3MF

Michael Flickinger, 1948-2006

Back on November 28, my father celebrated his 58th birthday. Ever since leaving Mary Free Bed Hospital, he has been living at home in the front room on the hospital bed procured by the VA. He still enjoyed playing the Tiger Woods golf video games with his friends that would stop by and also watching all of sports channels on the big screen. For his birthday we got him DVDs and various editions of the Scene It board game that he could enjoy from his bed.

It was a few days later that he started making an occasional comment that seemed to come out of nowhere. Occasionally he would just space out. It became clear that he wouldn't be able to play with his birthday gifts. As the days progressed so did his confusion. At one point i saw his try to make a phone call with the television remote. He would ask my mom "do you see the man watching television with me" where there was no one else in the room. His has shook to the point where he would spill any water he tried to drink. My mother would feed him but eventually his appetite disappeared. By the middle of December he would eat very little and was only away for 2-3 hours a day.

Today i got a call from my sister to come over because he wasn't doing so well. When i got there, my sister, mother and uncle were sitting in the front room around him. He became very quiet. We each took turns putting out hand on his chest to see if we could detect a heartbeat or any signs of breathing. We couldn't tell if he was live or dead. At around 6:40pm we called the Hospice nurse who was supposed to be stopping by later in the evening to perform an evaluation. He told us to hold a light up to his eyes to see if we could detect a response. After we held open the eyelid, the light revealed frozen pupils. That's when we knew for sure that he was gone.

A flood of activity followed. The nurse arrived 30 minutes later to confirm our suspicions. Because my father had not been formally admitted into the Hospice program at the time, we had to contact the police to make the pronouncement. First an ambulance arrived. The paramedics hooked up a LifePak which showed the flatline pattern often seen on television emergency room dramas. They made a print out and waited for the police to arrive. When the officers came, they made a phone call to the medical examiner and the hospital to actually make the legal pronouncement. Around this time a handful of relatives also began to fill the house. Finally, the funeral home arrived to take the body away around 9:00pm. They lifted his body off the bed onto the stretcher and rolled him down the wheelchair ramp that he last rolled up on his return home from the hospital.

Thus the final chapter in my father's fight with cancer has been written. His passing was very peaceful (almost undetectable). Even though you can never be truly prepared, we at least knew it was coming soon. I would like to thank everyone who has been so supportive during this difficult time. Hy heart goes out to the many other families struggling with this terrible disease.

Merry Christmas Cookies

I hope every one had a wonderful Christmas. I thought i would share some of my favorite cookies i decorated this year along with my mother, my sister, and my sister's boyfriend.

What's with today, today?

Who would have thought that the hardest part of exam week for me would be remember when my exams were. I knew that i had an exam today at 6pm for which all i had to do was hand in an essay. I scheduled a few hours to finish up the remaining 700 or so words i had left to go before the exam. I chose to spend my extra time with some folks on campus to work on the last Calc assignment that would be due before tomorrow's exam. When i got there, i ran into a classmate from a different class who asked if i was ready today's exam. I was confused because i thought that exam wasn't until tomorrow as well. It turns out i just got it all flipped around in my head. I had to quick cram for an exam at 4pm. Unfortunately for me i did not have that book or notebook on hand plus i still had to find time to get that essay done. I think i was able to make it work but my grades for both classes will probably reflect my forgetfulness.

Proof by projector

I've always been interested in how a choice of medium effects how a particular message is sent. How does one capitalize on the strengths and weakness of a particular medium. What makes a great Powerpoint, brochure, website, flyer, etc.. It started at work when I was given printed information that people wanted put up on the website. That often would involve rewriting the copy or designing a new layout that be most comfortable on the web.

I also started thinking about this in my Calc class. As students, we had to write up our proofs on transparencies and place them on the overhead projector when sharing our answers. This was to save time from wrting out the problem on the board because some of the results were quite lengthy. I started out writing the proofs on transparency just as i would type it if i were to turn it in. Through the semester i learned that it seems to more more difficult to understand a proof projected on a wall than one that you can hold in your hand. I wondered if there was a better way to present a proof in the medium of transparencies versus a text-only written proof.

I thought i would share my experiment. I typed up a proof for my notes and also made a transparency with the same result. We had to prove that the limit of x² as x approaches a is a². With the typed version i used the same style i would if i had to turn in the proof for a grade. With the transparency version, i tried to use color and design to highlight the important ideas of the proof. It's much easier to draw pictures on a transparency so i tried to take advantage of that opportunity. I tired to make it less wordy. I wanted something that could be quickly digested.

In the end, i'm not sure which method is more effective (but i do know which was more fun to do). Now that the class is over i'll never have to make another transparency again. I suppose i'll let someone else worry about what makes a transparency effective.

Cut it out

Apparently i'm a little late but i would like to go on record as saying those Discover Card commercials with the swarms of scissors walking the sidewalks creep me out. I would not feed them credit cards. They will only get bigger. Once they're powerful enough, they would surely attack their nemesis Rock and then proceed to wiping out all of human civilization.