Major progress in the push for an accessible campus! As of Wednesday:
- Access-related retrofit projects will have timelines attached, whether they're in response to a student request or just part of general improvements. They'll be somewhat flexible, but will provide a good way to track whether things are being done in a reasonable amount of time, or postponed and forgotten.

- Contractors will be held responsible for compliance. This is most relevant with respect to door parameters (size and weight and so forth). Projects will not be considered fully delivered until all doors have been checked for compliance by the contractor, and a written record will be kept of these checks.

This is *big* news. In more minor news, the two large (post-ADA) buildings that seem to have systemic compliance problems will be surveyed and brought into compliance. The general sentiment is that it's been long enough since they were completed that the vendors involved can't be billed for this, so this is being treated as a sort of cleanup, with the expectation that the second bullet point above will keep it from being necessary in the future. Wahoo!

Installing rmagick on OS X can be a major pain if you installed ImageMagick with fink. The solution is relatively simple, but I found a lot of different 'solutions' via google, none of which worked for me (including installing from source!), so take it with a grain of salt. You need to install the imagemagick-dev package; specifically, imagemagick10-dev, since imagemagick1-dev is compiled with HDRI support, which is incompatible with rmagick.

Similarly, on Ubuntu, you need the dev packages installed - both for Ruby and for ImageMagick. Off the top of my head, I believe these are ruby1.8-dev and libmagick9-dev, at the time of this post. Presumably this or something similar would work on Debian as well.

I went in for another round of implant testing and adjusting about a week ago. That means it's time for another episode of Pointless Rambling for Posterity!

We eliminated the tapering added to the high and low channels by the audiologist in Boston. When she added that tapering, she said it was pretty standard, and the audiologist in Chicago didn't seem to think it was that odd, so perhaps this is a progressively deaf vs. late deaf vs. born deaf thing; perhaps it's something else. In any event, my audiogram is now presumably flatter, though we didn't test it. I have already - two days later at the time of this writing - noticed a difference, though (and moreso a week later, as I edit this before posting).

The biggest difference I've noticed is in music, not speech. That's not to say that it hasn't made a difference, or won't make a difference, in my speech perception. (Edit: a week later, speech and environmental noises do sound more natural than before - less "bad radio".) But while speech perception is the primary benefit of an implant, subtle differences are more apparent in music and environmentals, simply because the signal is more complex and isn't quite as predictable. Most notably, a lot of what I've described in the past as "frequency squishing" - where the frequency range of a song seems compressed, making everything slightly out of tune and closer to a central pitch - is reduced.

The other interesting thing is that I think I'm now better able to verbalize my thoughts on implant/hearing aid integration. A number of people have asked me recently if I am interested in going bilateral. I do think bilateral is something that will become quite common in the future, and I am interested - but that time is not yet here for me. My aided ear is significantly worse, both objectively and subjectively, than my implanted side (can't really call it my ear, can we?), and having input on my left is still useful - for one thing, it makes sound feel more balanced and more natural. A CI on that side would probably improve things further. But at the same time, the sound I get from the two is quite different. Listening with just my CI is a bit like listening to your stereo with the subwoofer off. Or with just the subwoofer; the point is that it sounds a lot flatter. Now, that's not incredibly new - for a while, I could listen to music with the implant, but a lot of it just wouldn't parse unless I had my hearing aid on as well. What's new is that the hearing aid no longer sounds better in every instance than the implant; they complement each other nicely. The best example of this is the sound of a snare (or any drum with that post-attack sound). Initially, there's the hit, which has a bit of a tone to it, and is short. After that is the 'snare' part - the rattly bit. That's the bit my hearing aid doesn't (always) get, but the implant does. Conversely, my implant may miss the bass hit if it's subtle, but my hearing aid will not.

So for now, I'll continue to use a hearing aid on my unimplanted side. That also has the advantage of allowing for more improvements in implant tech while I wait. I suspect the impetus for finally going bilateral will be my left ear getting worse, and possibly - depending on the results of the myringoplasty investigation mentioned earlier - also my willingness to deal with infections in that ear (10 months infection-free in my implanted ear, and counting!), but there's no knowing when that will happen. And, of course, my health insurance may be in flux over the next few years as I switch from parental coverage to some combination of employee, grad student, and non-group (possibly CHIP?) coverage. But that's a whole different ball of wax, and probably better left alone for the moment.