday morning and Laura is ready for errands. I owe a break down on techniques for the week. I'll try to post it tomorrow.

 

Rolling

I'm not going to detail all my rolls partially because I don't recall them all. the overall theme is that I a controlling extremely well. I'm beginning to rain down attacks on them but I'm still not quite getting the tap as often as I should. The number of rolls where I dominate and only get them set up as the buzzer is going off is frustrating. Also, the white belts are scared of me (the ones that have been around longs). I've been told it's because there is no solution to my game, that I just keep coming and wear them down Well, yeah. So they just get in my guard and lock out their arms against me and try to weather the storm. So I need to find a way to make my guard not a safe space for them anymore. 

• Stan (black) - I got, what I think was, a legit tap. We traded. Since we're working back control, I started on his back, moved to mount because I prefer that. Worked it for a while but wasn't getting what I wanted, retook his back and pulled off a one armed short choke. Basically, sitting behind him, I have one arm under his arm, controlling that hand. The other arm is wrapped around his neck, hand grabbing the trap and I pull my elbow back for the tap. In fairness I will also say that when he started on my back, he eventually got to mount and got me with a kimura. 

 

Other notes:

• Tonight we're off to hang out with friends we call "The Hyphens" They each have different hyphenated names. So, when I talk about The Hyphens, that's what's up
• Today I'm buyin some plants for my office. I owe pics later
• I have been sleeping better the second half of the week. I need to talk about that
• just another reminder to self here to document lessons for the week.
• New Zelda hype

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

I'm forced to wonder why they care where the mo ey is going and if that information would actually be useful for anything other than satisfying curiosity. 

[The Most Loathed]

5 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

I'm forced to wonder why they care where the mo ey is going and if that information would actually be useful for anything other than satisfying curiosity. 

I don't believe it would help. 
Basically, investment firms make little bits of money off of cash sitting around by having it available all day should you want to make a trade. When the market closes they quickly deposit all of it in a savings account at a bank. In the morning they wake up to .00001% interest made and move it all back into their cash accounts and take the interest as revenue. It's the Office Space bug but for real. Because savings is tied to the federal interest rate, when they saw the interest rate go from effectively 0 to pretty close to 4 they got excited about what this could do for revenue. They did their public filings with this on their mind. Fast forward a couple months and they found that they were not keeping up with expectation, by millions of dollars per month. People in windowed offices want to know what happened. 

 

Basically what happened is that our advisors did their jobs and told people with big chunks of cash that when the interest rate was 0 it was ok to just let cash sit around but now you're silly if you've got a million bucks that could be earning even 2% interest if you put it in something super low risk like a treasury bill or bond for six months or a year. Are customers, being the clever kids they are, took that good advice and stopped sitting on cash. However, no one accounted for a smaller pile of cash in their estimates for the year and rather then just doing a face palm and admitting they missed a variable, they want to assume someone is doing this to us. Some competitor has set out to grab all. the cash by offering incentives.  In fairness, some firms are offering a percent or so on cash just to incentivize clients holding cash with them and feeling less urgency to move it out but there's no obvious mass migration, I've been able to demonstrate that.

If we knew there was a mass migration, what would we do? Probably nothing. We could try to match the competitor's offer but we could do that anyway. I proposed we just give half of the interest to the client always. That way we're offering them an incentive to keep cash with us but we always get a a little off the top.  It won't happen because people are greedy and see that as "our" money. 

 

Honestly, at this point, I suspect people are just pushing me to see how far I can take this project. They didn't think we could do half of what I have done in two weeks. I think they're just curious to see what I can hand them. I'd be ok with that if we said that and took our foot off the gas a bit. I have other projects I've parked for this and I want to wrap those up and have said so. If they want to get serious about this one, we should pull back and make a plan but I think that they think that doing that will kill the project, it won't. Part of me feels like I should tell them to knock it off and let me do it later, correctly, but a big part of me likes to make people happy and wants to seem clever and will keep pushing forward even in frustration. That's a me problem and I know it but it's hard to reframe my brain under pressure.

