Creating more options from the bottom of half guard
Just a few little cleanups depending on how screwed I might get. Let’s face it, we don’t always prevent the headwrap or being flattened out. And with a couple of these options in our back pocket, we don’t have to really worry if the other guy beats us in getting the advantage.
- Head wrapped and flattened: One of the worse things that can happen if caught on the bottom of half guard is to have your opponent get the head wrap and use that to help flatten you out. Stay there long enough and your oponent will eventually free his knee and pass your half guard or worse– get the 3/4 mount or full mount. So, what can we do from there?
Option 1: Block the hip on the passing side with your same side hand. And then bridge into that same side, but also use your opposite arm to help turn the head. As you create space, while coming down from your bridge, circle your arm from the top of his neck (remember, you’re turning his head with it) to the throat. Now, you should have one arm in a fairly safe and strong position. You’re now ready to bridge again. With this second bridge, you’re going to really take advantage of the forearm in the throat to create enough vertical space to pull your outside leg inward to establish a knee shield and then extend your torso away to create more space.
Once the knee shield is in place, you can do many other things, such as:
Option 2: Shoot back in for deep half guard
Option 3: Pull half guard foot through and onto opponent’s hip for open guard or possibly closed guard
Option 4: From the re-established open guard, pinch the hand against the leg, use opposite side foot to push off the hip and swing the other leg over the shoulder for an omaplata
- Flattened and have no pummel: By handing your opponent’s trapped foot to your outside foot, you can pull his leg outward to widen and de-stabilize his base. This can be used to help get the pummel back in and to threaten with a sweep. If your opponent places his weight on the trapped leg to make such a move difficult, you can threaten with that as you push his opposite side knee out. Again, it will widen and de-stabilize his base so that you can threaten with the sweep. The key is that if your opponent has you flattened out, you should be able to simply de-stabilize his base so that you can get back to your side vs your back.
This isn’t intended to be a magic pill for half guard. It’s simply meant to be a reminder that when things look really bad on the bottom of half guard, we can make some quick adjustments to turn things around again.
Going further from my basic Deep Half Guard Sweep
Well, I’ve continued to get my deep half guard sweep on guys that I roll with, with the possible exception of some of the bigger guys who practically sit on the mat. With them, it’s a bit hard to really get in close and under them. And with my knees on the mend from blown MCLs on both sides, I frankly don’t feel like doing other sweeps from the bottom of half guard. But I’ve got more input on that in a separate post.
My basic deep half guard sweep consists of me under my oponent’s leg, such that my body is completely aligned with his knee and his ankle is sandwhiched between my two feet. I pretty much pinch his leg between my knees as I also hug with my arms and keep my head nice and tight to avoid any chokes. As I pivot my body around his leg to get to my knees, I continue to stay nice and tight as I control the leg with my whole body to keep him from replacing his guard.
Now, it’s when I get to my knees that the new battle begins. I’ve got the sweep, but I really want to get to a dominant position. Trying to hold his leg with one arm as I scramble to take side control only works occasionally and on less suspecting oponents. It doesn’t work at all on more experienced guys. And it shouldn’t. I have been in dire need of a secret ingredient of sorts to make the sweep more threatening and one of my professors finally helped me with that the other night.
Once I’ve got the sweep, I simply take my inside arm and underhook that leg. Now, I’m back to a over/under position. I can threaten with the knee through pass to take side. And if he tries to defend, I simply pass the other side by leveraging the underhooked leg. The key is that I can threaten from two different directions. I simply bait one way with the idea of going the other if he tries to block my pass. Either way, I’ve just increased my odds of getting to side control.
Going to 32GB with your Android widget
So, if you’re like me, you may be wanting to replace all of your music players with that smart phone you’ve been sport’n around. The problem is you’ve got more music than can be handled by that 2GB or 8GB microSD card inside.
Now, it’s the middle of February, 2011 and when I Googled around, I see a problem with 32GB cards going back to early 2010. And I really don’t see a fix.
For the record, I’ve got an HTC Evo 4G phone. It came with an 8GB card, which worked pretty darn well. But I wanted more. I hate iPods with a passion. The music quality is horrible. I’ve also got a Cowon iAudio X5, which is pretty fantastic. I love the way the music sounds, especially since I replaced the factory firmware with RockBox. The only gotcha with this arrangement is that I’m also a big fan of Slacker Radio and I love to cache my stations for listening when I’m in a place where I don’t get good reception.
All of this screams for consolidation. And what better platform to consolidate on than my Evo? If only I had more storage space.
Well, I managed to scour the Internet for ultra-cheap 32GB microSD cards and found some for as low as $34. But imagine my surprise when I could get my music on them, but couldn’t really play anything back. The issue was file corruption. It was the thing I really dreaded. Did I get scammed on my card?
When you search the various forums, you’ll see people advise to take the card and reformat it using a card reader and your Windows PC. The premise is that the cards are formatted with FAT16 file system and they need to be formatted with FAT32. Hmm… sounds good. But what if your card’s doing the same thing after you’ve already formatted it with FAT32?
So here’s what I personally noticed. My phone was able to format the card with any issues. I was able to use Rythmbox to download all of my music just fine, except that it was slower than snot. Things finished and I was eager to play my music. But I couldn’t play anything with my preferred player, MixZing. I kept getting metadata errors in the display. So I checked the various forums and didn’t find any hints.
