The Macbook is indeed dead, meaning that I am less than two weeks from my first real chance at doing NaNoWriMo with, as my most viable portable writing instrument, a semi-functional (as in, the video adapter doesn't work with the OS, so the screen has interlacing and flickering issues) Sylvania g Netbook with a painfully small keyboard. I'm pondering an Alphasmart Neo, but it's seriously difficult for me to contemplate throwing money at more tech to solve only a tiny sliver of my problem. (On the other hand, the Neo solves that sliver pretty nicely, and is both cheap normally and on sale right now.)

I'm typing this on the Netbook, meanwhile; I haven't found my glasses, which went missing about a month ago, so the 7" screen is wearing on my eyes. It doesn't help that I'm nearing that bless-ed time of the month, and Sam and I had a lengthy, tearful exchange earlier involving (what else?) housework. I can hardly see the letters, and that means it's basically a bust. At least for tonight.

The evil and fail that was the shattering of the Macbook LCD has... been righted. Not entirely, and that will happen, mind, but at least I have something to work on, now.

For those who wonder to themselves, "How the eff did she let that happen?" (which is probably a few at least, since I was too PO'd to talk much about it at the time), I will tell you: through a moment of utter klutziness and unfortunate timing/placement so unimaginable that I had not in fact imagined it until several hours after the event itself. Early the day of the fail, I leaned over to put something in the trash. My laptop bag shoulder strap had gotten wrapped around one of the casters on my office chair somehow, and this combined with the lean meant my chair toppled (rather painfully for me, I might add). It didn't register at the time that I fell on my laptop bag; no, that didn't hit until a full five minutes after I saw the gigantic maze of cracks all over my lovely LCD.

I immediately googled around to find out how much these things cost to fix, and proceeded to have a heart attack over the many forum posts suggesting that Apple charges about $900 to replace an LCD. Cue several phone calls to Apple, then their local retail store, then a visit: yep. Well, almost. $807. To replace one part of a computer I paid $1000 for. Uhm, no thanks.

(There was also a momentary spark of hope when - and yes, this sounds perverse - Sam got in a car accident which shattered the screen of his laptop, the Macbook Pro for his job. I thought our homeowner's had an annual, not incident, deductible, so Sam's misfortune could have at least meant we got something out of the money we shovel toward our house insurance. And also, P.S. Sam is fine, along with everyone else involved in the accident.)

Anyway, so after reading about replacing your own LCD, I troll around ebay looking for used LCDs. I get sniped three timed, and said EFF THAT.

So I started looking into subnotebooks. Turns out the Sylvania g Netbook was ultra-cheap, and also pretty functional in terms of specs - $299 for a 7-inch 1.2gHz machine with 1gb RAM, 30gb HDD, built-in webcam and card reader, wifi, and so on. It's tiny, light, and I'm perfectly comfortable typing on it.

So I bought one, but the bundled OS (gOS) is ass. (I've joked with Sam that the 'g' stands for 'ghetto-ass lack of standard UNIX commands'.) It was an extra-special pain in the ass getting it fixed and transitioned over to regular (rather than dumbed-down) Ubuntu. (I did have to hand it over to Sam for a ridonkulous bit of trouble trying to get it to boot from USB.)

Aaaaaanyway. Long story short, it's up, running, and Oh, goodness! It's happy. Here's how it's decked out at the moment:



Which is perfectly workable for me.

My short review: lots of complaints on the net about the following:
1. wireless not working right with WEP
2. small keyboard
3. tiiiiiiiiny little touchpad with sensitivity jacked to 11 by default
4. small screen

But I use WPA2 on my wireless network, so I've had no trouble getting my wireless to connect. I've similarly had no trouble typing or reading on the screen. I had some trouble with the touchpad initially, but once I killed down the sensitivity a bit, it works fine. PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR $299 JEEZ.

(And now that I feel like I've channeled Dinosaur Comix, I can sleep. G'night!)