A lot has happened over the last week. Some of that I plan to still keep under wraps for the moment... but here's the stuff I'm willing to let you know about.

If you are one of those loyal fans I keep dreaming I have, who clicks on the inactive art and robotlab links in the hope that they may now be active, undeterred by the fact that the last time you tried, 5 minutes ago, it did not; you would have noticed that the robotlab section is now open. The art section, although it has quite a lot of content to open with, is still inactive because I have yet to work out an effective rating system. Also, I have not yet finalized on how I want the section to look. The typical Lightbox galleries you see all over the internet are just that - typical; not incredible - and hence not seen here.

The robotlab section features the story of my tryst with robot building. While most of it is past tense, I am hoping the future will be perfect. So far, two articles have gone up in this section - an introduction to what the section will contain, and the first chapter of the saga, slightly edited and resurrected for your viewing pleasure. The plan is to resurrect the second chapter and then write the remaining ones to close the original story. Once that is done, I hope to have the privilege of penning a few sequels too... let's see how it goes.

In other news, annoyed by the fact that my loyal fans cannot go ahead and recruit further fans by suggesting my page to them, I dug through the facebook bug tracker and found something rather strange. The currently-kaput "Suggest to Friends" link has been like that since December, 2009. Stranger still, despite repeated reporting of the same bug and several application developers threatening to go off the facebook platform, the facebook team has not yet fixed it - 5 months later. Amid all the complaining app devs, was the expected conspiracy theorist, who claims it has something to do with Zynga (of FarmVille fame) paying facebook to disable the feature so no other apps can get as popular as theirs.

So anyway, till they fix it, stop being lazy and send a message to those friends with a link to the TiR facebook page, and ask them to become fans. *Jedi mind trick*

In an attempt to make life easier for whatever few fans I do have, I have also started experimenting with building a facebook canvas app (like the aforementioned FarmVille) that sits on your profile. Ideally this app would inform you whenever there is an update to the site. I've made a little progress here, but the facebook API documentation is not very good, and examples are usually dated. I'll let you guys know when I've finally managed to build something useful for your profile pages. Until then, this is Roach, signing out.