Wow! Hello again. I've been gone for a while -- finishing A Book. (I'm at the capital letter stage.) It's almost done, so it's back to talking about cool tech stuff. You may remember, a few weeks ago, the implosion of the old Civic Center in downtown Raleigh. As implosions go, I'd give it only a few stars -- it wasn't a tall building, so it didn't fall inward in a big roil of dust, but instead just kind of collapsed like a big, concrete souffle that for years had hosted high school graduations and car shows.

Despite the fact that the Civic Center wasn't a big production number, it reminded me of how fascinating implosions are. Can you imagine the calculations and thought that goes into planning an implosion so that the building falls down in just the right way? Everything has to happen perfectly or instead of a controlled heap of rubble you have a mess.

Buildings are constantly being imploded, and as you can imagine it's a big-deal event. A lot of the implosions are captured on tape, and a lot of that video ends up on the Internet. Implosion World, at http://www.implosionworld.com/, has a huge amount of information on implosions. They have a photo gallery, video archives of past implosions, world records (can you imagine the implosion of a smokestack that's over 900 feet tall?), and a history of the demolition industry. And believe it or not, they also have a list of implosion Webcasts that go back to 1999 -- and some of them are still available to watch!

If Implosion World is a little too overwhelming for you and you want to see something a little closer to home, check out Phillyblast at http://www.phillyblast.com/. Phillyblast isn't as "slick" as Implosion World, but it's a fascinating diary of implosion witnessings through the northeast US, from the Jack Frost Sugar Refinery in 1997 to Veterans Stadium in 2004. In addition to the photographs and writeups of these implosions, the site also has links to sites relevant to the demolition industry and, I kid you not, four implosion screensavers.

Anybody with half an eye on the news knows that there's going to be a lot of changes in downtown Raleigh before all is said and done. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a few more big buildings cleared away for other development! But let's get that convention center up and going first...