ljc and Aaron’s Hal­loween dinner was last night. A great time was had by all! We’re all trying to get the sauce recipe — a secret that Aaron’s grand­fa­ther made him swear not to share under the threat of “dying ’till he’s dead.”

On Monday, at approx­i­mately 10.00pm, the Rochester cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism site Rochester Turn­ing broke the news the state is part­ner­ing with Patec to help absorb the costs of demol­ish­ing Rochester’s Mid­town plaza to make way for a new cor­po­rate head­quar­ters for Patec. Spitzer made the announce­ment on Tues­day. Today it was the lead story in the D&C.

The announce­ment is huge for the region, as it means at least 600 jobs moving into down­town, a major employer keep­ing it’s hq in the area, and an end to the ongo­ing saga of what to do with Midtown.

Its also sig­nif­i­cant from a CJ per­spec­tive. Rochester Turning’s post was a day and a half ahead of the D&C. This may be the fur­ther­est a local CJ has been ahead of the tra­di­tional press. The ques­tion is now will RT get cred­ited with break­ing the story? Noth­ing was men­tioned in the D&C arti­cle about the posting.

As for me, I learned about it through an e-mail list that quoted the RT article.

This past week­end was the Renais­sance Mar­tial Arts fes­ti­val, an event we’ve been run­ning out of our Kung Fu school for the past 7 years. Below is a slide show of pic­tures from the fes­ti­val. Since I was typ­i­cally behind the camera I only appear in one of these pictures.

Flickr con­tin­ues to impress me. While it has some draw backs, gal­leries that used to take me hours, if not days, come together in under 60 min­utes. Which is a nice thing, espe­cially since my work as the RMA web­mas­ter is purely voluntary.

LJC orga­nized “Mex­i­can Museum Night” in honor of an exhibit of Mex­i­can Wrestling Pho­tog­ra­phy that just opened at the East­man House and a show of Latin Amer­i­can and Latino art at the Memo­r­ial Art Gallery.

Dre and I agreed that, of the two shows, the MAG’s TRANS­ac­tions: Con­tem­po­rary Latin Amer­i­can and Latino Art, is the one to see. While I loved the Mex­i­can Wrestling photos, that exhibit was marred by some of the worst sig­nage I’ve ever seen. Not only were the notes writ­ten in incom­pre­hen­si­ble aca­d­e­mic speak (and I’ve read many of the works they were ref­er­enc­ing), but they were full of typos and mis­pellings (enough that I even I noticed). It was pretty embar­rass­ing all things considered.

TRANS­ac­tions, on the other hand, was uni­formly excel­lent. The art was really chal­leng­ing (its one of the more “gutsy” shows I’ve seen at the MAG) and the pre­sen­ta­tion was excellent.

After the muse­ums, we headed across the street to Selena’s. Aaron’s new friend Domo came along for the ride. Unforunately, when Aaron’s back was turned, Domo got a little frisky with Jenny. I’ve been told that Domo has chalked up this unfor­tu­nate inci­dent to the booze.

This was the week of get­ting to see Inter­net luminaries.

On Wednes­day, Ze Frank lec­tured at RIT. Through­out the course of a very manic and funny talk, he shared his thoughts about the online con­tent space and dis­cussed his expe­ri­ences pro­duc­ing his daily video pod­cast, the show. Both his pre­sen­ta­tion and his ideas were excellent.

Then, thanks to Liz Lawley, on Sat­ur­day, Dre and I got the chance to chow on BBQ with Tech­no­rati founder Dave Sifry. It was an awe­some night of shar­ing ideas and great food. Dave and I had a great con­ver­sa­tion about some of the things I’m work­ing on with the Open Pub­lish­ing Lab. He also con­firmed that others feel the same rss guilt that I do when unread post counts get into the hundreds.

Dave’s shot of all of us.

Dave enjoy­ing some excel­lent ribs (shot by your’s truly)

Things have been really crazy. RIT has been taking more time than ever. And I’ve just not been able to find the time to write. I expect that should change in the next few days.

In the mean­time, I need help with some .htaccess redi­rects to synch up my RSS feeds. Anyone out there feel helpful?