Rest in pieces

cymrullewes' Thinkpad 600E died last night.  It got knocked down onto the floor (again), landing this time directly on its Linksys WPC54G wireless card, splitting the card's casing open and driving it into the machine hard enough to bend two of the four screws that hold the card cage in place and tear one of the mounting ears.  It wouldn't boot after we picked it up.

After cymrullewes almost completely disassembled it, presuming it dead, and fixing the card cage, I took a look at it and couldn't find any obvious physical damage apart from the somewhat mangled card cage and one broken lug on the case.  Perhaps surprisingly, I was able to repair the card cage, and didn't find anything else visibly needing fixing, so I put it back together (with a little head-scratching at some screws I couldn't account for, because I hadn't realized there were screws on the back edge of the case).  To our surprise, it worked.

For a while.  Maybe an hour.  Then the display started acting progressively more and more weirdly, then started displaying only a pink band down the right side of the screen, then just four white horizontal lines, then two, and eventually quit altogether.  And it hasn't displayed a thing since.  The backlight is still working fine, and by connecting an external monitor I've verified that the graphics adapter is still working perfectly, but the screen is dead.  Something in the LCD screen must have cracked, and progressively failed once powered up again.  (I note that no cracks are visible in the screen itself.)

So ... anyone know of any inexpensive sources for a 13.3" XGA LCD screen to fit a Thinkpad 600E?

Update:

We're currently shooting for a used Thinkpad T20 off eBay as a more cost-effective replacement.

Another Grand Old Man is gone

A week ago, actually, and I just now found out.  Ralph Alpher, sometimes called "the forgotten father of the Big Bang," died on August 12 in Austin, Texas at the age of 86.  He predicted the cosmic microwave background and the elemental distribution of hydrogen and helium in the universe twenty years before the instruments existed to measure his predictions, simply from thinking about what the effects of such a Big Bang would be, at a time the steady-state theory reigned supreme and the Big Bang was just a quirky new idea that few people took seriously.

George Gamow (or, properly, Georgiy Antonovich Gamov), when he was Alpher's Ph.D advisor, co-authored a paper with Alpher and, knowing that the conventional method in scientific publishing is to list authors in alphabetical order, added Hans Bethe's name to the paper specifically so that the resulting paper, would have as its byline "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow" (alpha, beta, gamma).  It has been widely known in physics ever since as the αβγ paper.

Gamow died in 1968 in Boulder, Colorado, aged 64.  Bethe died two years ago in Ithaca, New York at the age of 99.  And now, they're all gone.