Various updates from the past couple of days:

• This weekend is our tamales party! Yay! Sunday Sunday Sunday!
• I am looking for a cheap source of soursop/guayabano nectar. I have been buying it at H-Mart for $1/8.3oz can, which is pretty expensive. I shall delve. Reason? It makes absolutely fantastic Batidas with the Cachaça I like, and I’m not always in the mood for just a Caipirinha. Not that I’m a regular drinker. It’s still pretty irregular for me.
• I am going to go out to dinner with misia tonight, then I’ll stick around the area while she goes home, then go to the Blade Runner Final Director’s Cut showing in my area. I hope it’s fun! My co-worker/friend Rob should be able to give me a ride home afterwards.
• For the past few days I’ve been coming to work without my personal laptop and without my passwords wallet, so my LJ account is not accessible to me, just sayin’. This means that if you really want me to get some information, you should e-mail me, which you should have started doing by now anyway, so whatever. But I can’t read or comment on locked posts at all. This should change back by next week.
• The ADSL issue continues. Am waiting for the new modem. Will deal with the modem when it comes.
  • Have asked Verizon (non-DSL) repairs to come look at the outside “Network Interface Device” (the grey box bolted to the back/side of my house). There appears to be vaseline in the phone jacks in there, and no signal is getting to my modem plugged into the active phone jack. The repair guy is scheduled to come by on Thursday.
  • Have acquired a jack with which to test the outside “Network Interface Device” anyhow. I’ll just wire it up to the posts that are serving the line that goes inside my house and test from that. Don’t know whether post 4 or 5 is tip or ring, but since it’s only two choices, I’ll try one mode and then the other. And I already have a punchdown tool.
  • I still have to test another inside phone jack to see if it’s the jack near my modem/router. Will do so with new modem I bought on Wednesday.
  • Regardless of all testing planned and actualized, the DSL still works, just not very well, so for now (and for the past few weeks before I actually did a speed test), it’s frustratingly slow but tolerable (and still faster than conventional modems).
  • If the new modem from Verizon doesn’t fix it, or the work on the outside Network Interface Device doesn’t shed light, I will probably switch to (more expensive but should actually work) Speakeasy. This’ll be on a dedicated line, which is already as far as I know wired, so it’ll need enabling, and I hear Speakeasy is less irritatingly obnoxious and stupid than Verizon is.
• Last night, instead of doing the DSL stuff, I was instead implementing the second part of my cable management plan.
  • I used a couple of 8″ 3-prong extension power cords to free up spaces on my UPS and get rid of the last power strip I had on the rolling TV entertainment center.
  • I installed a new network switch on the entertainment center and made 5 Cat 5e Ethernet cables out of an old longer cable, and made just one network wire link to the network switch I had hiding under the apothecary’s chest. I love my cable stripping/crimping tools even though I don’t use them very often. I had a little trouble recalling the proper wire order in the jacks, but tested them all and they’re all doing fine.
  • I still have to do the actual cable tie/cable wrapping (with the spiral wrap), need to find, acquired and install an appropriate wire basket for the transformers and the wire slack, and since I’ll be loaning my Wii out to a friend for a couple of months, will have to redo some of that when I get it back.

Tags:   adsl · batida · blade runner · cable management · cachaca · caipirinha · cat5 · cat5e · ethernet · geek · hacking · hmart · making cables · party · phones · soursop · speakeasy · tamales · wiring2 Comments