 

 

BJJ lessons from the week - I tabled these above for time reasons.

From back control, with a seatbelt, falling to the overhook side

• They start to flatten out and escape - top hook becomes a sticky hook under their top leg. This is enough to stall out the escape for a few seconds, reattack the neck
• Same as above but the few seconds you can hold their leg up are passing, kick the leg over, flipping the opponent face down. you may need to let your grip go but can keep the underhook arm in place, holding the trap. Depending on the opponent's response just take the back again or take mount
• From the start position and the bottom player escaping, long hook. If. you can shoot under and reset the back attack do that.
  • Assuming you can't, use the underhook to stay connected, use the top leg of the long hook to hook your heel in and rise to mount
  • Or drive your chest into his shoulder, keep that underhook arm and plow them to their side (this works well with the kick method above). You want to have both of your legs on the same side of the person's body (I kept going to mount but you don't want that here) . Drive their face and top shoulder into the mat. Wrap up the giftwrap and take their back

Using this toolbox on FridayI was able to maintain really strong control for top, just taking back to mount to ack to mount. I'm looking forward to trying it out at Akagi on Sunday.

 

[The Most Loathed]

Bandwidth has been low of late and the first casualty has been NF.

Life hasn't been bad, just busy and as is always the case, things that aren't in the pattern are the first casualties. It's ok.

 

Two thoughts before I go back to my regularly scheduled day:

 

I can't find it anywhere official but prior to our current snowstorm I was seeing that we were 9 inches away from our snowiest winter on record for the Twin Cities. I'm hearing anecdotally that we got about a foot of snow overnight. If both of those things are true, this is the snowiest winter on record (note winter, not year). It's been and interesting season for it too because I think every storm we've had has started on Tuesday and gone into Thursday. This one is no exception. 

I've gone out an shoveled each time when I would normally go to the gym. Today, as I prepared to go out, my neighbor was kind of screwing around at the end of my driveway with his snow blower. I assume he was just trying to clean up the mess that the snow plows make at the end of all of our driveways. Then he turned his blower towards the house then blew out the entire driveways. He probably saved me 90 minutes of work. Super nice of him. Then I saw him start doing other peoples' driveways then I saw all the other guys with the big, gas powered blowers get out and before long, everyone's driveway was clear. Super nice of them all. 

 

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned New Zelda Hype, well, I am fully enthralled in waiting for Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to drop in May. I don't generally follow video games. I play a bit of Minecraft and watch some content creators for it. I have a Nintendo Switch and go through spells of playing stuff or not.

However, I'm enough of an old that I had an old school NES when they were cutting edge and I had the gold cartridge Zelda when they dropped in '87 (that's what wikipedia tells me the year was). I haven't played all of the Zelda games but I played the heck out of the original then played the heck out of Ocarina of Time on the N64, and a bit of Majora's mask. When Breath of the Wild dropped a few years ago, I think it was almost the entire reason I bought a switch. I played through it, bought the DLC, played most of that and then put it down.

Now the Tears of the Kingdom is around the bend, I find myself jonesing for some BotW. I've started putting Twitch streams on during my work day to allow me to eavesdrop on people playing the game. The last couple nights, after work and whatever minor chores I am doing, I've spent about an hour each night playing BotW.

It's weird to find myself obsessing over a not-yet-released game, knowing full well that I'll play it from May to July or so and then not care for a bit. 

 

unusual update for me but wanted to at least get something posted. Back to work for me. Tomorrow is a special double jiujitsu day but considering I haven't don BJJ since Monday, I'm ready. 

[The Most Loathed]

Thursday Jiujitsu study

More mount attack stuff but this time we're taking the back from mount. 

Set up the arm triangle but for any number of reasons you just can't seal the deal, you can't clear the arm enough to strangle. Switch which arm you are using the control. This frees up your arm on the side where you want their hand. Use your now free arm to grab that hand and pull it across. In doing so, you have now exposed the back on that side. Knee pillow and take the back. Do all the back things.

