When they ask why I missed a guest speaker and an alumni panel discussion, I will tell them about the lovely donation I'm making on Sunday. What donation? Why, a brand-new 50 cm widescreen monitor I bought this afternoon at the Dubai Mall:
And why did I buy this monitor for AED 449? Because the one built into my laptop looked like this:
No, you're not going blind, and that distortion isn't a compression effect or camera artifcat. That's real. And that's why Duke will get the monitor when I'm done with it this week.
Sigh.
My laptop monitor has horked.
On the way over to Dubai, while hanging out at Logan, the monitor went from normal to slightly magenta and missing every fourth column of pixels. This did not make me happy.
Finally today I had the opportunity to connect the laptop to an overhead projector, which showed it has a fully-functioning video chip. This means that the problem is either in the LCD monitor itself or its connection to the motherboard, neither of which I can fix. So, the Duke IT folks have gone after a loaner external monitor from the hotel, but I may have to duck out this afternoon to get one at the local mall. Not that I'd rather spend $50 on food or souvenirs, of course. And not that I didn't want to get a new laptop in general. (Repairing this kind of problem can cost almost as much as a new laptop, believe it or not.)
Worse things have happened. The laptop still has all its other parts, for example. And I remembered to pack ties this time.