Schinckel.net

I listen to a variety of Podcasts, including All In The Mind, “Radio National’s weekly foray into all things mental,” and generally like it. As I’m known to do, I take exception (or get annoyed) with particular segments. The two podcasts I listened to today irked me especially. The first was a discussion of Placenta Brain, and the general consensus was that it doesn’t exist. I know of this phenomenon by it’s alternative name, Mummy Mind, and I have seen it in all of the women I am close to who have borne children. The general theories go like this: somehow (possibly due to hormones) women become different during pregnancy, often exhibiting behaviours they wouldn’t normally, like leaving their car running when running an errand, and being surprised to see if running when they return. I would go somewhat further than this. Bearing children permanently damages their minds. My sister, who was a perfectly normal, intelligent person, suddenly started making inane comments about all sorts of things. Something which she had not done before giving birth to my favourite nephew. I had grown up with my mother making crazy statements (often obvious ones) and had just put this down to it being her. After my sister had her baby, if occurred to me that Mum had been smart in her youth (her school reports, and discussion with friends and family from that era confirm this) and had simply lost her marbles (not totally) after giving birth. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my mother and sister very much. I don’t profess that they are totally bonkers, just not as “sharp” as they used to be. And giving birth seems to be, for both of them, the turning point in their lives as intelligent individuals. More than just the impairment during pregnancy, I think it seems to linger… • The second podcast was an interview with a Jewish Psychiatrist practicing in Israel, and treating both Israelis and Palestinians. This seemed to set him off on a good path, but he started to throw in some pretty inane language himself, particularly some of the Jungian Jargon (Always Alliterate!!!) and I quickly lost respect for him. It’s the first Podcast for a long time I have skipped the end of. His discussion of recurring dreams was a particular annoyance of mine: I can’t find the exact quote in the transcript, but it was something like:

The thing about recurring dreams is that they are telling the mind something. And the fact they repeat is because the mind “just doesn’t get it.”

I’m still of the impression that dreams have very little relation to reality. If we can see something in our dreams, it is only because we want to. Dreams are like “random events”, or spring cleaning of the brain’s circuitry. Any relationship to real life is only because there are all these events, images, sounds, memories, and our mind just attempts to fit them into what it perceives as reality. Forcing the facts to fit a theory, as it were. Anyway, he started to go on with a bit of rubbish after that - I’d arrived home (hardest ride I’d had for a while, pretty much head-wind all of the way home, with a bit of a rise for the last kilometre or so), and often while I continue to the end, I skipped it. • Now, before I get too many nasty comments about the first part - please note that I’ve deliberately played it up a little. My family are not loopy (perhaps just a little, but that’s a whole other story). I’m merely stating the anecdotal evidence I have seen about cognitive deterioration during, and indeed after, pregnancy. And, I have some other cases, but I’m saving them for my paper on the topic… after all, Fraud, ahem, Freud, Jung’s mentor, based all of his theories on a handful of cases.

…on such a Winter’s Day.

California Dreamin’ • “Room Service” • José Feliciano ★★★

Okay, that’s just a silly lead-in to what I’m going to post about. For some time, I’ve been trying to get Category Pages to handle a bit nicer in Blogsome. I needed to be able to get a Category ID from a Category name, and I hadn’t figured out how to. I’d basically given up. Then I found my new best friend, {get_cat_ID cat_name='Cat_Name'}. He allows me to do this. And much easier than I thought it would be, too.

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    {if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI|truncate:10:'':1 == '/category/'}
        {capture name=cat}
            {single_cat_title}
        {/capture}     
        {capture name=catID}
            {get_cat_ID cat_name=$smarty.capture.cat}
        {/capture}
    {/if}

Now, how do we use this to get child categories?

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    {list_cats optionall='0' list='false' child_of='$smarty.capture.catID'}

This appears to not work, as it continues to get all of the categories. I think there is an issue with child_of, at least on Blogsome.

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    {get_category_children id=$smarty.capture.catID}

Only generates the IDs of the child categories. Useful, but not excellent for my uses. However, there exists also a function called {wp_list_cats}, which allows for arguments in the for &arg=value.

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    {wp_list_cats args=“&child_of=`$smarty.capture.catID`”} 

Notably, you must use double quotes when trying to embed a variable inside an argument. Final code (not counting CSS, that’s up to you - or look in my StyleSheet):

{if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI|truncate:10:'':1 == '/category/'} 
    {*Category Index Page*}
    <div class=“catNav”>
        {capture name=cat}{single_cat_title}{/capture}
        {capture name=catID}
            {get_cat_ID cat_name=$smarty.capture.cat}
        {/capture}
        Currently browsing 
        {get_category_parents category="`$smarty.capture.catID`" link="1" separator="&raquo;"}, which has sub-categories 
        <ul class=“inlineCatList”>
            {wp_list_cats args=“&&list=0&children=0&child_of=`$smarty.capture.catID`”}
        </ul>
    </div>
{/if}

And, thanks to minimalnet, since because of the post in the forums: How can i show the Dashboard Blog Stats in my blog?, I began scouring the source code again.

Summer The First Time • Bobby Goldsboro • Room Service ★

Every now and then, I have cause to go through the Blogsome source code, and each time I come across what seem like interesting functions. Today, I noticed:

• get_category_parents
• get_category_children
• get_linksbyname
• get_autotoggle
• get_lastpostdate, get_lastpostmodified
• get_currentuserinfo
• query_posts
• get_cat_ID

Some of these I don’t yet know what they do, but at least three are very interesting for doing stuff I’ve been working on for a while.

