LincolnBlogs

Last night I put an end to a year long era of procrastination – at least as far as my network access is concerned. When I moved into my new place a year ago I was faced with a hard decision as far as my access was concerned. I had my cable modem and server in the living room, and my main workstation tucked away in a corner of my bedroom. Originally I was just going to run a wall colored cable around the baseboard and to my machine. This, however, proved impossible because there is *no* clearance underneath my bedroom door to get in there. Since it was a new apartment and I didn’t want to peeve anyone by drilling holes in the walls I decided to use one of those wireless gaming adapters, which worked…mostly.

The gaming adapter, when it was working, would not really go very fast, maybe 5-10mbs if I was lucky. That sort of irritated me. What *really* made me mad, though, was that during periods of heavy load, the thing would just randomly disconnect. This was never more noticeable then when I was running bittorrent on something, or more recently, running my tivo script to download and convert shows from there to watch.

Well, as it happens, some time ago I ran into my landlord and jokingly told him I was going to drill a hole through the wall to run some important computer wires, and he told me he would be ok with that as long as I didn’t drill through power wires or something (and he would disavow all knowledge of that conversation). I procrastinated on that for quite a while, partly because I had a *mostly* working network connection, and partly because I am so good at procrastination.

Yesterday was the last straw. Once again my connection was down, however, this time I was not home to correct it (by power cycling the gaming device). I had to call my wife to do it. I mentioned to her that I was sick of having my network connection go down and that I was eventually just going to drill through the wall. She reminded me that I also needed to do that to get cable in our daughters room. I decided right then and there that was going to be the evening project.

I never expected coax to be so expensive, but then again, I had to by 3 sections of it, and add on the new cable splitter and a $25 Linksys 5 port 10/100 switch and I was already up at $100. Sheesh! I am, however, happy to report that my main workstation has a solid 100mbs connection to my cable modem and home server and my kid now has cable in her bedroom to boot. Now to pick up some more memory for my workstation, and a few more ethernet cables (and maybe a new computer desk) and I’ll be high on the hog and almost looking like a respectable computer geek lives at my place once more. 🙂