Schinckel.net

Well, I’ve been doing a whole lot of iTunes and iPod listening lately, and my playcounts are up!

6908 songs, 20:18:37:17 total time

And, I’ve rated 3551 of my 6171 tracks, or around 57%.

I found this on a site today. It reminded me of the round of ads that are happening on Adelaide TV at the moment.

I’m not big on religion, but what Jesus said really makes sense.

These are, unsurprisingly, advertisements put out by some Christian organisation or other - the point they seem to be getting across is that “you don’t need to believe in god to be a good person”. Well done Captain Obvious. I like to think I am a ‘Good Person’, and I’m fairly sure I’ve never believed in god. In fact, I think I could make a pretty good argument that it’s easier to be a good person and not believe in god. That whole thing about having to have a personal relationship with god to get into heaven always seemed to be a little bit of a cop-out. Do what you want, as long as you commune with jesus, you’ll make it into heaven. And there have been some pretty evil christians in the past. The crusaders, for instance (and I’m not talking about the NTL permit!). The bible says “Thou shalt not kill”, to which the crusaders interpreted “thou shalt not kill other christians”. Throughout history various groups have judged other groups ‘less than human’, and the apparent respect for slavery amongst many christian sects shows they are not immune. The south of the US, for instance, probably the most fundamental christian area in the world, would probably still be happy to keep slaves, if the meddling north hadn’t interfered. And, the thing that Jaq brought up was that “What jesus said wasn’t new.” Surely other leaders of people, religious or otherwise, had preached tolerance prior to 2000-odd years ago. Come to think of it, much of what christians preach nowadays, or rather how they act, does not reflect what jesus said. And before I get any flaming comments - I have nothing personal against christians, moslems, buddhists or otherwise. I like to judge people by their actions, and their words. I know lots of people who I respect regardless of their faith or otherwise. Because, generally, they are Good People. And that is what I value.

Just today, I was promoted to the position of a Moderator within the Blogsome community. (Yay!) Now, I just need to make sure I use my power for good, not for evil…

I can’t even remember where I found this link: Be Rachael Ray for a Day.

So here is the deal - your Dine & Dish #4 blog post should cover a whole day’s worth of meals eaten outside of your home - breakfast, lunch, dinner and any snacks (if you have enough money), including drinks, for the total sum of $40.

Now, I’ve done the calculations, and US$40 is around about AUD$51, which is really quite a lot! So, here is my first part of my Rachael Ray Day - I’ll combine everything together on August 22nd. $40 a day in Adelaide.

Breakfast.

Hindley Street still has a bad reputation amongst a significant proportion of the South Australian population. Most of it is undeserved, but a quick walk down there at 8:15am will clue you in to why, especially if you remember that it’s much better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The section between Bank and Morphett Streets is the pits, and if you take the Railway Station underpass, you’ll emerge in the thick of it. Turning right into Hindley Street, you’ll pass pubs that are open that early in the morning, and strip clubs that closed not too many hours before. If you are lucky, you’ll see a feral or two enter a pub, stinking of beer, and eyes glazed over as they prepare to waste the local taxpayers money on poker machines. But push through, your destination awaits, and it’s worth it. After crossing Morphett Street, you enter the Education precinct, where the University of South Australia built a new City West campus to replace the aging, and closed suburban campuses of Salisbury and Underdale. (The northern and western suburbs are still whinging about the lack of education opportunities. Catch the bus, I say.) Because of the influx of students, several cafés and other shops have opened, and our goal is one of these: Phat Coffee. Josh will be behind the counter, he makes a great coffee, and he’s there all day, from 8:00 until 5:00. During Uni holidays they close at 4pm, but getting there is worth it. Phat Coffee does more than just coffee - they also serve a magnificent Ham Cheese and Tomato Croissant. Eat in or take away, it’s worth the $7.95 for the comfort food of a tasty croissant and a perfect coffee. Breakdown: Croissant: AUD5.25 ($4.12) Flat White: AUD2.70 ($2.12) Total: AUD7.95 ($6.24)

Lunch.

Still to write…Sushi train?

Tea.

