Guy Lunardi's blog

All,

I figure that many of you would be very interested to know how Tim and Maria are progressing on their way to China.

The preparation really started yesterday and continued on until 5:45am this morning when we got into the cars and headed up to the airport like Tim's latest update illustrate.

After a short drive to the airport, we loaded up all the luggages on a skycap's cart and rolled it to the International check in counter.

They helped us load and unload bags (not a small task) while Tim and Maria talked to the check in agent to get everything sorted.

I was extremely surprised how streamlined everything was while Whitney, Tim, Maria and I stood at the check in counter getting every bag labeled and readied for X-ray inspection. Tori was not agitated at all, she was even falling asleep in her chair while all this was going on.

Tim and Maria were joined by a cameraman from Fox13 as they arrived at the airport. He captured the entire check in process and went with them to security.

In order to actually make it through security in one piece, Delta had dispatched a person to help them with that. Very thoughtfully, he arrived with a TSA agent. Together they made sure that all the paperwork was in order. Tim managed to answer all their questions correctly and in no time they were on their way.

That's when Tim and Maria said goodbye to Whitney and I. They faded in the crowd heading to security as we walked out of the door.

Grandpa was not waiting for us outside anymore... He had been told by airport security to move the cars many times and had to drift all the way to the far end of the terminal. He whistled at us as they were about to tow our cars... Nothing at all considering what Tim, Maria and Tori are embarking into.

We had 2 very brief phone conversations with Tim after that.

1) He said that getting through security was quite easy and his tone of voice seem to indicate that as well. They were heading to the gate.

Tim, Maria and Tori met up with Fields Moseley and his crew of 2 News @ 10PM. They were at the house around 6pm. They asked questions and shot for a long hour before heading to "The Dance Club" in Orem in order to present live from there. This was on Channel 2 in Utah of course.

The piece aired on our beloved Tori Schmanski and her upcoming trip to China was fantastic. Grandma Schmanski, Tori, Maria, Tim and Brendan did very well in front of the camera. Whitney was at Dance at the time.

Here is the Link to the video on the kutv.com site.

Love,
-Guy

The Daily Herald published an article about Tori and her upcoming journey to China today. Tim and the rest of the family were interviewed recently regarding the stem cell treatment that Tori is scheduled to undergo in just a few days now.

You will find the article here.

From the article: "Tori Schmanski may not be aware of it, but she's about to go on a trip that could change her life." ...

The article is part of the Paper's top stories this morning and can be found at http://www.harktheherald.com/. You can read the posted comments on the article here from registered readers of the newspaper.

Happy new year to all of you and your loved ones. May it bring good health to all that we care for and Tori in particular,
-Guy

Tori truly enjoyed her evening today. Tim and Maria brought her to the 2006 Company Showcase from The Dance Club.

All of her dance friends were there, owning the stage and perfectly executing their numbers one at a time.

You will find some pictures I have taken during the evening here. Since we are moving, I didn't have anything adequate to take decent pictures but the subjects (read: dancers) were doing so well that some might just have turned out to be passable.

Looking back, one of my biggest regret is to never have made it to a dance exhibition Tori participated in (or going in The Dance Club).

Enjoy the pictures for those of you that were not there,
-Tori and Guy

Tim called this morning to let Sophie and I know that Tori and Maria had a very tough time last night.

They still can not figure out what is wrong with Tori. It was decided that she should be moved to Intensive Care. Tim's call came in at around 8:45am this morning while he was on his way up to the hospital.

Grandma and Grandpa Schmanski were able to follow shortly after as Sophie is going to be taking care of Whitney and Brendan today.

Tim was just telling me online that Tori's vitals are stable. she still has a fairly high fever but at least she is resting and sleeping right now.

We all are keeping her in our thoughts and hope for the better,
Be strong,
-Guy

Maria,

From the CVG airport I would like to wish happy birthday. May this upcoming year bring better luck than last.

Love you,
-Guy

Yesterday evening I sat foot in an American high school for the first time ever.

It was 7:15pm and my computer at work was crunching numbers so I was somewhat just sitting there. I remembered that Maria said Whitney would be dancing down in Spanish Fork that evening. Asking Sophie it turned out that the girls were expected to take the stage in the next 15 minutes or so. I left my office (computer still running) got in my car and drove to the high school.

How lucky is it that I got in the room as the group dancing before them was being applauded for their performance. I spent a grand total of probably 25 seconds waiting for them to take the stage.

Of course it goes without saying they did great and it looked like they were having fun. They stomped (heavily but not clumsily) loudly in there and the crowd really liked it I think.

I ran into Marilyn on the way out the room and we waited together for Whitney and the others to come out. Coming down to see Whitney dance was the reason for me to go. I will be away on a business trip for the next 4-5 weeks and I had not had a chance to see her for the past few days.

Marilyn and I argued for just a second about who Whitney should come back home with. I had to go back to the office so I had not thought about taking her home. Somehow a foreign distraction allowed me to sneak Whitney away :-). We stopped by my office to collect my things and went home. It was fun and we had a good time (plus she scored a Jelly Bean dispenser machine in the process).

