I’ve been doing some more house cleaning on the site. Today, I added a category link to each post, added the display of the number of posts in each category to the sidebar and added a link to the main archive page just above the footer. Again, all fairly easy to do.

I woke up this morning, and fired up my laptop only to notice a strange pattern on the display. “WTF?,” I thought. Damn, I had broken the display sometime yesterday when the laptop was in my car. I think I must have set something on the top of it. Lesson number one learned: Don’t remove your laptop from it’s protective bag when transporting it. I had taken the laptop out so I could use the bag for my camera which I was taking some shots with. Ended up protecting the camera, but not the laptop.

I really thought I was out $1500 bucks to buy a new laptop. However, a friend mentioned that you can buy replacement screens for laptops. First, I had to figure out how to remove the screen. Apparently, they use all sorts of different displays in laptops of the same model, so you have to physically remove the screen to find the screen part number. My was a HSD150PK12. With some patience, a small Torx wrench set and some instructions on the web, I was able to remove the screen in about an hour.

I found a HSD150PK12 on ebay for $170 shipped. I’ll be psyched if this all works out. The screen is on order, so I’ll tell ya in a bit.

Top Tip:
I took several shots with my digital camera while I was removing the display — basically, any time I thought that I might get confused on how the parts are aligned. I learned this from working on automobiles (e.g., a carburetor has about 10 trillion small parts and springs).