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crack is whack in Novi Sad
Thursday, April 5 2018
location: room 311, MS Joy, Docked on the Sava River in Belgrade, Serbia
Gretchen spent nearly the entire day in bed, so sick from her respiratory tract infection that she mostly didn't go to meals or participate in any of the usual boat activities. Periodically she'd fall into a coughing fit that would exhaust her. This morning I went to the dining room and brought her back some juice and "yoghurt" (she loves the faux Greek yoghurt on the boat so much that she was talking about maybe moving to Europe). I think she rallied enough by lunch to make it to that, but that was it. This evening I dined alone (with a four euro beer) at Arthurs, where I had another flatbread and ordered some soup for and cæsar salad to go for Gretchen.
Our boat had been docked briefly in Belgrade, Serbia so that some of us could go on a bus tour to somewhere. Naturally, I stayed on the boat and continued working until we'd docked at the city of Novi Sad, Serbia. It was raining by then, but I was restless, so I went ashore and walked down a street into Novi Sad, having no idea where I was going. I just wanted to have some sort of experience. Eventually I ducked into a store, looked around for a beer that fit within my budget of dinara (we had some leftover from our Belgrade adventure), and attempted to make a purchase. The middle-aged woman working as cashier said something to me in Serbian suggesting there was a problem, so I shrugged and said I only speak English. The guy who'd just been served was older and smelled like he might be homeless, but he spoke excellent English, and he explained that the problem was that one couldn't buy the beer I'd selected unless I had an empty bottle to exchange for it. Fortunately, there were beers in the store that had no such restriction, so I got one of those instead (a Nektar Pivo; it was an acceptable lager-style beer). I then walked to a modest town square, snapped a couple pictures, turned around, and returned to the boat. I could now say I'd been to Novi Sad.
Gretchen was feeling so poorly that she didn't want me working in the room. So I made a vodka drink, grabbed my laptop, mouse, and headphones, and headed out to the lounge. When I opened my laptop to do some work, I was horrified to notice that the screen had a crack in it. What the hell had that happened? Had someone dropped it unbeknownst to me? But I would've noticed if the crack had been there earlier, so I must've done it just now while carrying it from the room. There'd been a moment when I'd fumbled to close the lid and one of the prongs in the bottom that is supposed to fit into a slot in the top had missed the slot because the screen had been slightly rotated on its pivot. Now I could see that the place it had tried to go was the screen, and that was the place where the crack (actually there were two cracks) had started. I hadn't even considered that prong as a risk for screen damage, but evidently it is, and that's a real design flaw on an otherwise excellent (if clunky) piece of equipment. Fortunately, the Elitebook 2740p is plentiful and cheap on eBay, so a replacement screen wasn't going to cost me very much. Indeed, I found a whole Elitebook 2740p with a Core i7 processor, touchscreen, and 3G cellphone card for $50. (It was missing things, but they could all be salvaged from my existing 2740p.) Fortunately, my laptop still seemed to work just fine despite the crack; it didn't affect the quality of the display at all (and was nearly invisible from most working angles).
A church along the Danube south of Novi Sad. Click to enlarge.
Cliffs south of Novi Sad. Click to enlarge.
Docking at Novi Sad, Serbia.
A church in Novi Sad during my little walk in the rain.
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