Wear a hat you douchebag (or, having things cut off your scalp is annoying :P)

More recollections of what I’ve been up to!

About 12 months back I noticed a small lump near the crown of my scalp – being the delightfully slack person I am, I decided it was fine and nothing to worry about. Shoot forward to November last year, and I finally had a skin cancer check up. To be honest I should have gone in to have this done a while back, because even though I’m still in my 20s, being a ranga, I should be more conscious of this. Especially since my hair’s not as thick as it used to be either!

Anywho, so the skin cancer guy has a look, and nothing out of the ordinary. I point out the spot on my head hiding in my overdue-for-a-haircut mess of reddish hair, and I’m sent away with a “see your doctor” slip of paper. After seeing my GP, I was then referred to a specialist, who suggested that taking a knife to it would be the happiest method of dealing with it. I went into surgery about a fortnight later, which brings us to the end of January (yes, I was slack following up on the referral slip and seeing my GP). Now, considering the size of the bump, I’m quite surprised at how painful it was! I guess because after it gets cut out of your scalp and they stitch the wound back together it pulls tightly on your skin and causes extra pressure, but I didn’t sleep well at all until the stitches came out… and crazily enough once that was sorted, my head felt a lot nicer and I was back to my usual sleeping habits!

It’s been neraly two months since I had the spot removed and funnily enough it’s still not 100% healed – almost, but not quite done as yet. The test on the bit they removed came back without any nasties, so this one ended up being a preventative measue and it’s re-enforced how proactive I’ve become with at least looking after myself when I’m outside – when working in the garden enjoying the subrubian life, I’m out there with sunscreen (30+, and now with smelly clear zinc as well!) and the world’s most awesome sombrero. Because they’re cool.

It also goes without saying that I kept from training for a couple of weeks due to the recovery – rolling round, falling over, being thrown or getting into locks and holds wouldn’t be doing the recovery any favours, and it’d be nasty if the stitches caught on something mid-way through class! If life were a Tarantino film though, that would have happened and people would have been bathing in the red stuff!

So unless you want a knife taken to your scalp, wear a hat you douchebag. Or at least make sure you have a nice full head of hair to absorb the impact from the sun πŸ˜€

This announcement has been brought to you by me, Sean, the colour orange, and the letter ‘R’.

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Catching up on what’s been happening

I thought I’d make my first proper post a bit of a catchup on what’s been happening with me over the last couple of months πŸ™‚

I’ve been training on and off since mid-late November due to a handful of injuries that have been rolling my way, probably the most persistent of which has been my stump’s ongoing issues since November. It actually started after I took our dog out for a walk after Wifey and I caught up with my brother and sister-in-law for a weekender, and ended up mangling the back of my stump. This wasn’t a biggie at first because I thought I’d just done some minor surface damage to the stump, but it ended up turning out to be more serious and on-going than I first imagined.

What ended up happening only started to get resolved maybe a month ago – what had happened was to do with some foam padding added to what’s called the “seat” of the prosthesis. This is the part of the socket that comes up to the base of your arse cheek and forms a foundation to hold your weight when you walk – by doing this, it means the weight and pressure of your body is spready out on your bum (which is handy, because it’s cushiony and generally has a large surface area!) and along the bottom of your stump, which can only physically take so much repeated pressure/impacts before struggling to hold your weight.

Anywho, because I’m pretty active, a while back my specialist put some tough foam-like padding (only a few mm thick) along the back of the seat of the prosthesis to soften the cutting-like impact walking was having on my socket liner. This is a good thing btw, more cushion = less direct impact. The issue was that a while ago, part of the foam padding broke off and I ignored it, because at first it wasn’t making a difference. However, after that long walk with our dog it happened to grind away so much skin that it caused an open wound (at the time though, I didn’t realise the extent of the damage). Roll on to December and I had two weeks off work over the x-mas break, which was great for my leg because I kept the prosthesis off for the most part. However, jumping back into work and all the goodies that comes with my work ethic, and again I had problems with my leg. It was getting very, very frustrating!

My lightbulb moment came in February – after getting into my socket and feeling the familiar soreness on the back of my stump, I put my finger between the liner and the socket where the pain was comgin from and took a look, and the exact spot where the sore happened to be was on the torn edge of the foam backing! Following this revelation, I made an appointment and had my specialist remove the offending material and replace it. The effect was immediate, and for the first time in months, my stump is slowly healing itself.

