Seeing your up alias reminded me of a bash function I setup a while ago also called up. I use it to simulate doing cd .. n number of times. e.g. up 5 would go up 5 directory levels.
up ()
{
local levels;
local i;
[[ -z "$1" ]] && levels=1 || levels="$1";
for ((i=0; i<levels; i++))
do
cd ../;
done
}
It's probably the smallest, yet most convenient thing I've setup on my machines. Especially so if you work in languages with lots of nested subdirectories (like Java).