 

Friday

Double - Secret Jijitsu

Friday is no gi for us. Still working on back retention, this time from the underhook side down. The general gist of this side is quite different than the gist of the overhook side down.

When the overhook side is down, retention seems to be a lot more about keeping them in place so you can really attack the strangle. I think this is primarily because retaining the position demands less from the back person. As long as you can keep control of one leg and their back off the mat, you can attack. With the underhook side down you have to stay under them. So retention is about make space to stay under or completely throwing them off to take a new position (mount or back attack from the turtle). So that's a lot of what we were repping. If the front player can get their head lower, you have to grab their trap and lift to get back under. If they are getting their head lower and you can't retake the back then you sticky hook their leg with your top leg and throw them over and reattack.

 

Armbar Seminar

A guy at my gym follows a Sambo and Judo guy online, Ivan Vasylchuk. Ivan has been trying to set up a seminar series in the states for a while but has been confounded by Covid, visas and more. But he was finally able to make it happen and my gym was the first stop. Ivan's first language is Russian and it's the first language of the guy from my gym, which really worked out because Ivan struggled a bit with the language but Tony was able to step in as interpreter. I wish him luck on his future stops. I think it will do him a lot of good but I think that sometimes he'll struggle without someone there to here. But, he'll probably get really good by the time he goes home.

The topic was armbars. This guy loves armbars and hits them from everywhere. It was also three hours of instruction and I definitely got some serious mental overload and lost most of it. I think I retained two things:

Platform armbar from side control

From a good side control position, your opponent can give up the Americana or platform in the usual ways but they put their hand low and possibly grab their own belt (this is a defense I use). Take your head side leg over their head and put them in an inverted triangle. Put your shoulder on their wrist then move their hand to your opposite shoulder. Find their elbow and compress it to your body for a break

 

Armbar from mount

Mount. Attempt to strangle to get the arms up. You basically want a positions where they have crossed their arms over their chest and are hugging their own shoulder. You slide up as high as you can. Choose the top arm  and feed your same side arm down from their head towards you under their arm. switch to that side and flip your waist side leg so you are in the S-mount (curved with foot to wards their head). Bring your other leg across their face and neck and break.

I think I will see this again in my mount videos very soon

 

Oh, nope I retained a couple other things that bubbled up while I was typing

Finishing the armbar from the standard position -arguably the most practical take away

You want your head side arm to be under your opponents arm. Assume they are defending by locking up. You need to pull on the arm to keep your hips tight to prevent the elbow getting to  the ground. Your head side leg should be over the neck. Always have 4 points of contact, cheeks and heels are first, shoulder blades and heels at the finish. Instead of just sitting there trying to hip hinge back, lay to the feet side to break the grip. When the grip breaks, rotate your body back to the extended four points of contact and hip in to break the arm. There is a defense to the foot side lean and the involves the bottom guy having both arms cross and pressed into their chest. If they are doing this, do the food side first to get your arm into and even better position, closer to teh hands, then lean to the head side to break the grip then finish per usual

 

There was one nugget of how to attack a spinning armbar from your opponent stiff arming you. I can't quite extract it but I may work with some of the guy who were there and see if we can recreate it. 

 

Saturday

Chores

A nice day of doing chores. Nothing in particular to add right now

 

Sunday

Akogi

Crazy busy. A couple of new schools sent multiple guys for the first time. It was interesting to see that the new schools really didn't stack up to the regulars. I hope they keep coming just for the experience. Thanks to the new schools I got 7 taps, 4 off of blue belts, 3 off of white belts. I gave up 4 taps, two to a black belt, one to a purple, and one to an unknown no-gi giant. 

Something I had in my mind as I rolled was trying to start cycles of attacks. Even when I'm in guard, trying to make sure they are reacting to my pass attempts and not doing what they want. Then when I pass, starting my mount series immediately and forcing them to defend. Once I'm mounting, aggressively going after the arm I want. If it's not happening, going after the back and swapping back to mount to back to mount with multiple submission attempts in between. You can just tell from the look on their face, even if I don't get the submissions, that they are exhausted and falling further and further behind. 

