So yesterday night I dropped a whole cup of coffee on my keyboard (and my whole desk, but never mind that). I desperately tried to dry it all out as fast as I could, but after I spending a ton of paper towels, the “t” and the “y” keys were still stuck (so that whenever I pressed “t” I got “rt” and whenever I pressed “y” I got “uy”).

My first tought was that maybe some sugar or coffee dried under those keys, binding their pressure sensors together. I tried as hard as I could to clean it under them, to no success. Then I decided that I would try to take the keyboard apart to fix it.

Bad mistake.

First of all, why does a freaking keyboard has SO MANY SCREWS? My keyboard had 16 (SIXTEEN!) screws attached to the lower side. Worse yet, even after I released all those screws, the keyboard would not come apart! The plastic was probably welded shut, and I could just pry at the borders. WTF?

Then I noticed something wonky — when I took off the screws, half of my keyboard stopped working — but it was not a consistent half: The enter and space keys were okay, as well as the number row and the function keys. But all the keys in between where non-responsive. As I started putting the screws back in place, the keys started responding again. Maybe the screws were just holding the sensor in place? It does not make much sense, externally accesible screws that would not give internal access, but would hold the internals of the keyboard in place >.< Of course, when I put it all back together, it was working even WORSE than before. Not only the t and y keys were stuck to the r and u keys, but the q key was stuck to the tab key, and the w key was stuck with the CAPS LOCK key (they are not even close together, WTF?) the o and p keys were stuck to [ and ], respectively. It made no sense at all. So I guess I will have to buy another keyboard today. I don't know if I screwed my old keyboard for good, or if I just spread the water that was inside and created new and amazing connections, but I have enough work this week that I cannod afford to be without a computer until I figure out what went wrong :-( Any advice is greatly appreciated!

In other news, I just got this VIM cheat sheet from my laboratory’s mailing list. I should take the chance to properly learn how to use VIM, I guess. Hope it is useful to others too.