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What a mess. Eight lane bridge, thankfully with four lanes ripped up for construction, plummets into the Mississippi River. I drove over that bridge the morning of the day it collapsed. I'm thankful that I took a different route home, and did so before the collapse. It is odd, and frightening, to think that I've driven over that bridge twice nearly every weekday for at least a couple years just commuting.

My thoughts go out to anybody else in the cities, especially those who were involved, their families and friends. It's a total mess, for sure, and I'm thankful and amazed that the death toll currently stands as low as it does. I'm also, in a way, happy to see how everybody responded, with those in the mess that by some miracle weren't injured when falling some 50+ feet helping those that were.

Yes, you. You do not have a right to not be offended. I do have a right to say what I please. Deal with it.

Yow! A couple of my co-workers took me to their gym to play handball today. It's actually a pretty popular game around the office, I know of at least half a dozen people that play regularly. I figured I'd give it a try since I'm good at games which require hitting a ball with a racket of some sort, like tennis, badminton, and I've played a little racquetball. The racquetball definitely helped with the ball bouncing around off four walls thing, but nothing prepared my poor hands for the beating they'd get. Actually, the racket sports hurt me a little too, as I was often about a foot out of reach of the ball, but good placement if I'd had a racket.

Anyway, I have those nice soft sits behind a desk all day programmer hands, and that ball is awful hard. I walked away from my first handball experience with a rather swollen hand. I heavily favored my right hand, though I got a few decent returns with the left. It was a tad rough getting the glove off though. About five hours after the game it's still somewhat swollen, but I can make a fist again, so that's good. We'll see how bad it is tomorrow.

I've declared that my laptop isn't coming back, so I'm selling off component parts that are in working condition. To the best I can tell, the IDE controller on the laptop failed, preventing it from seeing the DVD and hard disk drives. It still booted from floppy, just couldn't find the fixed drives. Was too old to want to boot off an external drive, too. A shame.

I'm going to be trying to sell the parts to offset the cost of the next laptop, so if anybody has need of the below parts, make me a reasonable offer via email and maybe we can work something out. If I don't hear calls for parts soon I'll just toss 'em up on eBay or something. I'll get proper part numbers and pictures up when I have a second. Many of these parts should work in similar models too. Oh, and the display is really nice at such a high resolution. Color is a little washed, as it always was, but the space for working in is just great. Don't know if the connection from the panel is specific to the video card. Anyway, here's the list:

Display Panel. 1600x1200. Good condition, has minor mark from the eraser pointing device and a couple little marks from the keyboard.
Geforce 2 Go 32 MB graphics card.
Keyboard. Good condition, a little bit of shine due to wear on some of the keys. Eraser pointing device worn down, but replaceable.
Floppy Drive. Perfect, barely used.
8x DVD drive. No write capabilities.
Wrist rest/trackpad piece. Good condition.
Colored wrist rest inserts, purple, yellow, dark grey, and dark blue.
Power bezel. Includes all the buttons.
Power button circuit board.
NIC and modem module. Think this is mini-pci.
RAM. One each of 128 MB and 256 MB PC-133 SODIMM.
Power adapter. I think it's 70W.
Battery. Doesn't hold much of a charge.
Mobile Pentium III 1 GHz. Looks like this comes out, but haven't removed yet.
Heatpipe assembly for cooling the processor.
Fans for cooling the heatpipe.

Well, well. I've found the internet channel on the Wii. This post has been made in its entirety on the Wii. Typing with a virtual keyboard is somewhat a pain, but the word completion is nice.