 

 

Pausing here to start my workday but I'l be back later today for more

 

 

[The Most Loathed]

Monday Jiu Jitsu

More back control with a focus on hand fighting.

From the back, underhook side down. Back player uses underhook (control) hand to control same side arm and threatens the submission with submission hand. Front player is not scared of the control arm and ignores it but grabs the submission arm across the body to defend it will free his own arm on that side to start clearing legs.

• back player responds by freeing the control hand first by rolling it towards the thumb. This can now overgrip the same side rm, freeing the submission hand to do what it does.
• Of course the front player wants to return the previous grips and attempts to do so

If the leg is ever cleared and the front person tries to roll away to turtle, the back player need to release their grips. The top grip goes to the far hip, The bottom grip is sacrificed the go up to your elbow, the maintain higher head height. Go for putting  your head on their back. Slight hip escape to make room then pull the hip into you to put them back in back control. Bottom arm should be the submission arm, top arm should be the control arm. Depending on inertia you can roll through to the other side.

 

If the bottom person rolls through and builds to a strong enough base that the hip pull won't work, keep that bottom leg in but go diagonal across the back:

• if the turtled player tried to reguard you have to take a big step over with your top leg to catch him in back mount again
• If the try to turtle up, set up a power half to pull them back to you
  • note, I was going to deep. make sure your leverage arm is across the back of their head and your under hook arm is in no deeper than needed.

Rolling

Ken (blue) - one legit tap, I think it was back strangle if I recall

Evan - I think (Blue) - three taps. He's a lot smaller than me and doesn't come very often so I tried to give him light resistance but pulled a few taps anyway

Professor - gave up two taps the first roll. He was messing around with armbars and not going 100%. Similar, in our second roll he was still kind of messing around, got one tap on me but I got one on him. I think he was confident he could escape my back control and let me get to far before trying to escape. I got a nice double-cross lapel grip and started driving him down by pushing on his hips with my feet and got a tap. He did provide feedback that when I 'm in side control and he rolls to his side, I'm not giving  enough smash.

 

Jiujitsu study hall

The video today was about handfighting from the back, which is nice. Danaher wants you to take double cross body control of the arms then feed them to your legs. So, starting out on back with seatbelt. Back guy goes for the classic control and submission grip. Assume front playe uses controls side arm to control the submission hand. I use my control arm to strip that grip. Now his submisson side arm is coming over to strip that, I want to release the control grip and catch that hand cross body. Now his control side should come over to defend the strangle. At this time put the submission side arm low and cover it with your leg. Give his one remainin hand to uyour control grip and go for the strangle.

 

Other Stuff

I obviously never made it back to do my weekly wrap and kick off. Just a busy day. Unlike my first couple challenges back, I'm looking forward to the next challenge switch. I need to work on making space to do things which likely involves doing a little less.  I'll be thinking about this in the next couple weeks as we move towards the end of this challenge. 

 

Super short version of this weeks plans are pretty much status quo for me:

• Monday - BJJ and BJJ study hall
• Tuesday - Cardio and Marathon Roll
• Wednesday - BJJ and guitar lesson
• Thursday - Doctor's appointment and physical therapy
• Friday - BJJ and spend some time with Laura 
• Saturday - chores
• Sunday - Akagi

 

That annoying work project has taken on a life of its own. Despite my leadership chain not really being interested, people have heard I can now do this and are asking me to start flagging accounts based on transaction descriptions for all kinds of things. This week I'm rewriting my code to see if I can speed the process up and documenting what it takes to do this. I'm also socializing it within the team in hopes that they can learn to do it too and it's just a new offering from the team.

