Paging Tech Support, Line 1

Apart from my sprained finger, there's been another reason you haven't seen an update from me this week. What is the reason, you ask? My computer broke. My laptop, which brought me the Wikipedia article on differential equations as a study guide, which held over 3 kabillion songs, my portal to the world outside of Mudd, is gone. And we all mourn its loss.

...Okay, I'm being terribly overdramatic. In reality, the laptop is working fine, except for one little problem: the screen is black. If I could see the screen, all would be well in the world of computers. Unfortunately, the backlight has stopped working. (Definition for the less geeky among you: You know how laptop screens glow faintly? That's because the image is "written" on the screen, and then a very small, very bright light bulb shines through whatever image is on the screen, so that you can see what you're doing. If that doesn't make sense, think of it like this: It's like holding up a thin piece of fabric and shining a flashlight through it.)

Fortunately, this is Mudd. I had a cabal of computer experts who knew how to fix a computer. Unfortunately, none of their tricks worked. The uncrashable was crashed--including a rescue disk made with the specific intention of being uncrashable. Simple commands that the computer was given would fail in increasingly epic ways. I camped out in the East Dorm Lounge for several days, with my broken computer plugged into a borrowed monitor, backing up my computer, before I let anyone take it apart.

(As a side note, my finger was sprained and in a splint during all this time. I couldn't write because I'd sprained a finger on my writing hand, and now, I didn't have a computer. Fortunately, East Dorm is a veritable computer graveyard, so I'm borrowing someone else's old laptop until a better solution presents itself.)

Finally, after days of dealing with "Unspecified Error: Halting Copy," everything important (my music, my pictures, my writing, my math notes) had been copied over to my hard drive. After I was sure that nothing had been left out, I told a friend of mine (who, by this point in the year, had already fixed one laptop and taken apart his own several times), "If you get tired of doing your homework, feel free to figure out what's wrong with my laptop." He jumped at the chance to procrastinate meaningfully and spent an hour slowly dissecting my laptop's screen.

Then he came back upstairs to the room where we were studying with the proclamation: "I think it's your graphics card."

For those not familiar with the setup of laptops, graphics cards are glued into the computer, making them essentially unreplaceable. If you want a new graphics card, you generally have to get a new laptop.

This is exactly what I did. I have a new one in the mail, and this time, I decided the extended warranty was worth every cent.

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P.S. Look forward to my next update, "When Cameras Attack." I just got a new digital camera, and I will be using it as much as possible.