First, my arm is much better. I have full range of motion now in the shoulder joint itself. After the doctor told me I could move it as long as I kept to a 1 lb weight limit it had a few ways that it didn’t like to move. After a couple times of reaching for something and having it pop rather painfully, it was suddenly able to move through the full range of motion and the popping quit and totally went away. I’m happy ;-)

The only thing still wrong with my shoulder is that the pin keeps the collar bone from moving as freely as it should be able to move. Things like I can take my left hand and move it over my right shoulder and actually place it on my back. My right arm can’t do that. About the time my hand reaches my left shoulder, the pin in my collar bone starts putting pressure on the bone itself (which doesn’t feel all that good). So, shoulder joint itself moves fine, collar bone/shoulder blade junction it limited in movement by the pin. All in all, I’m happy with the recovery.

Work this week was less productive than I wanted. I had to deal with lots of email that kept interrupting my ability to get things done. On top of that, the laptop I’ve been using was OK for email and things like that, but it was too wimpy for real work. That meant I had to log into other machines to do real work, and they weren’t always available. So, today I’m trying to get some real development work done. In order to make that easier, I went to Circuit City Thursday and bought a new laptop. The one I have now isn’t one of those small, light laptops, it’s a beast! But, it kicks ass performance wise. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful than my desktop machine at work (which is a couple years old now). The laptop I got is a p4, 2.4gHz, 512MB DDR 2100 RAM, 40gb disk, dvd/cd-rw, ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video (which Linux supports rather well, thank God) w/32MB video RAM, and the best part is the LCD panel on the laptop does a native resolution of 1400×1050 so I have *tons* of screen real estate :-) Between Thursday night and last night I managed to get it installed and working the way I want so that I’m ready to actually get to work on this thing now. My one bitch about it? It’s got a full sized keyboard. Between that little Vaio I was using and the keyboard I was using on my computer prior to my accident, I’m *tired* of readjusting to different keyboard sizes and layouts. Typos suck…

One of the things I did with this laptop is to finally track down the software I need to make full use of the things I own…I can play my mp3s and dvds on this thing under linux even though rh9 doesn’t ship with software to do that. Sshhh, don’t tell anyone that I like to be able to listen to and watch the shit I’ve paid for. RIAA can kiss my ass, fair use doesn’t mean shit to them.