Now onto the title of this entry: another reason for me to go visit the high school came up while looking for the address. I can across this text on their home page: "Congrats Mrs. Boyack--5A First Place Outstanding Advisor". Michelle is such a fantastic person somehow that was the last push I needed to get me off my chair and in my car.

Michelle, Marilyn not only you are great women, you also are great parents. Thank you for contributing so much around you. Seeing you Michelle up in the console box orchestrating the event and Marilyn chatting with me on our way out: you manage to make someone like me not feel completely out of place at a venue like last night. There is no wonder why your daughters are Tori's best friends. Thanks for being there for Tori!

Love, take care,
-Guy

I am being asked quite frequently what is running Tori's website. As a minimum tribute to all open source developers who made this possible I decided I would write a short Blog entry about it. Here it is:

• First, the site would not have been possible without the amazing creativity of Dries Buytaert. Project Drupal at http://www.drupal.org/ is used as the core web framework for the site.

Drupal being a very flexible platform we have added a bunch of modules to make it do what we wanted. Very little tweaking was actually required. Someone else already had done most of what we were trying to accomplish and we were able to benificit from their hard work.

Here are some of the most significant modules used:

• "blog": It allows Tim to post the daily updates and others to create content on the site as well.
• "comment": This is how most of you add content to the site. These comments prove to be fantastic and it could not be done without this module.
• "image": All those cool pictures of Tori would not be on this site if it wasn't for the image module. It has a simple interface allowing any registered user to upload an image to the site easily.
• "nodevote": Cool little module allowing users to vote on 'content'. We are using it to rate images. This is what was used to do the 'Pray4Tori contest'. Whitney and Guy still need to sit down to write up the results.
• "statistics": This module helps Tim and I keep track of site and you guys :-).
• "PHPTemplate" and "bluemarine": These are the Drupal extensions allowing pray4tori.com to look the way it does. The 3 columns layout was chosen to allow the extensive amount of content to be displayed easily on the front page.

While there are other modules in use, these compose the main platform for pray4tori.com. It's proven to be very reliable so far (**knock on wood**) which is a good thing since we don't backup enough. I rsync the file system to a backup machine everyday but I haven't found the time to automate the SQL database backup yet. It would only take probably 1 or 2 hours to figure out and do... That's 1 or 2 hours I haven't found yet :-(.

It is fair to say that the site has been in autopilot pretty since it was brought up. I would like to once again acknowledge Rob Perry for his role as art director and designer for pray4tori.com.

• Gallery | Your photos on your website. This is probably what I consider one of the most formidable pieces of web software that was ever put together. The project, 'Gallery' can be found at http://gallery.menalto.com/. Whenever you get redirected to a photo gallery for a lot of pictures: Gallery is behind it. I have been using it for many years and will continue to do so.

The site is hosted by the largest web hosting company for a very reasonnable monthly cost (my little contribution to Tori).
It's using:
- About 400MB of disk space (out of 30,000 MB).
- That's about 3,250 files (out of 260,000 allowed).
- Almost 15MB of SQL space - that is quite a bit (out of 100 MB).
- About 2 cups of coffee a day by Tim (in the morning).
- About 10Gb of bandwidth per month.

That's pretty much all I can think of right now (that's probably the finer air of Park City). I might update this list later but for now, that is it.

Thank you very much to all the developers who have contributed to the various projects used here: Linux Kernel, GNU tools, Apache web Server, MySQL database server, PHP language, Gallery, Drupal, Drupal modules, ImageMagick and many many more I forgot to mention.

Take care,
-Guy

Today, I got my share of medical attention. For the past 20 years I had been told to get my 4 wisdom teeth out. Never got around to do it until now.

What does it have to do with Tori you might ask?
Well, it's very simple.

After getting to the surgical dentist office, I was fitted with an oximeter finger probe, a blood pressure cuff, an intravenous line (IV) and oxygen nasal cannula.

These are all devices that Tori wore for way too long. It's hard to image what it was like to for her to endure these for so many days.

For example:
- I always wondered what it was like to receive a lot of oxygen though the nasal cannula. Because of hygiene issues, I never tried her's. But I was able to test it first hand today -- Not pleasant.

- I always tried to figure why she would get so upset when getting her blood pressure taken. The default settings on the automatic cuffs do have a serious squeeze.

- And the beeping!

Anyway, coming out of there, I forced myself to believe this dentist thing was just a walk in park and I should not complain about it. I am not talking about any freaky kind of pain transfer or other psychology issues you could think of. This is simply a learning and humbling experience.

Hopefully Sophie and I will feel good enough to go visit her again very soon. Maybe even tomorrow if possible.

Take care of yourselves and your teeth!
-Guy

Not only you Tor! We all need some sleep. Actually, I started writting this entry when I noticed that Shaid DePalma was still surfing on Tori's site.

It's a week night - It's well past midnight and you have school tomorrow: Go to bed!
I used to have to say that online to Tori fairly often. Hopefully she will one day be able to enjoy a computer again - We can't imagine how much she misses that.

Good night every one,
-Guy