 

Laura has been looking for a new job for a bit and thought she was going to end up at my company. Unfortunately there was an interview that left a bad taste in her mouth and she wasn't sure what to do if she got an offer. Fortunately she had an interview with our state's department of health around then. She wasn't super into it since it sounded like she almost had an offer but the interview went incredibly well and it sounds like they will come through with an offer, which I think will be fantastic. This seems like a much better fit. It's also in a domain of knowledge that I'm an expert in so, while I know she can do the gig, I've offered my free consulting. It means that some of the user groups I attend and even the conference I went to last year could be shared events in the future. 

[Kishi]

Man, I'm incredibly struck these days by the relationship of bodies and position. Went over some back-take from guard vs pendulum sweep work and the difference is in where the top partner's head is located. It's truly wild stuff.

 

On 2/28/2023 at 8:00 AM, The Most Loathed said:

That annoying work project has taken on a life of its own. Despite my leadership chain not really being interested, people have heard I can now do this and are asking me to start flagging accounts based on transaction descriptions for all kinds of things. This week I'm rewriting my code to see if I can speed the process up and documenting what it takes to do this. I'm also socializing it within the team in hopes that they can learn to do it too and it's just a new offering from the team.

 

Yeah, they do that. I'm facing something similar, having found a hyper-efficient work process that's rendered me super-effective. Boss wants me to demonstrate for folk, and I'm kind of concerned that upper management is going to eventually hear about it, standardize it, and then push us to the grindstone even harder. There's no timeframe for it; just a kind of ongoing dread, but things coming to life beyond my control is kind of a thing I deal with around here anyway, so. I can relate.

[The Most Loathed]

On 3/1/2023 at 3:33 PM, Kishi said:

Man, I'm incredibly struck these days by the relationship of bodies and position. Went over some back-take from guard vs pendulum sweep work and the difference is in where the top partner's head is located. It's truly wild stuff.

Head height is crazy stuff. My professor is a former NCAA wrestler and drills it a ton and prefers to have top position but I've also seen some high level guys do back control on the underhook side, which means you have to stay under their head, preferably body. He can teach stuff from there but it's clear that he really wants to get back to top position. 

Not head height but another wild one I've run into is sweeps where you can elevate their feet. Sometimes a sweep from halfguard ends up in a scramble but if you can hook their feet, you steal their base and force their head low, allowing you to take top positions. 

 

On 3/1/2023 at 3:33 PM, Kishi said:

Yeah, they do that. I'm facing something similar, having found a hyper-efficient work process that's rendered me super-effective. Boss wants me to demonstrate for folk, and I'm kind of concerned that upper management is going to eventually hear about it, standardize it, and then push us to the grindstone even harder. There's no timeframe for it; just a kind of ongoing dread, but things coming to life beyond my control is kind of a thing I deal with around here anyway, so. I can relate.

It strikes me as very interesting how closely our roles seem to relate. Not quite the same but in the same orbit. 

Early on in this job I tried to make the rest of the team much more efficient by  writing a bunch of macros in a common library that anyone could call. Management loved it but peers hated it. I never pushed, I made them available and wrote documentation on how to use them. About half of them have become indispensable, literally every jobs has to have them or we send them back to the developer, the other half are completely forgotten. You could see people physically resist the ideas when I put them forward so I made a point of softballing the whole thing. I let things slide that I didn't think I should just to not make it too much at one time. I've never brought them all along but I do get occasional messages of "I'm reading your code right now and I forgot how clearly you write everything, I wish everyone else did." It's culture change and it's a slow process

Also related, I once obsoleted myself by converting the entire position into a python script and a spreadsheet. I debated not saying anything and just working a couple hours a day but, in the end, I took a different role and taught my team how to do what I had done. Everyone wins. 
 

[The Most Loathed]

Tuesday - I've lost the details but I took many, many taps off of my fellow blue belts. 

More importantly, it was clear that I was getting sick again. That makes something like 3 times in 6 weeks which is more than I think I have ever experience. That will dominate my next few days

 

Wednesday - Definitely sick. I skipped BJJ. I worked per normal. Despite not working out, I took an hour nap in the afternoon.