Adelaide has a vibrant Touch Football community. It’s a relatively small town, so everyone who plays touch knows just about everyone else. Anyway, after playing a game with the Arab Steed Pornstars, at City Touch Club, we headed into their sponsor, the Arab Steed Hotel. Owned and managed by Shayne White, the Arab Steed Hotel has been trading since [YEAR]. Shayne bought the pub in [YEAR], and has turned it into a successful little business, with a great location near the south parklands, on the Corner of Hutt and Gilbert Streets. Parking out the front can be difficult, especially in the peak mealtimes, between 7 and 8:30. Don’t even think about parking on Gilbert Street, unless you go further west, as parking inspectors like to frequent the area, and unless you have a resident permit, expect the day to quickly become more expensive. There are plenty of parks further up Hutt Street, near and past the Adelaide City Council library, and beyond, as well as futher west. The ‘Steed used to make a great mushroom gravy, and it wasn’t unknown for the whole team to order Chicken Schnitzel with Mushroom Sauce (and Just Chips, in some cases!). Nowadays, the mushroom gravy ain’t that good, but there are several other great meals to try. The Veal Shanks (or Calves’ calves - thanks Alyse!) go well, but my choice is generally the Cajun Chicken Burger. Today, however, on the Specials’ board was Pork Puff Pastry Parcel, so I had “A Pork Puff Pastry Parcel, Please”, and a jug of beer. Since I bought the first round, others paid for the following rounds, and that was all I ended up paying for. Breakdown: Pork Puff Pastry Parcel: AUD10.90 ($8.55) Jug of Coopers Pale Ale: AUD12.00 ($9.41) Total: AUD22.90 ($17.96)

To create an image tag for a Gravatar in JavaScript, for use on Blogsome. Download the md5.jpg file (it’s really a .js file, but we are tricking Blogsome into allowing it to be uploaded), and upload it to your site. Put the following code into your Main Page template (probably in the head section): <script type="text/javascript" src="/images/md5.jpg" /> Put The following code where you want the Gravatar to appear: <script type="text/javascript">document.write('<img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id='); document.write(hex_md5("{comment_author_email}")); document.write('&size=20" />'); </script> You can change the size of your Gravatar image with the size=20 part, set it to whatever value you want. Enjoy! **Edit: **Don’t use this code, as it displays the email address to the browser, and then asks it to generate the MD5 fingerprint. This means that a Spam-collector would actually have access to the raw email address. I’ve diasabled the code until I figure out how to get around this…

I’ll do this later, but to change the favicon (the one that newer browsers show next to the URI), you need to include the following in your Main Page template. <link rel="shortcut icon" href="insert path of file here" /> Probably you should put it near the top. I’d suggest uploading a file called favicon.gif, and then making the code: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.gif" /> That way you can change it by uploading another one with the same name later. Favicons should be 16x16 pixels, or possibly up to 32x32 for display in a _Favourites _menu.

I like the idea of Gravatars, and they are easy to implement in PHP, but I cannot execute straight PHP code, only Smarty Templates (under Blogsome). I’d like to be able to write a Gravatar plugin in Smarty Code, but I don’t know how to MD5 encrypt just in Smarty. I thought the following would work, but it doesn’t seem to: {php}echo md5("email@address.net");{/php} In fact, I can’t seem to get any code to execute using the {php} {/php} tags. {php}echo "Hello, World";{/php}

I get quite a few people emailing or leaving comments asking for help with Templates and so on for WordPress, or issues with Blogsome that I’ve dealt with, but don’t appear in the forums.

Matt, Can you give a newbie some advice about installing the Connections theme? In the top nav menu there are five buttons: Home, About, Archives, Links, and Contacts. I can’t figure out how to make these links work. The Home button works ok, but not the others. My feeling is that I need to edit the links in header.php, but what do I put? Do I need to create pages first? If so, how do I do this? Also, can you tell me how to add a calendar like you have on your site? Thanks for all your help, Caitlin

I just dunno who or where to turn to.. The blogsome forum doesnt help at all. I usually have long blog entry and want to cut it to the first small paragraphs view in the index page, and use that excerpt/more feature to read the rest. The trouble is i dunno how to do it. I have filled the excerpt box for every post and checked the view the excerpt option on the dashboard cpanel, but it still doesnt work. I’m thinking that prolly I delete the html tag for the feature in index.php, and if it’s true, I dunno where to find the original tag. This is also my problem: where can I go to easily get the original coding for each default templates provided by blogsome? Thanks for your help, Peter

This one’s easy - when posting using the Dashboard, locate the cursor where you want the break to be, and press the little more button from the Quicktags. Or, type in <!--more-->. If you are using ecto, typing into the first box will create text before the more seperator, the second box will be after. The trick here is that it’s not an excerpt or summary, but more of a teaser. I recall that it’s also possible to change the text that is displayed, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (hint: this may not work in Blogsome, IIRC). I’m more than happy to help with other issues, but be aware that I’ll post responses to my site, in preference to email, as this might help someone else out in the future.

I’ve noticed a couple of blogs that hilight the comments made by particular users, mainly the blog owner, but in one case there were two writers, male and female that had blue and pink comment boxes respectively, and everyone else had another colour. I might implement this for another blog I’m working on, to do with a Touch team I’m Assistant Coach of. (South Australia Mens Open). I’ll also probably implement it here, at least for testing purposes.

After my whinge about the 0.9a2 (or whatever the ‘stable’ version was numbered), I downloaded the nightly development build, and it seems more stable. It also has a Pause/Resume butoon in the Downloads window. Doesn’t seem to like Resuming much though…