Just received this mass email from from my step-father, Larry, this evening.

Welcome to the Albers Family roller coaster ride! Mary was admitted at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics in Iowa City on May 27th as scheduled. However, several days later, she started having kidney issues, probably due to the dye from her cathiterzation the previous week and her liver was still not getting rid of the toxins as needed. They placed a cathiter in the right side of her neck on Thursday evening to monitor her heart output on both sides. She was moved to the CVICU Unit, which gave her constant care.

Last Friday evening, I was told by the CVICU Cardiologist, who is also a Heart Failure Specialist, that surgery was probably not an alternative and that she had a limited time to live. I contacted all family members and a conference call was held on Saturday morning with a decision that we all meet with this Specialist on Sunday evening at the Hospital. At that meeting, she was asked specifically if surgery was at all possible and her answer was NO. She then informed Mary about not having surgery and the family was going to work on other solutions such as hospice, etc. This was started during the day yesterday with several conferences involving family members. We contacted Oldorf Hospice House in Cedar Rapids and arranged a meeting involving Mary in her room this morning.

However, I encountered the Surgeon, Dr. Helman, in the corridor last evening and he asked why the Heart Failure Cardiologist aborted the surgery and I gave him multiple reasons including over 50% failure possibility along with other bad case scenarios, even if the actual surgery is a success! He stated that we should possibly re-visit surgery as he had a somewhat different view of her situation. She had gotten better than she was on Friday evening due to adjustment of medication. But he also stated that it would be very, very difficult due to her complicated overall condition.

This morning, Oldorf Hospice House in Cedar Rapids visited with Mary about going that route, but later in the morning, a Social Worker asked her about having surgery, if it was possible. She opted for surgery immediately, so we arranged another meeting with the current Heart Failure Specialist on duty this evening to explain directly to Mary and the family members again as to what future problems she may face, even if she makes it thru surgery and recovery.

She again is steadfast in wanting surgery against very great odds so is being transferred tomorrow morning to the pre-surgery unit. I will let everyone know when the surgery is scheduled, unless something else gets in the way beforehand! I hope this clears up some of the confusion that has been stated around the community the past several days, but ultimately, possible surgery or no surgery is Mary’s decision.

Please keep her in your prayers and thoughts as she is in need of as much spiritual help as possible.

~Larry Albers

In order to get my kids (Jared and Haley) accustomed to life in Iowa City, I have set them upon a task. Now, this task (or series of tasks) is to take personal pictures of each purchasable land-item on the actual Iowopoly board game.
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It’s early Wednesday morning and I have finished tackling the mind-numbing task of upgrading my WordPress engine to version 2.5. Not only that, I’ve finally uploaded some of my blog’s pictures that were missed when I transferred this blog over to my new domain.

This should be a fine summer; with my kids with me for almost seven weeks this year. It’ll be different than previous summers since I am not living in Van Horne. Living in Iowa City should be really good for no only myself, but the kids as well. I’ve already planned a series of events to get them accustomed to the downtown area. I have the kids making periodic trips to downtown Iowa City (only a few blocks away) to take snapshots of the real locations depicted on the University of Iowa‘s version of Monopoly. The entire family has been playing Iowaopoly for a couple years. I’m looking forward to see how the pictures turn out.
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It’s been a busy semester as Team Wombat has been working at a feverish pitch in order to successfully complete their senior design project: The RFID Hacker.

For those that don’t visit this blog often, our senior design project is a device that will read and write RFID tag information. What is RFID? Well, you know when you walk into FootLocker at the mall and the security alarms go off? That’s an RFID tag system. The book you bought at Barnes & Noble still have an active RFID tag embedded in the spine of the book because the bookstore clerk forgot to disable the RFID tag. An RFID tag is much like an electronic barcode, except you don’t need to wave a laser at the purchased item in order to determine it’s sale price.

Why build an RFID hacker? Well, RFID is used for security purposes and we at the University of Iowa Engineering College have an RFID security ID card so that we can access the Seamans Center during off-hours. RFID technology is great, but since it is an open-source technology, almost anyone with enough time and electronics background can defeat RFID security measures.

So far, our project is going well. We’ll be populating our 2nd printed circuit board throughout the upcoming weekend, not to mention the final project report AND a huge poster for our final presentation. For more information regarding our progress and more about RFID technology, visit our senior design project website here.

For my University of Iowa Intermedia I class, I have been determining exactly what my final project will be. After attending several lectures, I have decided that my final presentation will have SOMETHING to do with Processing 1.0 [Beta].

For those that don’t know much about programming languages or art, Processing 1.0 is a visual designers dream… especially if programming is not your bag. In a nut shell, Processing 1.0 is a Java overlay. Think of all the visual classes or objects you wanted to design, but simply didn’t have the time. You slugged your way through the incredibly difficult task of creating Java screensavers and GUI interfaces, all the while saying to yourself, “Man, there has to be a better way.”

Well, along come some brilliant people at MIT who loved Java’s object oriented programming style and write-once methodology, but were more interested in creating visually stunning objects and classes. But, like you, thought Java sucked in that regard.

I am currently reading Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists.

It’s a good read and wonderful tutorial for those interested in both graphic arts and computer science.

Check it out.

It must have been a freak of nature or a massive aligning of the planets that allowed my University of Iowa Spring Break to coincide with my kids school break. But nevertheless, it did happen and my kids and I were allowed a weeks worth of chilling around my parents house for seven days.

As usual, it was a fairly relaxed week in Van Horne. This was a particularly different Spring Break, as we were getting accustomed to the new life my Mom and step-father, Larry, are getting used to themselves following Mom’s release from the University of Iowa Hospitals.

Haley did what she does best: bake. Not only did she mix together a wonderful pan of brownies, but she slapped together a batch of chocolate chip cookies that barely made it through the night without being entirely consumed. I spent a considerable amount of time in front of my PowerBook G4 laptop; programming a Java-based peer-2-peer Chord network simulator. What? Yeah. I’m a geek. Ask me about it later.

The week ended with the kids and I hooking up with the gaming friends (including Brian and Danuuc) of mine at Gamerz in Cedar Rapids. As has been typical since last October, the night was spent fragging our beloved friends in an all-out competition of Battlefield 2. I’m not sure why we like this particular game so much. Perhaps, it’s the right mix of pace and patience. It’s not the ‘twitch’ game that Unreal Tournament is, and not as mind-numbing as multi-player Quake 3 can be.

Jared held his own, switching teams more often than I switch subjects in the middle of a sentence. Well, that’s an overstatement. As the night wore to a close, both Jared and Haley teamed up with me against a more experienced three-person team. We did just fine as far as I am concerned. Apparently, my daughter is a veteran of Gears of War, so her ‘Medic’ persona worked well with my ‘Support’ and Jared’s ‘Sniper’ perfection.

Now if I can only get a job that pays well enough to fortify a basement full of gaming PC consoles.

We can only hope.