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Marisa: A little girl's fight to live

The Bayport 5-year-old is sleeping on one side of her parents' bed. Her mother, also asleep, lies beside her. On the other side, doing his best to stay awake at 3:08 a.m., is Marisa's father.

A ghostly glow fills the master bedroom as he clicks the TV remote with his thumb, listlessly flipping channels. The two-story, pale-yellow suburban home, set back on a neatly mowed lawn, is still.

MORE: Complete project | Inside Marisa's brain

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

When the piercing alarm sounds and red lights flash, Bill Carney isn't startled.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

"Wh-what is it?" asks his wife, Danielle. She lifts her head off the pillow, but her eyes are still closed.

"Relax," Bill murmurs as he walks around the bed and presses a button on a machine to end the racket. He's not surprised that the lights and siren failed to rouse his daughter. The alarm, sometimes triggered a dozen times a night, has lost its shock value.

"Marisa honey, wake up. C'mon baby, you have to wake up," he says, shaking her leg.

Half-asleep, Marisa, wearing a pink Tinkerbell nightgown, pushes herself into a sitting position.

She's in danger -- again. There's too little oxygen in her body; too much poisonous carbon dioxide. The monitor hanging from the bed's wrought-iron headboard says the CO2 level is 69 percent -- about twice what it should be.

"It's weird," says Danielle, now on alert. "Did the tube get knocked out or something?"

Bill disconnects his daughter's lifeline, the 4-foot-long plastic breathing tube that runs from the hospital-grade ventilator on the nightstand to the hole in Marisa's throat. He cleans out the moisture inside the tube, then reattaches it, covering the connection with a leopard-print ribbon -- Marisa's favorite -- that he ties into a neat bow.

"I'm going to bump it up," Bill tells his wife.

"Put it on 18," Danielle advises.

"I know, I know."

He pushes more buttons on the machine, increasing the number of "breaths" that fill Marisa's lungs from 16 to 18 per minute.

The parents hover over their daughter. The blue light coming off the monitor shines on their worried, weary faces.

"Forty-seven," Bill says, reciting the CO2 number.

A few more tense minutes pass. Marisa has already fallen back into a deep slumber.

cfpwhuky: 0 5 Cm Graph Paper

This is a little more out there but my friend has a theory that Apple has let Kevin Smith use the new Final Cut to cut and make his new film that is coming it. The importance of this is that he feels movie making is going the way of music making these days. He believes anything under 20 million is going to be funded independently, not released via movie studios and will sell the movies directly to the theaters. No good, clear reason. It's just that Front Row usually goes along with PhotoBooth, so.... Also, it seems that Apple might be really pushing iChat with Leopard, especially video chatting, and the iMac, MBP, and MB all have iSights. It doesn't seem too crazy to believe that perhaps Apple wants a built-in camera in all of their hardware. In the case of the Mac Pro, Xserve, and Mini, the natural place for such a device is a display. This is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. Hardware companies don't want to release multicore hardware b/c no software is out to support it and software people don't want to ship multiprocessor software b/c no multiproc hardware is out. Since there are a few multiproc computers out now, some software companies might start multithreading their apps, most people probably don't have it them yet. Also, some apps won't really benefit from being multithreaded. Take a basic calculator. Why would you really need it to take advantage of multiproc computers? It isn't that processor heavy to do 2+2. AV software, like iTunes, Final Cut Pro, etc., could greatly benefit from multiproc systems. One core can do the audio while the other does the video for FC or iTunes could use one core for playing music and the other for ripping. That said, sales wise iPad will be king of the castle for quite some time. You can't really price the apple ecosystem, or beat the usability of iOS. iPad definitely has the mindshare, which is what you need in emerging markets. Take a look at the category definers Apple has introduced. Basically they set the standard for whatever market they are in (with exceptions for a few). Xoom is NOT a terrible product, but to be called the BMW of tablets would require that it is better than the iPad. This is more like Hondas and Hyundais. Android tablets are currently the Hyundais -- trying to copy the Hondas as closely as possible (Hyundai's name is close to Honda and so is there logo, and so are most of their car styles).

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