The 36-hour MIT Simplicity Consortium Cape event was a great success. I've no time to thumbtype much, so here are captions to random photos from yesterday: 1) An Easter Tree seen at Talk of the Town diner at breakfast 2) Professor John Maeda kicks off the presentations 3) Legendary type designer Matthew Carter speaks on cultural influences in type design 4) John introduces my five-minute talk in channeling personas of older people for web site evaluations 5) The kite assembly "bar" 6-10) The flying of kites for the hour of beach meditation 11) The 8am Research Advisory Board meeting with Kevin Nolan from J&J joining from New Jersey via iSight/iChat. 12) An informal group workshop with Cory Kidd on using robots as weight loss coaches 13) John's former long-time assistant Heather Pierce and me.

- mike lee - falmouth, ma

Laura, Dennis and I arrived at the Sea Crest conference center in our rental car. A year ago, my drive was alone through a snow storm. But even sans snow, this place is pretty deserted as it's off season. Most of the conference attendees arrive tomorrow morning, but those that were here already, including Professor Maeda and people from Lego, Toshiba and some other companies went to dinner at RooBar City Bistro. Dinner ended promptly because the folks from Europe needed to catch up on their jetlag. And I had to go back to my room to work on a 5-minute PowerPoint talk for tomorrow afternoon.

- mike lee

After a long slog out through traffic on Rt. 66 Friday afternoon we arrived at our rental cottage, Lucky River Cottage, near Luray, Virginia. The cabin's deck overlooks a small waterfall. There's no T-mobile signal anywhere in the river valley around us, or in the town. We enjoyed a quiet two nights, nice breakfasts cooked by Cianna's Auntie Kate, and a first visit to Luray Caverns. Cianna is on her full dose of meds, but still having a dozen or so seizures a day. So we'll keep waiting for improvement. With the fam at home, I arrive at Terminal C via taxi to catch a flight to an MIT sponsor event at Cape Cod. I got a voicemail from my brother that someone tried forced entry into my mom's house last night. My mom watches Cianna a couple days a week, so that will make our planning more complex with her freaking out about her bad neighborhood, yet not wanting to move. Such is the life of the sandwich generation.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Cianna was eating strawberries for dessert tonight when a seizure hit. The medication is still keeping the number of occurances low, but instead of completely losing consciousness, she smiles and babbles through some of the episodes. In pic 3, she is holding onto my t-shirt to keep from falling. In the last pic, she is in mommy's lap as the seizure is logged in HanDBase on a Palm PDA.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

The new version of Katamari Damacy for the Sony PSP, Me & My Katamari, arrived from Gamestop today! If I didn't already own the PSP, I'd buy it just to play this game. I have it just in time for a long car ride this weekend and a plane trip next week. A mild bummer: Gamestop cheated me out of the collector's pouch.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I was on the living room couch posting a couple new family photos on Flickr when Cianna climbed out of bed to come see what I was doing. I showed her some photos and remembered that I hadn't shared the pic of Roxy posted here on hN.

Me: Hey it's Roxy! Cici: It's a cat. Me: Isn't that a cute cat?? Cici: It's a cat. Me: Ms. Regan sent you the cat! Cici: It's a cat. Me: OK, you're more of a dog person.

Cianna's doctor had us increase the dosage of her medicine ahead of plan today which reduced the number of her waking seizures to 5 from 18 yesterday! She will be on full dose by the weekend giving us high hopes that her condition might be totally under control soon.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

A heartfelt thanks goes out to all for the well wishes. Life is quickly getting back to normal in the Lee household. I was out into the wee hours last night to pick up Cianna's first batch of medication from the all-night pharmacy. Then I crashed into deep sleep. Cianna's grandmothers and grandpa visited today, and they made her laugh and smile a lot. Tonight, I managed to put together a Flickr gallery titled Cianna's Challenge of scenes from the last couple days. In the photos, you'll see Cianna's real achievement, which was, as an active toddler, staying in bed for two days with all kinds of electrodes and tubes attached.

- mike lee

For a time late this afternoon, the hospital room was silent except for the hum of the building's heating system, and the hiss of oxygen gas being released into the air. Cianna was taking a well-earned nap from the struggles of the day. It was in these quiet moments that Amy, my mom and I sat thinking about what it means for Cianna now that she has been diagnosed with epilepsy. She'll have to take medication twice a day for at least the next two years, and likely for the rest of her life in the hopes that, like many, she'll be able to completely control the beast. Hopefully, she'll be able to drive a car one day.

For the days and weeks to come, she'll continue having seizures until we arrive at the correct composition and dosage of medication. I cradled her tonight for two of her sets of seizures, one time in bed, and the other in the pediatric ward playroom where she slumped forward to the floor while pushing a toy. Each attack was a punch in my stomach that pushed tears up into my eyes.

But Super Girl is pushing back on the lapses of consciousness. In the playroom, she started a heaving cry of frustration in between the seizures as if she was trying to push them away. I think this otherwise life-loving girl doesn't want to be cheated out of even some tens of seconds of life experience. There are too many flowers to smell, books to read, balls to toss, hugs to give, spoonfulls of ice cream to eat.

I've only had an hour of sleep in the last two days, so I'm signing off...

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Cianna has been having mild seizures since the weekend. The episodes started with rapid horizontal eye rolling that would last for a minute or two followed by disorientation. By Tuesday, she would go limp for 5 minutes each time, and the seizures were happening serially (several in a row). All this was enough to scare the piss out of us. A trip to the emergency room on Monday didn't coincide with any seizures, but finally yesterday morning Cianna's mom got into see a neurologist and he saw two occurances. Cianna was admitted to the hospital yesterday (1-2, pics I saw via e-mail), so I decided to leave my conference early to take a red-eye out of San Jose through Vegas (3-4) to BWI. It was a comfort for me to get a briefing from the neurologist this morning. His opinion is that this is some form of mild epilepsy, and we'll need to do EEG and MRI under anesthesia today in order to get the data required to decide on a plan for treatment. Mommy is worn out from three failed EEG atempts yesterday afternoon where each time Cianna threw a fit. So all is quiet at the moment. Cianna is whining for ice cream and watching The Iron Giant DVD (5). She calls her IV splint "robot hand" (6).

- mike lee - rockville, md

Over the remains of a buffet lunch, Stanford University President John Hennessy kicks off the 4th annual Media X Conference on "People, Technology & Innovation." The audience is a brainy blend of Stanford researchers, corporate sponsors, venture capitalists, and others. Attendance has doubled over last year, so we're all in the Arrillaga Alumni Center.

- mike lee - stanford