February 2, 2011: Slow Progress

Another super cold day today.  I can’t believe that we are in Texas.  This is quite a bit colder than I have seen it here and definitely colder than I imagined that it would get.  It is so bizarre that Texas, the home of heat, gets so dramatically colder than central California or Florida.  We have quite the wide temperature range here, but very little snow.

It was so cold today, we assume, that the electricians decided not to come over.  That meant no work being done on the house today since the contractor is stuck waiting on them to get their electrical done and out of the way.  The house is stable at this point so we are not unable to live in it, it just would be nice if we had more stuff done so that we could get to work putting the house in order.  What a disaster the house is right now.

From all of the work going on, the carpeting in the entire house is a huge mess.  I don’t really want to start cleaning it until the work in the garage is done because once you clean it it needs time to dry or else it attracts far more dirt than it would have otherwise.  But that means that it is just getting dirtier and dirtier right now.

I didn’t need to go into the office today.  The roads are just as bad today as they were yesterday.  Solid ice and everything around Dallas is closed.

Very little to say about today.  It was quite a slow day in the grand scheme of things.  Souder came over and did a lot of work both with me and on the house.  He got tons and tons of data cabling done today.  There is now a bundle of cables running from my office (the soon to be nursery), from Liesl’s room and from Dominica and my bedroom to the garage.  We counted and we are going to need a forty-eight port patch panel to support all of the cable runs that are being put in around the house.  This is going to be one seriously wired house.  All of the wiring is being done “right” as well and goes up into cable management in the attic.  It is quite impressive up there.

Our master bedroom is going to get six cable runs.  We ran out of cable on that room so only four are in so far.  The nursery has four.  Liesl’s room has two.  That is a dozen runs from that part of the house alone.  The bar is going to get a minimum of two and the kitchen already has one.  That’s fifteen or more for the parts of the house that need to get their cable via the attic.  The den or play room where Liesl is going to have a television in the main part of the house will need a minimum of two and, I suspect, will get four as the runs are so short and it is such a handy spot to have several runs.  So that takes us up to nineteen with twenty being a safer number and does not include a dedicated wireless access point run to the laundry room that has been discussed nor does it include my new office!

The new office is getting a minimum of eight ports installed and I think ten is more likely.  That takes us to thirty.  That room is going to be awesome.  Then comes the server room which will need tons of ports on its own.  Filling a forty-eight port patch panel should be easy.  Topping twenty four is unavoidable.

We will end up needing an addition switch too, it seems.  The twenty-four port switch that I have now isn’t going to cut it for long.  I will need a forty-eight port (or possibly more) in almost no time.

We got pizza for dinner from the good place up on Frankford.  Brian actually stayed for dinner, which he almost never does.  It was really late before he managed to head off for home.  We are expecting that we will not see him nor the electricians tomorrow.  There really is not much point working on the house until it warms up outside since we are now at a point where everything works and we are not struggling with everyday life.

My guess is that the house won’t see any additional work done until the weekend.  Then, I hope, we should see tons of progress.  I’m sure that I will be working from home tomorrow – it is still crazy cold here in Carrollton.

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