Schinckel.net

PostSecret. Gotta Love It.

I’ve played around with CSS for the last couple of hours, and have finally got my RSS/RDF links to be rendered like icons (with a border and so on). It took me ages to figure it out, but I was only able to change the background colour, until I removed the <li> tags from the links - that was overriding the ability to change border and text colour. I then spent a couple more hours trying to make the same thing happen for the Search and Post Comment buttons, before discovering that Safari, and Camino, don’t support changing the look of form buttons. And I’m not going to bear using IE to test it under…I’ll live with the images I’ve made (for now). What would be cool is to make all of the elements of Connections work in CSS - like the top and bottom bits of the sidebar boxes, and so forth. Well, the bits than can be made by CSS, anyway.

Stupid cats fightin’ outside our window again. Seems to be happening most nights now. I went outside, and they were literally right outside the bedroom window. If it gets to be a problem, I may have to kill them. Seriously, when I went out with the torch, they just stopped, mid fight, like schoolkids. And walked away. “We weren’t doing anything, sir.” (I’ve disabled Trackbacks & Pingbacks on this post, it has been getting hammered lately.)

Yesterday afternnon, as I was on the way to the physio, I bumped into some old students of mine from a previous school. I chatted to them for a few minutes (Hi Bree and Steph), and was about to head off to catch my bus, when some random derelict man came up to us and said something. Now, I didn’t understand a word he said, so I just responded with a “Look, I’m sorry, but I really have to go now”, and turned towards the girls to make my goodbyes. And the guy punched me. Hard. Luckily, it was only in the arm, but I didn’t see it coming, and I’m glad he didn’t hit me in the face.

We wanted Jason & Sharon to call the boy Helmut, but they chose Max. So I’m posting this image…

I discovered PostSecret some time ago. I love it! Basically, it takes postcards (real, live ones) that are sent in anonymously, with a secret on them, and posts them online. This one today made me laugh:

Cellphone Dieting : Gizmodo:

The process is pretty low tech: take a picture of the food you eat, send it to a dietician, and then they send back a video message telling you… …These kind of personalized/techno services should be making things interesting in the next few years. I could see a personal trainer doing this, as well…

There’s an ad doing the rounds on Australian TV at the moment that reminds me of this article, but I can’t remember what it was advertising. It had a guy who sent a picture to a personal coach, or something.

With the demise of my phone, I was virtually a lost soul. Luckily, Jason had just upgraded his phone, so I now have his old one, on a long term loan. It’s the same model as mine, but there is one notable difference. The vibrate feature is about three times as strong as my old phone. So now when I get a call, and the phone is in my pocket, I **really **know about it! It went off a couple of times on Wednesday night during parent teacher interviews, and it really tickled! Apologies if you called me during the time I was under a phone blackout if I haven’t called you back yet. I will, probably on Monday during the public holiday…Yay!

My mobile phone died yesterday. It’s a Nokia 6610, and the day before I noticed the time was about 15 minutes slow. I reset the time, and didn’t think anything of it. If anything, I thought that maybe a rogue tower had changed the time. Then, yesterday morning, I put the radio on, like I normally do. “Bad reception” I thought. I changed the station, a couple of times, and up came the station I would originally listen to (ABC Classic FM). I looked at the phone, thinking I must have changed the station previously, but it said a different channel. “Strange”, I thought, as I passed out of my driveway and headed up the road towards the train station. “I’ll just do the old faithful, turn the phone off and then back on.” Like it’s running Windows, I guess. Hmm. Doesn’t want to turn back on. A similar sort of thing happened last October, when my phone died temporarily for about 24 hours when I was at the National Touch Championships in the Gold Coast. It came back to life, after about a day. I think the cause of this was heat, but nothing like that this time. I’ve pulled the phone to bits, I know it’s fully charged, and I cannot find out what is wrong. And I’m not about to pay $45 to some drone from Nokia who will just say it’s not fixable. So I might have to get a new phone. I’ll get one with Bluetooth, I think, and get a Bluetooth gadget for my computer, too. Still, being without a phone is a bit of a bitch.

I am all for recycling. Anyone who knows me knows I am (mostly) green. And I am a big supporter of anything that will increase the recycling done by our society. Schools are a great place to start - if we can have the younger people recycling automatically, then hopefully some, most or even all of them will continue do so. Perhaps some of them will influence their employer and they will be more open to recycling and reuse. So, in principle, I should support the competition that is run by SITA. But there is one thing that concerns me. The winning schools are those that collect the most recycling waste. Isn’t it likely that schools that already have policies in-place to reduce use will have less waste? So we are rewarding those schools that not only recycle, but use more in the first place. I’m not sure how it should be run, but I think someone needs to have a long hard think about this.