Last weekend Brody Brazil from Comcast SportsNet interviewed me prior to the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon that Sunday about the story of losing my hand.

The episode aired on NBC Bay Area TV last Sunday evening after the event and Brody kindly posted it to Facebook for all to view. I though he did a great job putting it all together.

You can view the video here: NBC Bay Area Interview

Last week our local newspaper ran an article about my story on the front-page, you can read the article online here: How a tragic fall turned into to an inspiring story

The journalist, Tom Barnidge, dropped by the house to interview me. He had heard I was competing in the Wildflower triathlon as a challenged athlete and had checked out my story on my blog and found it inspiring…every now and then he gets to do a human interest piece, so thought he’d write a piece about me.

I didn’t know when it was going in to print and the first I knew about it was from the Facebook updates and texts from friends saying they’d just read about me in the paper…bought a smile to my face.

I was invited to visit Brightworks in San Francisco by my friend and Founder, Gever Tulley.

Back in 2005 he founded Tinkering School, a summer school for children based on the belief that they can build anything, and through building, learn anything. He’s written a book, 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) and presented at TED a couple of times. And now he’s got his own extraordinary school.

The children were exploring a theme called “By Hand” and part of this was to see what it was like if you didn’t have a hand or perhaps what it was like if you had four. The children (of all ages 6-12) were incredibly creative, taping up body parts, adding articulating limbs to different parts of their body, seeing what it was like without a hand or just a few fingers.

I got a chance to come in and talk about my experiences and show them how I had adapted and used my different prosthetics for different situations. They got to see my high-tech, bionic hand as well as my low tech body powered hook.

It was great fun and they all made a card thanking me for coming in to visit.

Brightworks blew my mind, it was so unlike any school I remember from my childhood and all the children were so engaged and happy. Makes me wish I was a kid again!

A few weeks ago while I was in Toronto I connected with Rob Spence, a one-eyed film maker (see if you can notice his bionic eye in the photo) who is making a documentary on today’s cyborgs as part of a promo for the new video game Deus Ex Human Revolution.

He wanted to interview me on my experiences with my i-Limb hand and as curious as he was about my hand I was just as curious about his eye!

Rob damaged his eye in a shotgun accident as a kid and decided to have it removed a while back. Recently he worked with a couple of engineers to take a tiny wireless camera and build a bionic eye…it doesn’t connect to his optic nerve or anything, but it is really cool.

His documentary compares the cybernetics available in the video game Deus Ex, set in 2027, with state of the art prosthetics today to see how far away we are.

You can watch the video below, Rob did a great job and you’ll see a few segments of the interview he did with me.