The lurgy struck yesterday and I spent last night gasping for air and tossing like a waldorf salad, so I called in dead this morning and planned to spend the day in bed. The Beloved, however, had other plans.

Every Thursday, the local homeschooling group get together for group activities of a generally educational nature¹. Today's particularly inspired idea was a Taking Stuff Apart Day. Knowing my penchant for disassembling computers, the Beloved suggested I come along and maybe find some piece of hardware to dissect.

I knew just the piece.

Years ago, when I was brain-loose and fancy-free, I had a good but certifiably insane friend who I will call Chloe. Now Chloe, apart from being stark staring insane but unbelievably cute to make up for it², was also an Honours student at the ANU, and as such lacked (a) money, and (b) the equipment she needed to do her work. I, meanwhile, had a spare laptop I wasn't using, a sad old thing with Windows 98 and 16Mb of memory and no (count 'em: zero) USB ports. Still, it could run Word, which was all she needed, so I lent it to her.

Her RSI flared up almost immediately.

Lacking even a rudimentary ability to put 2 and 2 together, I later lent the laptop to the Beloved, who was also doing Honours.

Her RSI also flared up.

Suspecting (finally!) that the crappy keyboard and the crappy screen might have something to do with this, I sheepishly took the laptop back and left it in my shed. We christened it The Craptop, and never spoke of it again.

So today, the Craptop came out of the shed and made One. Final. Journey.

If you examine the photo at the top of this entry, you will see the Craptop, in all its glory and a very large number of pieces. Laptops are never very useful for spare parts at the best of times, and a Pentium 1 made by a company that even Wikipedia has never heard of³ isn't any use for even the most basic frankensteining. So it became an educational experience. Armed with screwdrivers, pliers and my Clever Tool (the best present I've ever got, and it came from thelancrewitch, of course) we took the bugger apart.

The second photo demonstrates the best part of the dissection: the discovery of sheets of polarised plastic film, part of the laptop's display, which make eerie optical illusions when you look at things through them. That's the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM, in case you didn't notice.

I went home and collapsed in bed, but I and the Craptop had entertained several kidlets, and that made a successful morning by any standard. Mission accomplished, and good riddance to the Craptop.

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¹ That's a joke, actually. With homeschooled kids, everything is educational. You could no more get these kids together for non-educational activity than you could herd cats with promises of broccoli. They just get together and do stuff, and the education happens whether their parents like it or not.

² These two qualities go together entirely too often. Or maybe it's that we avoid the insane ones unless they're cute, so all the ugly insane people have to join the Liberal Party so civilised people never see them.

³ Slight exaggeration, but I can't remember what it was now so it hardly matters.