It started when the monitor on my servers started flickering while I was installing long-overdue upgrades. I had errands to run in Brighton, so I made a quick stop at Computer World, a little one-man shop that does repairs and sells used equipment.

I asked if he had any monitors and he just blinked at me like I'd grown a third head. He finally found his voice and asked "what size".

He walked to about ten feet of floor to ceiling shelves, filled with used monitors.

Oh. I just earned the Blinkie Award for Stupid Question of the Week.

He had a smaller monitor that would fit on my shelf and be suitable for monitoring servers, even if I wouldn't want to use it for "real" work.

Then the laptop I take when I travel and use to test Editomat started flickering.

A quick visit to Amazon and a day to hope it wasn't going to die in the middle of a test and the new LCD screen arrived.

You can learn almost anything you need to know on Youtube. I found two tutorials (OK, demonstrations) on replacing the LCD on my model laptop.

Step 1 is removing a plastic bezel around the display.

Last Christmas, a friend gave me a set of spudgers. A spudger is a gadget designed for removing stuff that's stuck together - like a plastic bezel.

I can attest that a real spudger works much better than a butter-knife or screwdriver. I've used the spudgers several times and been just thrilled at how easily things come apart with the right tool. (OK, I'm easily thrilled. I may have an unhealthy relationship with tools.)

Part of this task involved removing the laptop base. Apparently this is the first time I've opened this laptop (unusual for something I've owned longer than 15 minutes).

There was an empty memory slot!

Nobody will be surprised that I had a proper size memory chip in stock to put in that slot. The laptop now has twice the RAM it had before I started this adventure.

The new LCD screen went into place nice and easy - it took under an hour, despite breaks to feed the animals and answer the telemarketers.

keters.

I was a little annoyed that the new LCD had a chunk of tape on one corner. I carefully removed the tape, but it left a bunch of sticky and smudge on the screen.

Really. How unprofessional.

Then I powered the system up, and there was a model number burned into the display!

This was a brand new LCD. They shouldn't do something like that.

A few minutes later, I slapped my forehead: Protective Plastic. The display was protected by an optically clear plastic with an Easy-Remove-Tape-Handle and a burned in model number.

One I removed the clear plastic protector, everything works just fine.

Caz earned bonus points this week.

I've been doing some yard work before it gets too hot (that's about a half hour after I get up) which involves dragging stuff back and forth from garage to yard.

I leave the gate open while I'm working. Half the time, I also leave it open after I clean up and return to air-conditioned comfort.

I've let Caz out into the yard a couple times with the gate open, and he stayed where he belongs.

I'm not pushing this. The truth is he could break out of my yard any time he got determined. The fence is much more of an advisory than containment.

But, most days, he really is a good dog.

Except when I'm in a zoom meeting. He recognizes the difference between zoom and Youtube. When a meeting starts, he's right at my elbow barking loudly. One bully-stick later, he's happily chowing down and the meeting continues.

There's some debate about who has trained who.