Other questions: which Twitter badge do you prefer? Text or flash? I feel like the whole thing looks a little cluttered and busy, especially with the flash badge. Any other suggestions?

I’m about to turn off my comment spam blocking just to refresh the “recent” list. The last one was in December, he whined.

Hang in there. I’m coming back… slowly.

And of course, if you have any suggestions, please please let me know. I don’t have the best sense of style. For example: webcam not-found image replacement: too big? ugly?

Update:
Okay, got the banner fixed. Next up: column backgrounds. Thennnn…?

So this site might look a little messy for a while. I currently have widgets installed on the right toolbar. I’m going to modify their CSS to get them looking the same (they’re pretty close already) and then finish up the installation. I’m hoping that it’ll make the whole setup a little more modular, so I can move things around a little without getting elbow-deep in CSS theme sewage.

So stay tuned. A prettier supercres.net coming right up, hopefully.

Well, okay, it’ll look better when I go through and add tags to all my old posts.

I was trying to type my previous entry, about getting Fotobook working, especially the second bit about getting the update script running automatically through my crontab. The problem was… I couldn’t type wget!

It’s kind of an important part of the crontab line; that’s the command that has Unix load the given page. But for some reason, every time the word wget was in the post, I got an error when I tried to publish my edits. I’m guessing that Wordpress tries to execute wget when it finds it (for reasons unknown; a bug?). So I spent longer than I care to recount trying to figure out how to disguise wget in my code, but have it appear normally on the entry so it could be copy-pasted into Terminal.

The first solution I looked for was an HTML tag like to make it not interpreted, and just presented literally. Didn’t work. And my search for a better tag was fruitless, though CDATA looked good for a while. (Guess it doesn’t interpret in XML.)

Then I tried inserting things inside wget. Putting a “|” in the middle obviously worked, but it’s ugly, and I’d have to explain it. So I looked for some latin-1 character that would be invisible.  was close, but for some reason, when it copy-pasted into Terminal, it eliminated the “g“. A 0×0 .gif image would’ve worked, but my stylesheet gives every image padding plus a border, so it looked like a white box in the middle.

Then the lightbulb— any HTML tag that wouldn’t get rendered into something visible would work. I tried <>. That showed up as <> (weird). </> was invisible, but when I went back to edit, WP had gotten rid of it as obviously useless. So then I just used bold tags.

wg<b></b>et worked. Hurrah.

Kludgy, but it works. If you have a better, more elegant solution, I would love to hear it.

I got the Fotobook plugin for Wordpress, and now my Photos page is automatically populated with all my Facebook photo albums. And since I installed Lightbox plugin, clicking on the photo enlarges it in a cool Flash (?) overlay.

Very fun. Highly recommended.

Update:
And now I have my cron job working. (On the hour, it repopulates the Photos page with all my most recent Facebook albums and photos.) For the benefit of future Googlers, you’ll want to put something like this in your crontab.

0 * * * * wget --delete-after "http://supercres.net/wp-content/plugins/fotobook/cron.php?secret=************&update"

…Making sure, of course, that it’s all one line and that you replace my URL with the one given in your Fotobook settings. Also note that wget is not included with OS X; they have curl, but I didn’t try that. (I’m putting it in my local machine’s crontab since my website server has shell access but not crontab.)

AND FINALLY… you have no idea how hard it was to get the word wget in a post. For some reason, Wordpress tries to execute it when I click the “Update Post” button. Another post about that coming soon.

Right. Here goes.

Around the time I stopped posting, in January of this year, I started getting busy at work. But I quickly realized that it wasn’t the kind of busy I wanted to be— it involved relentlessly trying to get people to come in to the lab and participate in my study. This study is not the most comfortable thing in the world (I’ve done it several times), so trying to make it sound like it’ll be a breeze was beyond my diplomacy skills, especially over the phone, and especially not to people with mental illness. Then — then! — once they came in, if they came in, running the study itself was a giant pain and I constantly dreaded doing it.

All that is basically to say… I was not happy at that job. I wasn’t really doing what I was hired to do; my job was shifting away from more advanced programming and data analysis and towards more standard research coordination. I have a lot of friends who do that, but it’s not for me, at least not at a clinical lab.

So. I started looking around for a new job. I e-mailed a guy with whom I interviewed right after I graduated (remember? I didn’t get the job), but found out that the company had a failed clinical trial and had gone under. Ruh-roh. Lightbulb: perhaps not the best time to look for a job.

Then, on a whim, I e-mailed a professor of mine from Penn whose class I really enjoyed, and whose research I found really fascinating. I had talked to him about a job right around the time I graduated, but he didn’t have space, so I started at the clinical research lab. And — amazingly enough — he was hiring! I went in for an interview, and then a couple days later, I had an offer. (The official offer letter took a lot longer, and I had to wait for that before I could quit the old job. That was a few weeks of unadulterated stress.)

So yeah. I got that job and left my old one. The most stressful part was working up the courage to tell my boss. He’s kind of an intimidating fellow. Plus he wasn’t really happy about losing another person; the lab seemed to be undergoing (and still is undergoing) a bit of a mass exodus. But no matter. I’m at the new place and I like it and it’s going to be helpful going forward in my “career”.

Then something odd happened just as I was starting the new job full time. I met someone awesome. I wasn’t really expecting to do so, much less stumble onto something like this. I’m going to try not to be sappy and clichéd and blog-PDAish, so I’m going to talk about her too much, other than this (for background): her name is Liz, she is amazing, and she has ten-ish tattoos, depending on whether you count a few together or separately.

And speaking of tattoos, I got one. It really had surprisingly little to do with Liz. Around June, my dad told me that my sister was thinking about getting a tattoo or some sort of piercing. I managed to dissuade her from the piercing and convince her to get the tattoo with me when we were at the beach. Little did I know (until I checked a few days before we were supposed to go) that North Carolina will not allow anyone under the age of eighteen to be tattooed, even with parental permission. No tattoos at the beach, but as soon as I got home, I went to Liz’s tattoo guy:

His name is Shawn Dubin and he does incredible tattoos (and illustrations). I can’t wait to go back for another one; I think I’m going to have him design it this time, since I really love his work.

Oh, the tattoo is a hippocampal pyramidal cell from area CA1. The image is a reconstruction from microscopy that was intended for use in NEURON simulations. This type of cell has been implicated in spatial memory, which is something my lab works on. Plus, it’s pretty.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Liz and I went to Connecticut. It was fun. We visited the Hill-Stead Museum, which has an incredible collection of Monets, Manets, and Degases, and a lot lot lot of awesome antique furniture and appointments.

More recently, I bought a smoker and Beatles Rock Band, and am planning a party to fully utilize them. I want to unite the worlds of old lab, new lab, and various other groups. All in good time.

I think that’s about it. Uh, yep. More later. I promise.

That worked. Now seeing if Twitter updates with edits.

Now testing the “don’t tweet!” option, and to say that I’m using the WP to Twitter plugin by Joe Dolson. Like it so far, except that it’d be nice if I could tweet by default on new posts, and not tweet by default on edits.

Also… I turned 24 yesterday. It was a low-key birthday, punctuated by an Eagles playoff loss. Also, it’s snowy and too cold. Makes for bad going-out weather. But it was still fun.

On the plus side, I was giggling like crazy at the Flight of the Conchords premiere last night, and also enjoyed Big Love. (Unless something big happens with the latter, it’s kind of losing its luster in its early third season.)

Right. Action items: post more. And… that’s about it. Enjoy the inauguration and subsequent regime change, kids.