Out of desperation, I uninstalled MixZing and went to download and reinstall. Oddly enough, the free version of the app seemed to recognize my music and could even play it. So, I went ahead and upgraded it back to the preferred version and started to get music again. But then I began to see the metadata errors again. I then switched over to the default music player that came with my Evo and it could play my music but had no album artwork.
The real kicker came when I tried to cache my Slacker stations. If I cached them without my music collection on my phone, things worked fine. Once I filled my card up with music, the Slacker cache couldn’t be read any further.
These were all tell tale signs of file system corruption to me. But I didn’t think it was due to bad media. Instead, I saw something that concerned me.
FAT32 has a limitation of 32GB. Now, my microSD card was showing between 33 and 34GB of available disk space available. That was too much formatted capacity, which got me wondering if the card was simply manufactured slightly too big. So, I did an old disk drive trick and I destroked it a little (created a smaller 30GB partition). Now the formatted capacity is truly showing up as 30GB, under the FAT32 limit, which is fine. And the best part is, I can put all of my music on it and listen to it using whatever media player I choose.
So, if you’ve gone down the 32GB path and are horribly frustrated to get it to work with your smart phone or tablet PC, try destroking your card just a little. Then give it a try.
Good luck!
Pandora sucks and Slacker is underated
Seriously, if you’ve just been offended, you seriously need to get your hearing checked. You probably would benefit from also seeing a mental health specialist. Now, if you’re still here, I’m gonna tell you why you need to drop that Pandora crap and make the switch on over to Slacker.
First of all, there’s a lot of growing interest in various types of online radios. I suppose a lot of this can be traced back to the once popular XM radio. Basically, the premise is to be able to simply enjoy quality programming without all of the bothers of endless commercials or banter. The problem with many of the alternatives is audio quality. For those whoever listened to XM vs Sirius, might know what I’m talking about. The quality was very different between the two players.
Well, here we are in 2011 and once again the war is on. And when it comes to audio quality, Slacker kicks some serious ass vs Pandora. If for no other reason, you need to switch to Slacker just so you can remember how music is supposed to sound. Seriously, I love my music to sound good. And I’ve tried the various types of lossless formats when I rip my albums. But in the end, I always tend to settle back on the highest quality MP3 I can get, simply because even with 20TB+ of storage space in my house, I can’t carry it all with me in my pocket. And for the most part, this has been fine for me. The bigger issue has been what I play my music on and what I listen to it with. I hate iPods. I really do. They lure me in with their über cute looks and neat features, but always disappoint with terrible sound quality. The same goes with most of the headphones out there. Sure, you can go down the path of getting the latest Bose noise canceling headphones, but when you actually get to hear your music on superior ones, costing half the price, you’ll want to slit your wrist. Well, why should your station be different? The sound quality ought to be important to you or you really need to stop reading this.
The second major reason you really need to make the switch is portability. Let’s face it, we’re not so connected that we don’t worry about being without coverage. Right? Have you experienced any dropped calls recently? Have you been where you couldn’t get onto a hot spot? Sure. It happens all the time. Now imagine if it happens while you’re driving. I know, I know, I’m just talking crazy talk now.
Well, Slacker allows you to actually cache up to 20 stations on your mobile device, assuming it’s an iPod Touch, iPhone, Android phone or something else that’s newer than 5 years old. Caching these stations mean you can be completely without Internet access and still be able to listen to your high quality Slacker Radio without skips or anything like that. Hmm… it’s just like you ripped the music and stored it all locally. The big difference is that you didn’t have to actually go and buy all of that music.
But what about ease of use? After all, Pandora people will tell you how easy it is to start using it. Bullshit! You start by entering a couple of artists you like and it will try to create a custom radio station from that. Well, I happen to like some Slipknot songs. It doesn’t mean I want to listen to every group that associates with them. And I certainly don’t want to keep listening to just Slipknot. The reality is that with Pandora, I have to skip songs a lot. But there are issues with skipping. First of all, you can only skip up to 12 times per day with their basic service. And if you upgrade to Pandora One for $36/year, you can skip up to 6 songs per hour. Or you can follow the directions from their expert Customer Support and change channels if you need to skip more than that. And if I’m not mistaken, you can only listen to something like 40 hours of music per month with their free service. Not such a great thing if you like to listen to your music at work and also happen to work more than 40 hours in a month. I tend to work 100+ hours per week. I’d only be able to enjoy music a few days per month like that.
Well, I have friends who have simply spent hundreds of hours trying to fine-tune their Pandora stations. I tried to do the same thing and finally settled on using the Quick Mix feature. It’s okay, but I still find myself skipping a lot more than I’m allowed.
With Slacker, you simply click on a station according to your favorite genres– sort of like how regular radio works. But then you can click on “edit” and mark the various artists and songs you like and/or dislike. Or you can click on the button to create a station, just like with Pandora. But rather than having to skip past the artists and songs you don’t like, with this feature on Slacker you can get a list of everything and simply toggle the like/disklike flag. Do it all at once without having to listen to annoying songs or hitting your skip limit.
Once you’ve created or edited the ideal station, you can publish your station and share it with your friends and others. And seriously, if you start sharing Slacker Radio with others, they will be your friends, even if they previously hated your guts or posted “kick me” notes on your back– especially if you’re the one who saves them from looking like an idiot, raving about Pandora.
So, what are you waiting for? Go to Slacker and start listening today. You can thank me later.