I’m going to start playing around with Google Calendars. My Touch Football admin team have been using Google Docs (was Writely) for collaborative documentation, and I need to reorganise my life. gCalendars look cool, and I might be able to sync with PalmOS. Hopefully both ways, although even just one way might do.

I’m not sure if this is a ‘feature’ of general Gmail, or only the _Gmail for Hosted Domains _variety. I had the need to send an executable file, and I had zipped it up, as there were also support files in the directory. I attempted to send it, and Gmail complained:

Sorry, ArchiveName.zip contains an executable file. Schinckel.net policy prevents sending these files, as they provide a security risk.

I had to rename it to .zip.jpg, and then resend it. I’m not an idiot. I know when a file I am sending is relatively clean (as clean as can be expected), and I am prepared to take the risk. I manage the domain, and I have never checked any box about preventing .exe files. Aargh!

I’ve worked in fast food. Granted, it was a long time ago, and I was only a delivery driver, but it vexes me how often orders are mucked up by these (generally) young people. What hope does our society have when the youth can’t listen properly and remember for thirty seconds what food I want. We went to KFC at Mitcham tonight, on the way home from a Training & Development session. Jaq was driving, so she ordered, and it went a little like this:

Jaq: Can I have a Zinger Bacon and Cheese Twister, in a large combo; and a second twister with cheese and no tomato please.
Stupid Drivethru Operator: Okay, so that’s one Bacon and Cheese Twister in a large combo, and a twister with cheese and no tomato.
Jaq: No, the first one was a Zinger Twiser.
SDO: Sorry, we don’t do Zinger Twisters.
Me (yelling from passenger seat): Yeah you do, I have them all of the time.
SOD: Silence.
Jaq (to me): So that’s it then? Do I drive thru?

[We decide to drive to the window. As the previous car pulls away, a hand holding a large chips comes out of the window - obviously they forgot to pack the order properly.]

New Drivethru Operator: We don’t have them as a menu item, but we can make one up for you.
Jaq: Ok, thanks.
NDO: So, that’s a Bacon and Cheese Zinger Twister combo. What drink did you want?
Jaq: There was another twister too, with cheese and no tomato.
NDO: Ok. What drink did you want then?
Jaq: Sunkist.

[Time passes. Drink is brought out. It’s a small one.]

Jaq: Um, we ordered a large meal. Were you the girl I spoke to before? Because she read that bit of the order back to me.
NDO: No. Sorry.

[NDO takes drink, and brings back a large bottle.]

NDO: There you go, and there is your meal.

[Bag is handed to us. As we begin to drive off, I notice there is a small chips in the bag. We stop. I then realise there are two small chips.]

Jaq: Excuse me, we ordered a large meal and got two small chips.
NDO: Yeah, we have run out of large chips containers.

[We drive home.]

When we arrived home, it got even worse. Initially, we thought they’d stuffed up Jaq’s order badly, by giving her tomatoes, and no cheese. But it turned out that they had just made my Zinger Twister sans Bacon and Cheese. So, I’m counting about 5 errors in our order, plus at least one in the order of the car before us. That’s pretty pathetic, KFC.

I’m an intolerant person, at times. I despise lazy spellers, inappropriate punctuation, and meaningless drivel (unless I wrote it). So, imagine my consternation when I perused a missive on a Whirlpool forum:

my-subi writes… > billee, > just whimmed you, pls check your inbox, ta. no probs, going there now.

Now, there’s two things wrong with this picture. The first is that billee would have been notified of the whim (WHirlpool Instant Message) upon logging in, so there is no need to post a message like this. I can let it slide, as it’s possible that billee might be checking the forums without actually logging in. However, there is no need to reply that (s)he is “going there now.” It’s probably going to take longer to type in that message and press _Send _than it is to click on the link that takes you to the whimbox (I just made that word up!) What a crazy waste of bandwidth. Writing a message saying that you have been sent a private message, and then replying that you are about to read the private message. Almost as crazy and pointless as some guy blogging about how annoying it is when people do stupid, pointless things.

Well, I’ve been in Perth for the last week, for this year’s School Sport Australia National Touch Football Championships. I’m a bit tired to do a proper write-up of what went on, and how we went, but I may do it later. In short, we beat Victoria twice, 4-1 each time, and lost to every other team. The girls played okay, but I still felt they played a bit below their best. I was pretty disappointed with a couple of the games, but generally had a pretty good time.

I’ve had a good idea for a way to simplify the front page of a blog: have the newest post displayed in it’s full glory, but have other posts only have an excerpt. Actually, what I might do is make it so that is uses JavaScript, and only the post headers of other posts are shown, but clicking on the title displays the whole text…

Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot • Sting & The Police • The Very Best Of Sting & The Police ★

University of California (Berkeley) now has a whole lot of lectures available as downloadable audio. You can get Podcasts of them, or get them via the iTunes Music Store, Berkeley edition. I’m not getting them as Podcasts, since the ones on iTunesU are already pre-tagged, and the courses I’m getting are not currently running, so I don’t need to automatically get new ones. The only tagging fault I’ve found is that they are missing: Remember playback position Skip when shuffling Which I think are important for this type of thing. I’ve also noticed some Podcast/downloads via iTunes can be paused and resumed, unfortunately, these ones can’t. Finally, a neat point is that it automatically creates a new Playlist, and a new Playlist Folder.

Snow • Alex Lloyd • Black The Sun ★★★