That’s why I got so many business cards printed!
A few days ago my work Thinkpad T43’s screen started flickering (not flickring, actually flickering). I immediately dismissed it as some kind of broke-my-Gentoo thing I always do, but after rebooting to Windows (yeah, it’s still there - IT demanded I keep a Windows partition), I realized it’s a hardware problem - something is fucked up with the backlighting or something. It got worse until a couple of days ago it started going blank for hours, and only coming back randomly for 5 minutes every time.
Now, this would all be fine if I wouldn’t be in the middle of a training engagement in India - and a week
from returning home. Projecting still worked - so I could go on training, but I couldn’t do anything
except for that - plus it doesn’t really feel nice that during breaks all your students can still watch
your desktop 
Anyway while not giving up to hardware, I found out that if I apply pressure at certain points on my screen, it goes on - that made me spend hours massaging my screen trying to get it working, but whenever I got my fingers off it it went dark again.
I almost thought of giving up and started thinking about finding an IBM service center or something (or is it Lenovo?), but that soon realized as impractical. Since doing customer engagements for Zend away from home always feels a bit like a military operation (that’s an Israeli thing: Israeli men tend to compare hard / exciting / surreal situations in their lives to military related experiences - even if they don’t admit it out loud…), I suddenly remembered something one of my officers used to say whenever we complained our equipment or supply is crappy: “This is all we have, and that’s what we’re going to win with!”. All motivated, I started MacGyvering, trying to get my screen working back with a toothpick and some chicken curry (that’s mostly what I have here).
Finally, I came up with this solution:
In case you’re wondering, that’s one of my Zend business cards I always carry and hardly use 
Off topic: yes, I’m in some kind of photo-taking craze. Perhaps I was bit by a Japanese vampire or something.
Dude, I knew those business cards were worthwhile for something other than taking notes…
Well, if memory serves, that’s not the only alternative use for business cards
On the bright At least this gives you a reason to get another machine, though. Think what you could achieve if you actually had a real computer! (The black MacBook will easily suffice, and is on the same price level as non-Apple competition, even in Israel. I’m getting a new one soon…)
Well well - first of all it’s moving from Arad to New York, then it’s moving from Thinkpads to Macbooks - what’s next? are you going to start writing for fashion magazines?
You are generally right - I actually started thinking about asking for a Macbook as my next computer, now that you can run Linux on it and all - but that’s not up to me unfortunately…
I’ll tell you what’s next - you start drinking Starbucks’ crap coffee (”Skim milk on that Multi-Grande-Ventii-Latte-Frappucino sir?”) and coding Ruby on bloody Rails (”oooh, too delicate to write my own SQL, me”), that’s what’s next!
(seriously though, convince Zend to get you a Mac. It’s a great machine and allows you to use both Windows and an actual non-shit OS. IBM quality control isn’t what it used to be anyway…)