Long overdue discoveries

This is my 4th blog entry in 4 days, and while it is probably due to a combination of having things to say and procrastination (always during midterms period), I feel like I've sold my soul to the internet. Chatting for hours on MSN, visiting message boards, downloading various multimedia, that's alright. But blogging everyday is foreign to me...and most people I know don't do that.
My friend's take on this: "Sell your soul to the internet - Brought to you by the Devil's internet provider".
In anycase, today's procrasinatory tidbit has to do with a discovery I made today:
I was reading demonbaby's latest post about poop to my mom earlier this evening (it's quite funny), when the telephone rang. So I started fiddling around with my laptop keyboard...which in the past has caused me much grief (but I accepted it as part of life and just dealt with it).

Here is, what I thought was the cause of my keyboard woe:
About 1.5 years ago, at the beginning of March 2005, was the funeral of a friend of mine. Sad day, as can be expected. After coming home from the service, I decided to turn on my laptop and then make myself a cup of tea. I'm walking into the living room with my cup and then I trip. Naturally the tea spilled all over my laptop. What followed after was "AHHHH...SHIT, damnit, freaking...fuckin, blarghy, mrar" and so on. I turned off the computer, flipped it over, and lay it on paper towels in an attempt to save its life.
After I tried turning it on hours later, there was a black screen...a few hours later, some error messages. Things that I don't like to see. I forgot what exactly I did after, but it somehow started working again. hoorah. all is well in the world...until about 1 month later, my keyboard started doing funky things when I typed.

For example, if I typed gmail, it would come up as g0a53.c60.
I thought that maybe this was a delayed response to the tea incident. I didn't know what to do. The only thing that seemed to work was plugging an external keyboard to the back of my laptop, and then somehow, all the keys worked perfectly. I sent it to a computer fixer dude who my family knows. He had no solution. Karate teachers husband..."well, i guess the external keyboard overwrites any signal your shortcircuited keyboard sends to your computer" (not his exact words, but something like that). Someone upstairs who got himself a new laptop, donated his old laptop keyboard to me (which was of the same make). We installed it...still the same problem.
So for 1.5 years, I've been plugging this large, old, external keyboard into my laptop to be able to type properly. During that time, my mom even offered to get me a new laptop. But I figured I could survive like this for a while.

So here's the discovery. I only found out today (after 4 years of owning this thing), that laptop keyboards have numlock. I figured that the keyboard area is so small, that numlock just didn't exist, and there was no real reason to have it anyways.
I noticed that the little green light was on where the numlock thing is, which indicated that numlock has been on all this time. I turn it off...lo and behold, I can type.

On the one hand, I'm really happy that my keyboard is fine after all and my laptop doesn't need changing. But I also feel really, really, really stupid. All this time I had been blaming the tea incident for my keyboard problems, when it was just numlock, that for some reason had been turned on for 1.5 years. I'm only comforted by the fact that I wasn't the only one that missed it. Still. You may all laugh now.

-signing off...and feeling slightly sheepish.