The black drive in front is half the size and holds twice as much as the silver drive behind it. What a difference a couple of years makes.

Project 1: Cat6 Ethernet Wiring
My office is on the main floor of our house and has been running on wifi from the basement for a long while. Even though we have a pretty fast Internet connection the added latency of wireless was causing HD YouTube videos to excessively buffer and LAN file transfers to be painfully slow. I already had a gigabit switch downstairs, so decided it would be a good idea to run the cable to my office and install a 4-port wall plate.

In itself this doesn’t sound like a difficult task. I’ve worked with ethernet cable before and installing a wall plate is fairly trivial. The main problem I was faced with here is the fact that my office sits above the finished side of our basement which has a drywall ceiling. Drilling up from below was therefore out of the question for the moment. The alternative, of course, is drilling from above, but in order to do that I would need to remove a portion of the drywall in my office in order to be able to get a drill into the proper position. I decided that this would be the best course of action and set to work.

I ended up cutting out a 16″ square section of drywall. The width allowed me to center the cut between two studs which would later allow me to screw the drywall patch into the existing studs, while the height was sufficient for me to comfortably drill down through the floor. I ended up having to cut about a 6″ square hole into the basement ceiling as well so that I could get enough access to fish the ethernet cables through the floor joists and over to the unfinished side of the basement where the router and switch live.

After all the cable was run and connections tested I started the process of patching the drywall. Careful measuring was key in getting everything to fit right. After 3 rounds of mud (AKA spackle) and sanding the wall was once again smooth and ready for paint. We had planned on painting this room soon anyway, so that part of the job would have been necessary regardless.

The final speed test showed that a file that took 1 minute and 16 seconds (1:16) to copy over wifi only took 15 seconds (0:15) to copy over the new cat6 ethernet run. Success!

Project 2: Thermostat Installation
Our house has had a very old thermostat since before we bought it; one of those beige rectangular boxes with the temperature control in the form of a slide on the right-hand side and switches for the fan and heat/cool modes on top. I’d been thinking of replacing it with a more modern, programmable model for some time, but as soon as I saw the Nest I had to have it. After watching their very helpful installation video it seemed like an extremely straightforward job that should only take about 15 minutes. Things, of course, are never that simple.

I immediately ran into a couple of issues. First, the drywall behind the old thermostat was in pretty bad shape, so I couldn’t seem to get a good grip in the wall for the new baseplate. On top of that the old wires were stranded instead of solid copper, making it nearly impossible to fit them into the tiny connector holes in the Nest unit. Things seemed to be getting worse and worse with solutions I tried; the included drywall anchors were stripped almost immediately.

After trying many things what ended up working were some heavy-duty metal drywall anchors. The wiring problem was solved by cutting the existing wires and stripping them to expose some shiny new wire that ended up fitting just fine. This was definitely one of the most frustrating projects I’ve taken on in recent memory, simply because so many things I tried wouldn’t work. In the end it was totally worth it — now I can change the temperature in my house from anywhere in the world.

I’m pretty sure I’m DIY-ed out for a while — both of these jobs turned into multi-day projects, so I’m ready for a break. I know I’ll be back, though.

This behavior is surprisingly easy to implement for Sublime Text 2:

1. Open up the file ~/.bash_profile
2. Add a line that says alias subl='open -a Sublime\ Text\ 2.app'

You can change the subl alias to whatever works best for you. Now you can type subl ~/svn/projectname/ and Sublime will open up with your project already loaded.

With all of these things buzzing around in my head it’s difficult to figure out where to start. When I overthink what I should be doing nothing at all gets done. I think the trick is going to be picking something and just starting. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Well, there has been a new and annoying development for this situation. I uploaded a video to my account which was really only intended for family. In my experience YouTube typically gives you the option of “public” or “private” so you can control who can see said video; this time I noticed there was a third option called “Unlisted”, which was grayed out for some reason. After some investigation it turns out that a user is not allowed to use this option if they have any “copyright strikes” on their account. Sure enough, the copyright claim leveled against me by the folks representing Van Morrison now evidently affects which YouTube features I am allowed to use.

“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just see how I go about removing this strike from my account and be on my way.” Come to find out, the strike is permanent. So there you go, upload a video of some street performers, have your account and all of its uploaded content, not to mention a long history of favorites and subscriptions permanently tainted by the circus that is copyright law.

It all began to make sense. The first time I noticed there was a problem was in the pitch black of the bedroom after not being able to fall asleep. Thinking I’d listen to a podcast or two while laying in bed, I grabbed the phone from the headboard and pushed the headphones into place. Or at least I made the attempt. There must have been a piece of pocket lint just inside the headphone jack which was promptly shoved further in and compacted by my fumbling nocturnal efforts.

After removing the lint we had to test that everything was working properly. Since I didn’t have any headphones with me the Genius pulled out his own personal pair to test with and double-tapped the home button to play the most recent audio file. He gave a very abrupt “Uh… it’s working.” and stopped playing the file. It was only later that I found out that the file that had started playing was an old episode of The Dawn and Drew Show podcast, the intro to which sounds like this. I can only imagine what that poor guy was thinking.

Lesson learned: always shine a light into a problematic hole and assess the situation.

In other news, I can’t wait for this kind of weather to return:

Taken while driving back to St. Louis on I-70 E.

On a related note, I find myself turning down apartment choices based on what kind of Internet service they are able to get. I’d really like to stick with AT&T’s U-verse, so the hunt continues.

I’m feeling the itch again, this time because the various little beta bugs and incompatibilities of Windows 7 are starting to get to me; while most software seems to function well under this operating system, a small amount of them that I use on a regular basis (ex: TightVNC) don’t seem to run as well as they did on XP. As a result I’m seriously considering switching things up again (and the fact that Windows 7 isn’t due until late 2009 doesn’t help), but for some reason find myself being drawn to a Linux install once more.

I like the nerd-factor of running Linux, and I’m definitely more comfortable with it now than I ever was in the past. Most likely the fascination will last all of a week at which point I will probably drag myself back to XP once more… We’ll see how things develop.