It’s difficult for me to believe that we just finished week 6 at RIT. This has been the most intense quarter yet. In part that’s because it’s my last. Teaching one class for only the second time has contributed as well. But most of that time has been taken up trying to come up with ways to bring sustainable change to the School of Print.

Coming up with ideas has not been hard. It’s the doing and nurturing parts that take all the time.

One effort we’ve undertaken is to start a blog for the School. SPMEtcetera soft-launched earlier in the quarter. Our hope is to create a destination where the industry, alumni, and prospective and current students can discover all the neat things that are going on at SPM. The great part, from a sustainability perspective, is that all the writing is being done by student employees. We’ll make an official announcement about the blog later this week.

The other big project is the Open Publishing Lab. There will be a lot more about that soon. The good news is that over two years of planning will (hopefully) be coming to fruition in less than 14 days. We just need our teams to make it to May 3 and the innovation festival and then we’ll have a lot to talk about and show.

Sorry about that everyone. Sometimes I’m such a noob.

In my e-mail que this morning was an invite to reunion.com. It had been sent to me by an business associate. Being the Social Networking patsy that I am, I decided to go through the joining process. After registering, and avoiding the pay-to-play options, the website volunteered to search through it’s member database to see if any of my friends were already members. All I had to do was let it look at my g-mail address list. This seemed like a good idea at the time to my sleepy brain.

*sigh*

I unfortunately missed this little clause:

We’ll find your friends and family who are already members and also automatically invite any non-members to join (it’s free!).

I just failed the internet.

I also have a feeling that this “helpful feature” is going to create a lot of problems for reunion.com.

Update: as I expected the e-mails are beginning to flow into my inbox from folks who received the spam…

I’ve been testing the new Wordpress interface for a while and just think it’s da bombiest! The user interface is clean, the new functions rock, and the .php seems pretty optimized (everything running faster, even on my slow server).

It’s amazing to think that I’m already done with the first three weeks of my final quarter at RIT. It’s been intense — and the reason that I’ve not been blogging. By the end of this coming week, I’ll be able to premier all the stuff that I’ve been working on.

So I haven’t been able to update the site on any consistent base in a while. Life’s been really busy. Unfortunately, as of late, it seems like I only have time to blog around major, and often tragic, events. So, quickly (with RIT’s quarter drawing to its close, I have a mountain of grading to do) here’s some good things:

• My presentation at the American Anthropological Association’s national conference went well. It looks like I’ll get a journal publication out of it.
• The quarter itself has gone pretty well, in particular a lot of strides have been made at setting up a publishing research lab here at the school. More on that soon.
• Our (boy) cat Lewis, has made a full recovery after having two toes amputated because of a cancerous growth.
• I got a new phone/pocket pc, which has helped me get organized.
• I was a judge in a national variable data print competition.
• The blog helped me reconnect with an old friend.
• Dre and I are succeeding in getting out (and traveling) to see friends and family. At this rate, who knows, we might actually go on our Honeymoon this year.
• I was awarded my teaching rank (black sash) in Kung Fu.

I’m sure there’s more, but my timer is going off, reminding me that it’s time to get back to grading.

This past Sunday, Joe, my father-in-law, passed away. Joe lived very long and full life — in his 85 years he marched through southern France as an infantry man in WWII, graduated from RIT when it was downtown, participated in the atomic bomb tests in the southwest though the U of R, and been loved greatly by friends and family. As an amputee, he’s managed to live independently up until he went into the hospital two weeks ago. While its terribly difficult to say goodbye to him, he was facing a lifetime of pain and future amputations that would have taken from him the independence he held so dear.

I have more to write, but right now we’re planning for the funeral. It will be Friday at 10.00am at St. Joseph’s in Penfield. Here’s his obituary from the D&C. The online “guest book” can be found here.

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.

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?

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.

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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Last Friday 13 sutures came out of my finger and thankfully everything remained attached — I had been haunted by a cartoon image of the top of my finger flipping open as soon as the stitches came out.The healing has progressed really well; better in fact than my surgeon expected (how’s that for confidence in your patients). Due to the loss of tissue, the finger will most likely have an uneven look, but all and all he thinks everything should be o.k.

What has been a bit strange is the “hard candy shell” (comprised of dead skin) that’s formed over the tip of the finger. I’m told that it will peel off one of these days (the shell, not the finger). For the moment though, I can’t feel anything through it, which leads me to wonder how much of my sense of touch that I’ll have.

Still, I feel really lucky.

Especially since I’m forced to keep my middle finger splinted and held up high. Which is strangely therapeutic:

Oh, and in response to LadyGoat’s comment from a few days ago, I did a hell of a job on the bushes before the accident! Check out this artistry:

Ok, so now onto the nc-17 part of this post, if you dare, you can see pictures of the finger carnage. For everyone’s sake, they’re after the jump…
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