I’m back from vaca­tion, and sit­ting in my office trying to get used to my new Mac laptop. Our short vaca­tion was great. And Dre and I have passed the one-​year mar­riage mile­stone with no frying pans being embed­ded into my skull. Good times!

Here are some photos from today at RIT:

Tomor­row I’m at Cor­nell to start classes there.

Things are crazy. Dre and I are trying to sneak away for a few days. So I don’t expect to have any updates until next week. Then all hell will be break­ing loose as things are start­ing both at RIT and Cor­nell. Plus things with the Loop are going on as well. Fun, fun, fun.

Where did the summer go?

THE LOOP has soft launched. A news r&d project, run by Rochester’s Gan­nett paper, the Demo­c­rat and Chron­i­cle, the Loop is a col­lege focused news mag­a­zine. What makes it unique is that the end result has been devel­oped and cre­ated by a team of stu­dents from 8 of our area col­leges (basi­cally every­one but the Uni­ver­sity of Rochester). One of my stu­dents from the School of Print, Heather Hynes, is respon­si­ble for the visual design of the site.

My involve­ment with the project has been as an adviser and a researcher. Basi­cally, I’ve spent a few days a week in at the D&C sit­ting with the team, dis­cussing online con­tent pro­duc­tion, and get­ting their views on the news. This is all part of my ground­ing for the work I’ll be doing at Cor­nell. It also is mate­r­ial I’ll be bring­ing back to my courses this year at RIT.

Oh, and all the cool kids have installed the Loop Face­book App and follow the Loop on twitter.

I am find­ing that I need to learn to retype again. The left middle finger has no feel­ing in its tip (actu­ally in the entire high­lighted area) and my left hand isn’t let­ting it play in the typing games. That’s caus­ing me to get cramps from the weird con­tor­tions that the hand is making to work around the finger.

So this four fin­gered typing isn’t a viable long term solu­tion. I’m work­ing on get­ting the hand to “trust” the finger again. It’s tremen­dously slow­ing down my WPM. I’m basi­cally having to relearn how to touch type with one finger that doesn’t give a lot of feed­back about it’s rel­a­tive positioning.

It’s really strange to have to strug­gle at typing after so long. And it’s a lesson about how much we sub-​consciously rely on senses, like touch, to orient us in the word. This is such a little injury but its taking me a while to adjust to. I can’t imag­ine what its like for people who suffer major trauma.

For those inter­ested, there are more heal­ing pic­tures of the finger after the jump. It’s not gory this time. I promise.

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Just got the e-mail con­fir­ma­tion that I’ll be pre­sent­ing at the Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion (AAA isn’t just for cars) National Con­ven­tion this fall on my U of C bot’s research. This is awe­some news on mul­ti­ple counts! So DC here I come (at least in Octo­ber … make that December).