Suhweet! As thanks for writing up a website consolidating all of the course's lecture slides, my professor who was visiting Germany last week brought me back a real German kinder surprise egg (Überraschung specifically)
Woot! Happy face! Apparently linux managed to fubar the BIOS (or some kind of display non-volatile memory): The display was permanently stuck in the "sleep" state. The fix is to press the reset button on the bottom of the machine for 2-3 seconds while it's running and all better now. :-)
Super sad face... The display on my poor little $20 netbook failed some time between last and this morning. Backlight seems to come on and the pixels are driven black, but that's it :(