So, because of this in particular, training has been really erratic – I’ve only done a handful of classes this year so far, and am nowhere ready to grade next month (I also missed out the December grading due to the issues knocking me out solidly from November 2009 until the new year, so that’s two in a row as we generally hold gradings quaretly throughout the year), so I’ve been working on training at about 80% so as not to damage the stump. I’ve managed to do classes for the last two weeks without too much trouble, and for the last three weeks I’ve been able to finally get back into the yard as well and work on revamping the garden. Things are definitely looking up!

So, I’m at a good place at the moment. Over the course of my break form training, I also took the opportunity to do some reading on martial arts – I read Patrick and Yuriko McCarthy’s translated works on Gichin Funakoshi and Motobu Choki (regulars will know I’ve mentioned him when referring to Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo-jutsu and the International Ryukyu Karate-jutsu Research Society in the past – you can check out their website here, and read more on the books themselves here), finally read Tom Cleary’s translation of Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings (more info on the translation is at Musashi Miyamoto.com) and a translation of the Hagakure (can’t recall the translator for this one) – Wifey actually bought me those last two as a gift, isn’t she awesome? Down the road I’m planning on writing up something on my impressions of these books so that others interested in them can see some of my thoughts on them, being inspired by the martial arts book reviews section on Black Belt Mama’s website.

There’s been some other stuff happening as well on the injury front, but I’ll save that for another post in order to keep this one a little more focused!

Anywho, expect more regular updates form now on, I promise!

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WordPress fixes part 3 – Customising the wp_list_pages navigation menu drop-downs to insert elements between each menu heading dynamically

This is the last bit I’ll be writing on some customised features I’ve added to my theme – again, because the community (especially in this instance) has been so good to me, the least I can do is return the favour by publicly posting the code/solution to my problem.

When I built my template, I designed it so that between each menu item sits a div to create a space between menu items. While this is easy enough to do in static HTML, I needed a solution that would allow me to do this for my menu system in WordPress through using the wp_list_pages function. Now, it wouldn’t be too hard to programmatically add the div in if the menu was operating as a single unordered (<ul>) list, but I was also leveraging some jQuery to render the drop-down menu system for my sub-menu items two more levels deep; thus, simply adding divs as wrappers with list item tags with the wp_list_pages function wouldn’t work, as the divs would also get added to each of the sub-menu list items.

Ideally, what I needed was a script to treat the menu as two objects – the first would be the top-level navigation, the second would be the two-levels of sub-menu navigation that fly out as drop-downs. Once the output from the database has been extracted into two objects for manipulation within the code, the first object will require an extra div to be added in front of the text block. We add it to the front of each text block so that there isn’t a div left over and placed after the final top-level list item, because that looks messy.

For the second object, all the list items cascade out into sub-lists within the primary menu item. These list items have no additional HTML inserted between elements, and styling them is handled by all the CSS coded up when the template was initially rendered as static HTML.

This of course creates issues with adding in a link back to ‘Home’ via the WordPress widgets – to get around it, I simply added a static link back to home in the header.php file. Crude, but effective.

Not being too cluey with PHP (I’m still on my training wheels!), I took my situation to the WordPress forums and received some fantastic assistance by one of the members on there, vtxyzzy. The following is the eventual code that resulted from our discussion, with vtxyzzy creating the solution whilst I made a couple of tweaks to fix some of the bugs:

Code:

)/',$my_pages,null,PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
	$insert = '';
	$newmenu = '';
	$level = 0;
	foreach ($parts as $part) {
		if ('' == $part) {--$level;}
		if ('

In the code you’ll notice the $insert function which adds the dividers between each entry in the top-level menu, and leaves the remainder without touching them. Very clever, and certainly isn’t anything I could have achieved without outside help!

So, incorporating this function into my header.php along with the static link back to the homepage looks like this:

header.php:


Feel free to use the code if you feel it might prove useful to your site. There’s no need to link back/credit, but I wouldn’t mind if you left the comment in the code, posted a comment on the blog or send me a message to let me know if you’ve used it as I’d love to see other people’s use of this great little function!

… and that’s the end of the technical/Wordpress stuff! Expect normal programming to resume form next week, finally! πŸ™‚

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WordPress fixes part 2 – Page elements appearing in front of pop-up images in the NextGen Gallery / lightbox plugins

This one’s actually a bit impromptu as I only just figured it out and wanted to share it with the community in case anyone else comes across the same problem.

Since installing the new themes here and on my other blog, I found that all my image galleries that were put together using the NextGen Gallery plugin (which also uses the lightbox plugin) had all the elements from the navigation bar appearing above the pop-up image. I posted up a question on the WordPress support forums to see if anyone could help, and didn’t get a solution (though someone else posted up that they had the same problem, so I felt happy that it wasn’t just me which was a relief!)… but because I’m prone to lightbulb moments, I thought of something that may be causing the error, and thanks to some poking around with Firebug I found a solution, and it’s all to do with the z-index properties in the CSS files loaded into both of my blogs.

