Battle with the internet

In this case, “the internet” refers not to the imagined space created by websites, articles, bulletin board posts and various media, but rather the physical internet as it is piped into our home. “The tubes,” if you will.

Since we moved in to the new townhouse in August, we’ve been using a wireless router, hoping to get the ethernet ports that are in each room worked out by someone professional who knew what they were doing. After three attempts (the Comcast cable guy, a local IT support company, and Geek Squad) and much bitterness directed toward those three groups at their ineptitude, unwillingness or sheer laziness, the two of us in the house with the most experience in networking and electrician-type things pulled the magic internet box out of the wall and decided to do it ourselves.

The first step was quick: I hooked up the modem to the incoming cable and got the wireless and wired internet to work with my laptop. Step two was figuring out how to pipe that working wired internet through to the rest of the jacks in the house. This involved ripping the facade of an organized board out of the wall to realize there were simply ethernet cables running down the walls to this box from each room. More than that, each one was labeled. After staring at it, the two of us resolved that a trip to Lowe’s could make all of this happen.

We picked up a specialized wirecutter with a tool on the end that let you put heads on any ethernet cable. After stripping the outside of an ethernet cable, all one had to do was organize the colors so that they were correctly assigned and clamp the head onto the cable. Voila, one end of the cable was set up so that we could plug that into the router. Internet was sent to each room one by one as I meticulously and infuriatingly shoved tiny wires into each jack in their specific color orders. Six of those later (four internet lines, one phone line, and one that shifted when it was being clamped, thus trashing that head entirely) and internet was go. Everyone’s computer was plugged into their respective walls and the internet worked for everyone. It took around four hours, starting some time before eight o’clock and ending somewhere after midnight, but it was done.

The kind of satisfaction ensued that only a ridiculous DIY project that ends with the intended result can bring. I went to work tired, but I had an excuse–I was up late stripping wires and physically networking the house. It was kind of awesome.

I hope I don’t have to do it again. «»

Fear of writing

November’s approaching, which is National Novel Writing Month, known somewhat better (if at all) as NaNoWriMo. I’ve flirted with the idea twice only to give out either before or started or shortly after. The task is either too demanding or too daunting for me. The project’s key piece of advice before it begins and throughout the course of the month is to keep writing. Keep the proverbial pen to the page, keep producing text at a decent rate. If you stop, you get stuck.

That’s been the case with blogging. I stopped while I was working. Writing had become a chore at the end of the day, and a chore I didn’t want to entertain at that. Before a couple weeks ago, when I stopped writing, I managed to make up for that lost time or just call it a week off. This time, it piled up and became too daunting to make up for. It become easier to scrap the task entirely when it’s much too big.

As I wrote in my first post, the struggle is really to keep going, even if it takes one of these posts once in a while to do it. «»

A little uncertainty never hurt anyone except Schrödinger’s cat (maybe)

Life without a cell phone is not only possible but somewhat liberating. There are times when I’m walking by myself or stuck waiting for someone outside of a store–simple moments of downtime that would otherwise be filled with calling or texting someone in an attempt to be connected or be certain of what someone else is doing, where someone else is. Certain about the future, some might say.

Instead, those moments of downtime are mine again, spent waiting, thinking, or distracted with something not so external: my iPod or DS. One could argue that those distractions are just as guilty of disconnecting oneself from one’s immediate surroundings, but I would argue they’re fundamentally different from the grasping at familiar territory that the cell phone represents. This is probably an artificial distinction made only to argue my own electronic device guilt away, but it’s there nonetheless.

I revel in the fact that I find the cell phone an unnecessary affectation. I make use of others’ phones should the circumstances require it; after all, everyone else is operating on the premise that they have the possibility of direct communication with everyone they know and plan (or don’t plan) accordingly. But my personal life has been unaffected by my lack of a cell phone, and I don’t really have any desire to get one.

This sort of attitude has led me to be mildly irate with others when they enter their cell phone worlds, removing themselves from current surroundings to text or talk when other people are immediately there. Casual conversations in the car are the worst, since those not on the phone are now captive audience to one half of what is most likely a banal conversation better had at home in the company of no one else. That sort of space isn’t sacred, but there’s something intruding on the nature of that physical space in a way that’s unsettling. Better discussions of cell phone manners have been had elsewhere, and this notion of private and public space blending is a common thread in the recent writing on cell phones.

My thought is that the notions of connected and disconnected are very relative. «»