Monday, December 01, 2014

There Are Mornings When Coffee Isn't Enough

... and those are the mornings you need to run CAT-5e cable to your daughter's bedroom.

Now there's something that will really wake you up!
I'm really proud of myself. After many decades of being a dufus, I am now slightly less of a dufus. I'm a morning person with lots of projects under way. I can never seem to get anything done in the morning because stores are closed and/or I don't want to wake the rest of the family. I finally figured out that if I staged my parts and equipment during the day, I could polish off projects in the morning.

Staging the gear doesn't take long and it allows you to spend plenty of time with the family. That's what had tripped me up before. I didn't see the point in working on a project unless I could finish it in one swoop. By breaking it up into two parts, I could get it done and give my wife and kids the attention they deserve.

In this project, I'm giving my daughter a Ubuntu computer for her room and, not being a big fan of WiFi*, I decided to run wire to it. Yesterday, I drilled holes for the cable and fed it through, leaving it dangling out of the wall. This morning, while she was elsewhere, I wired up the sockets. I'll finish this project off tonight when I install the wall plates and move the computer into the bedroom. After about 3 months of wishing I could get to it, it's done. Yay!

Next up: A dual boot desktop machine - Win7 and Ubuntu server. Eventually this will include a virtual machine manager so both systems can run at the same time. More on that as it develops.

* - We have a wireless network in the house, but whenever possible, I prefer to run CAT5e into a room. WiFi is great, but when the Interweb Tubes don't seem to be working or have slowed to a crawl, WiFi is just one more unknown you need to diagnose. If troubles happen to a computer hooked up by wire, there are only a couple of causes.

1 comment:

tim eisele said...

Prepping in the evening to do work in the morning is indeed a fine idea. It's amazing how much can be done early in the morning as long as everything needed is available. And while working while my family is awake isn't necessarily neglecting them (my daughters always take a keen interest in whatever project I'm working on, and I think having them work with me counts as "quality time"), it certainly does go faster when working on my own.

Hopefully I won't ever need to pull cable in our house, though. When we built it, my wife decided to take the opportunity to run cat-5 pretty much everywhere imaginable before the drywall ever went up, with a hub in the hall closet. So far it has worked pretty well, any time we needed a line there has been an appropriate one available.