First up, some code:

Previous code:

#nav-menu, #nav-menu ul {
 margin: 0px;
 padding: 5px 35px 10px 35px;
 list-style-type: none;
 list-style-position: outside;
 position: relative;
 z-index: 300;
 width: 100%;
 height: 100%;
 background: none;
 text-align: left;
 font: 18pt/24pt Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;
 font-weight: bold;
 color: #ffffff
}

This is the CSS that governs how my navigation bar behaves itself – it seems a little convoluted, but it’s setup like this (and uses the rules that follow) to get the nice jQuery-driven drop-downs that can cascade out to multiple levels (there’ll be more on some PHP tricks I’ve used to customise my nav bar in the concluding post on WP fixes I’ll be posting up later). The property that is causing all the grief is actually the z-index property, which is currently set to 300 as per the tute I used as a reference to put the menu together. If we click on one of the images and wand our cursor over the pop-up version via Firebug to get the properties of the containing divs though, we reveal another z-index property that’s clashing. The #stimuli_overlay div that acts as the parent div for the goodies that follow has a z-index of 90, as referenced via the lightbox.css that is installed as part of the default Lightbox plugin:

lightbox.css

#stimuli_overlay {
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
	z-index: 90;
	width: 100%;
	height: 500px;
	background-color: #000;
}

The solution to this is now simple – either change the lightbox.css file or change your style.css attached to your theme. I chose the latter since I didn’t want to touch the plugin defaults, as it would cause issues later on if the plugin were ever upgraded.

New code:

#nav-menu, #nav-menu ul {
 margin: 0px;
 padding: 5px 35px 10px 35px;
 list-style-type: none;
 list-style-position: outside;
 position: relative;
 z-index: 50; /* Causes bugs for NGG, has to be smaller than #stimuli_overlay z-index, which is 90 by default, so move value of #nav-menu to 50 instead of 300 */
 width: 100%;
 height: 100%;
 background: none;
 text-align: left;
 font: 18pt/24pt Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;
 font-weight: bold;
 color: #ffffff
}

There, problem solved – 50 is still ample to ensure the dropdowns sit on top of other elements, and small enough to ensure it doesn’t interfere with the lightbox CSS.

And because I’m big on commenting in my code to avoid getting confused when maintaining it, I’ve also added that great big string of text to my CSS to remember why it’s changed from the standard 300 recommended by the tute I used as a reference.

In theory, you can make the z-index property anything you like, just as long as it doesn’t go above the z-index value of the divs that sit above your page when you call the lightbox plugin via NextGen Gallery.

I was originally planning on writing two WordPress pieces, but I only worked this one out a couple of hours ago and thought I should share πŸ™‚ Next one will be the last, then I’ll get back to the usual program I promise!

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WordPress fixes part 1 – Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by…

Just wanted to share this fix – I had this error come up when working on my other blog when I installed my latest theme and could not work out why it was happening. The error message mentioned the functions.php file and pluggable.php file in the error message.

From what I’ve read online, this error is caused by whitespace somewhere in the PHP files noted in the error message. As a precaution I went in and checked every php file in my theme and cleaned any inconsistencies, then checked pluggable.php and got rid of the blank space at the end of the file. Reloaded, still no luck.

I then took another look at my functions.php file, and something occurred to me – I added a php comment field at the top of the file before programming in some stuff in the file, and there was a blank line between the comment php tag and the functions – I removed the comment so it was purely the functions on the first line, and problem fixed!

Previous code:



 '
', 'after_widget' => '
', 'before_title' => '

', 'after_title' => '

', )); ?>

New code:

 '
', 'after_widget' => '
', 'before_title' => '

', 'after_title' => '

', )); ?>

Incedently, you can also see how I set up the sidenav boxes on my other blog this way too in case you’re interested or want to criticise πŸ˜›

While everyone might have different issues, hopefully this’ll help someone else who gets this message – check the files indicated in the error message, and if you’ve added a comment to the top of your file for example (like my functions.php file, where I put the theme details in as a php comment and then had a blank space/line underneath), chop it out, re-upload via FTP, and hopefully your issue will be resolved!

I have another WordPress fix to post in the next couple of days on the blog detailing how I setup the drop-down system in my navigation bar in the page header to style the top nav separately from the drop-down boxes to dynamically insert the dividers to the right of each menu item. Stay tuned!

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