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Esther and Bud are Walt’s wonderful parents. The ambigram above was composed November/December 2008 as part of their Christmas gift.

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Way too much of my time last weekend was spent trying to figure out how to get my Facebook status displayed here on my blog. After several frustrating hours spent googling, I gave up trying to figure out a direct solution, so I’m using an indirect one.

I signed up for the Ping.fm service, which is specifically designed to allow you to update your status on multiple social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.) all at once. With the Ping.fm Wordpress plugin, I can easily keep my blog synched with my Facebook status… I just update my status using one of the Ping.fm methods, and everything else is automagic.

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I found an interesting article today explaining how the reCAPTCHA system works and how it helps in the effort to digitize books. I think now I might possibly consider all those reCAPTCHAs I come across a bit less of an annoyance.

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Read more at: What is reCAPTCHA?

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All I want is to be able to display my own Facebook status on my personal website. So I go on a Google search to try to figure out how to do it. There are several Wordpress plugins that claim to do such a thing. Alas, after testing half a dozen of them, none of them seem to work as advertised.

It seems that Facebook doesn’t want its users to be able to do such a thing, since (a) they do not easily make available a link to get your own status RSS feed, and (b) they continually disable the workarounds that clever users have developed to obtain their status RSS.

My question: WHY don’t they want to allow us such a thing?

Are they worried about advertising exposure and revenue? They shouldn’t be. My argument is: Giving me this ability won’t stop my Facebook visits… on the contrary, I’m more likely to visit so that I can make sure my status is kept up-to-date.

There has to be a way to do it. Back to the search.

Update: Thanks to these excellent instructions from a user named Otto on the wptavern.com forums, I now have what I want. Though it did require implementing the Facebook developer API on this site. (I think the phrase “Using a sledgehammer to kill a fly” might be more than appropriate here…)

Update #2: Ugh. Apparently, it only works if the viewer is currently logged into Facebook. Guess I need to either go back to the drawing board, or hack something together prompting the person to log in. It’s been removed until I have more time to work on it.

Update #3: I found a workaround!

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As much as I hate to use the same excuse over and over… I’ve been busy.

We moved into the new apartment the first week of September. It doesn’t feel like it’s been over a month already, but it has! I think we finally got the last of the boxes out of the living room / dining room area last weekend, but there are still some lingering in the front “office”.

I’ve been on a kick of “fixing the place up” — shopping for new furniture & fixtures. For example, we now have a sunroom, and I really want to get a long, low shelf of some sort to place below the window to hold plants. We also have a breakfast bar, and we need barstools. (And so on… you get the idea.)

I took photos during the move to try to track the progress, but haven’t really photographed the place since then — I still don’t feel like it’s what I’d consider “presentable”. But here are some nice photos of my sunroom:

Fall semester is halfway over already (!) with some pretty tough classes: Physical Chemistry, Quantitative Analysis, and Biochemistry. In addition, I’m also assisting with the Organic chemistry lab class and also with the lower-level Physics lab class. I’m also tutoring Physics and working on scholarship applications.

I’ve also started trying to research graduate programs. The problem with that is, I’m still not 100% sure on either (a) where I want to go, or (b) what field I want to study.

A while ago I signed up for this online service called Evernote that assists you with keeping virtual “notebooks”. I haven’t really used it to its full potential yet, but I’ve started using it this weekend to try to collect information on different grad schools. I think I may try to see how I can integrate it with this blog… not sure if such a thing is possible, but I’m going to try to remember to do some research on it.

Does it ever seem like there just aren’t enough hours in the day?

I know what my problem is — too much time spent on Facebook / watching TV / surfing the web, and not enough time spent doing productive, useful stuff. I’m just not sure how to change that… I guess I’m an addict.

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