Monday night at 8:23pm, in the Palliative Care section of the University of Iowa Hospitals in Iowa City, my mother, Mary Albers, slipped quietly from our world and into God’s hands. It is difficult to moment to describe, but was certainly the weirdest, yet most awe inspiring moment I have ever witnessed…and one will never forget.

Mom waged a long battle with congestive heart disease, following a bout of Rheumatic Fever brought on by an untreated case of strep-throat back in the late 1950′s. Rheumatic Fever is responsible for many of the cases of damaged heart-valves worldwide, of which the late Lou Costello was also a victim. Mom had elected for open-heart surgery nearly six weeks ago, but her physical strength was not enough to allow her the opportunity to recuperate. She was simply too weak.

This will be a difficult time for surviving family. Although we have always lived our lives with Mom’s serious health issues hanging above our heads, we had all (including Mom) chosen to do so to the fullest regardless. Her absence will be sorely missed, yet will be a continuing testament to those who refuse to sit on the sidelines and allow life to pass them by. I pray that we all have the opportunity to be that strong in our faith.

NOTE: Funeral arrangements have been finalized for Mary with visitation set from 4:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 24th at Phillips Funeral Home in Keystone and the Funeral at St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Van Horne at 3:00 p.m on Friday, July 25th.  The Committal Service will be at the Keystone Cemetery after the Church Service and a lunch will be provided back at the Church following the Committal Service.  Further information may be found on Phillips Funeral Home web site!  Please continue to keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

We thank all of you for your continued support

I am a geek by nature, so I browse many geek-related websites: engadget, ThinkGeek, Wired or Switched. During the last couple weeks my kids were back with during the summer, we became fascinated with the craziest commercials we had ever seen. The folks at HowStuffWWorks released one of their first television commercials featuring the nearly impossible: a scuba-diving cat.

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A couple of weeks ago, I became frustrated with Motorola RAZR and decided to upgrade my cellphone to the new Motorola RAZR2. I loved my RAZR, but it was past its warranty and its main screen was constantly blank. When I upgraded through Verizon, I decided to try out Verizon’s Mobile Web package. To my surprise, many of the websites I visited were not optimized to be viewed through a WAP enabled phone. This meant that the websites didn’t display properly and navigating them through my cellphone was an absolute pain.

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For those of you struggling with podPress, wait to further. Well, you’ll have to way anyway, but here’s some things you should know:

FeedID: You’ll have to wait. It takes time for Apple and iTunes to check out your podcast. For me, I had to wait 3 days before I received a reply from iTunes regarding my feedID. Of course, that doesn’t mean podcast can be found on iTunes.

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On another website I manage, we have been toying around with the idea of podcasting a few of the audio and video tracks we have accumulated over the years. The only problem is this: How in the heck does one ‘podcast‘?

Now, some of my friends have done it with much success (of course, because I’ve downloaded them all to my iPod). So, the task was to determine the best way to use WordPress with some sort of PodCasting plugin that would give us exactly what we needed. With as much programming experience I have, I never felt that I would not be able to determine the best solution.

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