 

Thursday - Still sick but doctors visits today

Based on the number of times I threw my back out in 2022 and the fact that I was having some nerve pain I would associate with my disc ruptures from years ago I booked time with a physical therpist

Seemed like an intelligent, well informed guy. He listened, asking interesting questions, then moved my body through some ranges of motion. Basic outcome is that he wants me to work on strengthening my glutes. He gave me some hip bridges and similar type movements that I will work on. It's hard to measure success vs failure but I'll record doing vs not and back issue vs not and just keep plugging away. 

 

Retest based on my previous GP visit tell me that I had high blood pressure.

BP still high. Doctor wanted to put me on medication. A past me would have said "no" I'll take care of it other ways. My take was "sure give it to me" but in my mind I was thinking, "I don't think this is what you think it is." But I was also thinking, ok, if I'm wrong, the right choice is to get the treatment but also do my thing to try and end the need for medication. So that is where I am. That's a theme that will stick with me for this post and subsequent posts. 

 

Friday - still very sick, so no BJJ. Sent a text then waving off not just Friday but Sunday too.

 

Saturday - Chores day. Groceries etc.

The blood pressure thing was on my brain. I started looking at wearable options. 

First and foremost, I ordered a basic blood pressure cuff for home use. I think this freaked Laura out because she saw this as me taking the blood pressure thing seriously. More on that in a bit.

Second, because my personal hypothesis is basically that between illness and overtraining, I think those are more responsible for my reading than any pathological condition, I needed to find a way to try and track and address this. I settled on HRV. I'm open to hearing that this is the wrong call. I'm open to other options but for the moment my goal is to improve my HRV and use it as a guide to when I should train and when I should take it easy. If my hypothesis that my high blood pressure is due other things then improving my HRV should show some benefits in BP. If not, Im free to test it another way but I also need to consider that I simply have high BP. 

I dug around in my box of computer things that I probably need to throw away and found my Apple Watch from a few years ago. I hate jewelry. I don't wear a watch, chains or rings, including a wedding band because they just get in my way. for now, thought, I am committing to wearing the sensor packet known as an Apple Watch. I'll reasses  in several weeks. The likely outcomes are either that I will drop the sensor packet entirely or I'll convert to different one. This was a free choice for now though. 

 

Sunday - Day one of monitoring

BP was 166/102 first thing in the morning (120/80 is normal). HRV was 15, if I'm reading things right (80-100 is more normal). Per my app my recovery was 40% which I don't totally know how to interpret. My decision was to go to the rec and just walk on a treadmill (it was 15 degrees Fahrenheit [-9C] today). My app pretty quickly told me I was over exerting myself. I turned down the speed and walked a bit longer. Then went and did my PT movements. 

 

[The Most Loathed]

Wrap up & Kick Off

Last week ended in me being sick again as well as a significant change of focus. However, nothing is truly our of line with what I've said before. So this final week will be a bit of follow up but a forecast for next challenge:

 

Last Week

Submission: ~ 11 (I think closer to 15) submissions, primarily against peers (not just picking on white belts). I still need to work on what to do when my primary path isn't working but the back has become much more accessible to me

Documentation: meh. towards the end of the week I stopped recording my hours and I did so-so on NF, however, I introduced new things too.

Mobility: poor - I did not do the additional work I needed to this week.  I did, however, see a professional, so I'm excited about that.

 

This Week

• Monday - BJJ - Marathon - BJJ Study Hall
• Tuesday - Cardio - BJJ Marathon
• Wednesday - BJJ - Stretch
• Thursday - Cardio - BJJ Study Hall
• Friday  - BJJ 
• Saturday - Chores - Hosting
• Sunday - Akagi 

Submissions - Let's go for 20 this week. There's no reason I can't

Documentation - I'm going to let work documentation slide. This week will be about testing and recording BP and HRV daily

Mobility - This week my goal if 5x my assigned glute strengthening stuff from my PT. Extra Credit for looking into Supple Leopard and Deskboard for more glute stuff.