More laptop woes

So following the laptop hard drive debacle during APSC 459 next term, my computer decides that I still haven't had enough punishment -- the LCD has decided to die. Of course, then I fixed it...too bad that just then, a screw fell into the inverter board, shorting out the backlight and negating my work. >_> I am now borrowing my roommate's screen in rez and a random eye-hurting CRT in the lab(s), making my laptop slightly less portable. Replacement parts have been ordered, though, and will hopefully come in soon. I think that I will sell this computer after I fix it up and get something shiny (and with an extended warranty >_>)

But wait, there's more! My external hard drive (containing easily seven years' worth of collecting various out-of-print and rare music) decided to begin giving up the ghost yesterday. I managed to get it spinning and reading data again, and ordered a replacement part -- suffice to say that I will not power down the drive until I get my data copied off; if it stops spinning now it will probably not start again. Talk about an expensive summer; so much for taking trips and buying a keyboard amp.

Work and Snowstar are still claiming significant portions of my life, hence not much time or inclination to post (not to mention interesting happenings to post about). Here's a wide-angle panorama of my lab in the Physics building:

(Photo processed by Autostitch (great program, developed at UBC's CS department by David Lowe's Computational Intelligence Group)

Here's a photo taken through a microscope (literally; I probably looked like an utter toolbox putting my camera at the objective of the microscope) of a part of the project that I am working on, which involves pumping liquid metal through tiny fluid channels to make 'wire' shapes. This was just an initial test to see if Gallium (melting point 30 degrees C) would be able to be pumped through a channel with a syringe. For reference, the thin part of the channel is 100 µm (a tenth of a millimetre) wide and 10 µm high, and several millimetres long.