August 18, 2009: Finally Done with Cabling

My big news for the day is that my latest article, The Small and Medium Business (SMB) Information Technology Vendor Relationship Dilema, was published as the headlining article on Datamation this morning!  This is my first article to be the main headline.

By early afternoon my article was linked from the IBM Tivoli for the Midmarket Community website!  Now there is a compliment.

I am very sad that my first major interview done with Baseline and eWeek magazines in late 2006 was lost.  I never made a copy of it and they reorganized their online publication losing many older articles.  I did find, however, an article from IEEE summarizing the Baseline article which I will be sure to copy this time!  At least there is some record of the article and even a summary.  Who would have thought that a major publication like Baseline would not keep their old articles around!

Three days until Dominica’s birthday and I still have no idea what I am going to get for her.  She refuses to give me any ideas which is not fair at all.

Liesl fell asleep right at noon which caused some problems with our lunch plans.  We waited until she woke up which was around two.  I had gone upstairs to check on her and discovered her just hanging out in her crib already awake hanging out with her Cheer Bear.  This is an important step in development.  She is now happy to hang out on her own.

For lunch we went back to Ruchi in the Beach Shopping Center to check out their lunch buffet.  We are so excited having Indian food in the area again.  We definitely wanted to try the buffet to see how it was.  We were pretty late for lunch so we were, again, the only people eating in the restaurant while we were there.  That is not a good sign, but they have not been open for even a week yet and it will take a while before people in Peekskill really realize that it is there and get used to it as a dining option.

This afternoon and evening we were back into “making cables” mode.  This time we are taking it personally.  Dominica got into “cable building mode” as I worked on other projects while going in between getting cables measured for her and then, once we had enough cables to really start running them, we started running them from the cabling closet out into the rest of the house.

We ran four cables to Dominica’s desk, four to mine, pulled out the CAT6 running upstairs and replaced it with a new, working CAT5e and ran two incredibly long runs into the utility room with the new rack.  We powered down the two remaining servers that were running in the open area of the basement and moved them into the utility room.  Finally the very loud white noise that they produce is not pounding in my ears while sitting down in the office.  This is going to be great.

We tested out the cables and we have working GigE everywhere now.  This will be quite the improvement.  The cables are no longer strewn all across the floor either.  We have everything in the closet going out through the hole that Art had prepared for them.  Now we can finally close the closet door again.  It is like having a whole new basement.  The only things that we have left to do are to put the wall enclose together through which the cables will run next to Dominica’s desk and then to cover up the bundle of cables crossing the floor between our desks.

We also decided, as it was well after midnight when we were finally done, that we were not going to drill the final holes in the utility room tonight for running the cables and will just leave them for tomorrow.  That is the last bit of work remaining and not a big deal to do.

Then it was off to bed happily knowing that the cabling work which has been hanging over our heads for months is finally complete.  What a good feeling.  We are so much happier with our house here in Peekskill with the new paint, window dressings and the basement changes.  It doesn’t feel anything like the townhouse that we bought just nine months ago.

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