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.

LJC and Tomo

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.

Dinosaur BBQ Panorama
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?

After a lot of deep soul searching, I suspended this semesters studies at Cornell. It wasn’t an easy decision. But for the last few weeks I’ve felt stretched to the maximum. The eight hours of commuting time was an absolute killer. I was also *just barely* keeping up with the reading. Add onto that trying to do a good job at RIT and being able to support Drea — well something just had to give. And Cornell was that something.

It was a difficult decision. The right decision, but difficult none the less.

I’m going to try to keep on my reading schedule. I mean, I bought the books! And I’ll be reading them next year. So I might as well get on it and start my immersion in those texts. Especially since I’m hoping to continue researching throughout this year.