Hotbox Wiring

Last week was Scarlet’s* seventeenth birthday. One of her presents was a new computer. In addition to a couple of trinkets, I also got her (well, her and the family) a Linksys router with four switched ports. Now, here’s the rub, I need to wire the house so that everyone with a computer (Mary, Tess, and now Scarlet) can have shared access to the ‘net.

(Why not get them a wireless router? Well, not everyone has a receiver, but more importantly is that I personally find wireless to be wanting. Connections are slower than with wired and are sometimes iffy. Most of all, I can secure a wired connection with fewer headaches than a wireless one.)

I come by last Saturday ready to do my work. Upon looking at the layout and the lengths of cable I had, clearly the best way to go would be to drop lines from the attic. "Attic" is actually a generous term. It is actually a dust- and web-filled hotbox of a crawlspace. Long story short, I got hit with heat exhaustion for my wiring effort. I wasn’t able to finish up the install until Sunday, but without me being all weak and nauseous and dizzy (like after I dropped the lines) it went quickly…mostly. Mary’s computer had a file corruption that caused chkdsk to delete two system files which wouldn’t let me reboot Windows until we used the install disc to get me to a command prompt. I then copied the files from Scarlet’s new computer and we were up and happy.

I haven’t spent so much time in a stretch at Mary’s since last year. It was nice. Now maybe we can just have me hang out sometime instead of work. It’s not that I mind helping these women, in fact it does much to feed my soul, but I also enjoy the quieter times.