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.

Thanks for everybody's help in the cookie adventure. The cookie party was a smashing success, resulting in several gross of cookies in my home.

The most successful gluten free cookie was the Gluten Free Pantry Chocolate Chip Cookie mix, which actually came out tasting pretty good, and did rise and set like some semblance of a cookie. Amazing.

Okay, so, the backstory. I'm hosting a cookie party. Entry fee, one dozen cookies. Lots of people come, lots of cookies are had. Everybody is happy.

Problem. One of my wife's (still getting used to that) coworkers' significant other has a wheat alergy. No gluten allowed. They weren't going to come, because what fun is it to be surrounded by tasty treats and not be able to eat any of them.

Solution. I know gluten free flour exists, know my local grocery store even carries it. Offer to make a couple batches of gluten free cookies. Yay, everybody is once again happy.

Problem number two. I made a test batch of cookies, to make sure they'd come out right. I added Xanthan Gum in a teaspoon per cup of gluten free flour ratio, to try to replace the gluten. The dough turned out sticky and tasted horrible as dough. The cookies cooked, spread out way too much, and stuck to my non-stick pans. The cookies tasted fine after cooking, but they didn't turn out right at all.

Can anybody tell me what's going wrong, or maybe just post a good gluten free cookie recipe or two? Thanks in advance.

Okay, so I've been back for a month. You'd think I would have found time to thank all the well wishers by now. Apparently not. So, formally, offically, thank you.

The wedding went off without any real problems. There was one little blip at the end of the night that was easily corrected, so I'm not going to count it. The ceremony went well, the dance lessons paid off for the first dance, and a good time was had by all. I saw some people I haven't seen in too long, and some that I see all the time. It was a great night.

The bride was, of course, absolutely stunning. I didn't look so bad myself. The wedding party was looking good too. Everybody had huge smiles on, except maybe my best man who was looking far too serious. Sadly, we haven't yet gotten the pictures from the photographer. We're meeting with him next week to pick which ones we want. I made sure to buy the copyright from him too, so perhaps I'll post a few of those pictures online as well.

Again, thanks all.

Well, I'm travelling off to another state where I'm going to be getting married this weekend. After that, the fun drive back, hop a plane, and away we go on our honeymoon. Hopefully it all goes off without issue. Whee!

Jeez. What's up with that? Where's all the time go? I suppose that with a new house, planning for a wedding, a couple business trips and no free time at work, and trying to hang on to something of a social life, there just isn't much time left for anything beyond eating, sleeping, and hygiene. Sorry to anybody that was remotely interested in my ramblings, either here or in other journals. Dead sun just plain hasn't been around.

Little brings so much joy as those little things that turn one's toilet water blue.

Yeah, I've been doing a terrible job posting anything I've been doing lately here, haven't I? I mentioned once, a while ago I was looking for a house and now I'm back stating I'm buying one. Imminently.

It's cute, a story and a half. Finished upstairs with half height walls before the slants happen, flat ceiling. Mostly finished in half the basement, just nothing covering the concrete. Just over quarter acre yard, nice deck, detached garage. The inside is all very clean and nice. There's a little work to be done, like the wallpaper upstairs must go, but nothing terrible. It's probably in better condition than my apartment, anyway. I'm also told there are hardwood floors hiding under the carpet.

My fiancee and I are, of course, incredibly excited. A place of our own, a chance to build equity, and all sorts of things we've wanted in a dwelling but haven't had at the apartment. We get to furnish it with real furniture. All sorts of stuff to be happy about. And, *sigh*, more sentence fragments in this post than you can shake a stick at.

I have some pictures of it up on my Flickr account. I'll post some more once I own the place.

Well, I pre-ordered one. They're nice looking, I've enjoyed a number of games on the DS that I'd like to own and play at my own pace, and don't own a DS, so why not?

Who'd have thought that house hunting could be so nerve wracking? Such large amounts of money, tight timelines, and difficult decisions. I can't recall a time I've ever been so tense.

Well, I went and used one of my Christmas gifts, a gift card to GameStop, to subsidise a portion of Kingdom Hearts 2. I started playing over the weekend, and well, when is the last time you've played a game with a three hour introduction/prologue sort of thing?

Seriously, it took me just over three hours to get out of Roxas and into Sora. Over three hours before Donald and Goofy show up. Three hours before I'm doing more than running the odd errand or beating people up in "Struggle". I don't mind in the least a little introductory period where commands are taught. I don't mind getting a little story out of the way early. But three hours of it? Oy.

I realize now I should have made a save immediately after becoming Sora and just not touched that. Too bad I've used that save a couple times afterwards.

Once I get down to business with the game itself, well, maybe I'll just have to post something on that too.