What a terrific Halloween surprise! We were up at the mall today to buy the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on DVD, and stopped in at EB to see how everyone was doing… We happened to look through their used DVD section, and found a bunch of old zombie movies that somebody had traded in. We were able to pick up Zombie, Zombi 3, Zombie 4, and Zombie 5 for only about $10 each!

It’s Halloween again, which also means it’s our Anniversary. Three years ago Terri made me the happiest man alive.

Terri, thank you for everything you do for me. You’re the best Wife any man could ever want.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Well, so much for fall! Just a few days back I was reveling in the beautiful Fall weather, and today we’ve got snow on the ground. Yesterday was cold and rainy, as it has been for a week or so now, but it got colder and colder as the evening wore on. When I went to bed last night at around midnight there was a light dusting on the ground, and this morning it looks like we might have an inch or so sitting on the ground. Yuck! I’m not a fan of Winter… I really don’t mind the snow too much, that can actually be fun, but I hate being cold. And once Winter sets in, I won’t be warm again until Spring. Seems like the cold is setting in awfully early this year too… It isn’t even Halloween yet.

The last couple of days have been fairly unpleasant here at work. We had a big networking job on the schedule for Monday… New switches, new patch panels, new NICs in all the computers, upgrading everything to gigabit. I was really looking forward to the job over the weekend. I haven’t done a whole lot of wiring, and I’ve never installed a patch panel, so I thought it’d be interesting. Well, while it was a great learning experience, it certainly wasn’t interesting… These have been quite possibly the most frustrating, mind numbing, repetitive days I’ve ever experienced.

To begin with, the wiring at this site is absolutely horrible. One of their employees has run and tipped all the cables…usually without regard to any wiring standards at all. We didn’t really notice this until we’d started ripping things apart and found the first cable that was neither A Standard nor B Standard. In addition to installing the new switch & patch panel, we wound up having to re-terminate most of the cables at the other end as well. And then we discovered the other switches… We found 3 additional switches/hubs throughout the building, hiding behind filing cabinets and in dusty corners, each just splitting a single line in two… So now we have to run extra cable or install new switches to get those locations up to gigabit as well. There’s another location that’s even more screwed up… The PC gets no link, and the line tester reads the lines as completely reversed… But both ends are done with B Standard. I tried to follow the cable as it winds in and out through several offices, into the ceiling, through walls…and noticed that the two ends of the cable don’t match. One end is flat CAT5e, and the other is standard rounded CAT5. So, somewhere in-between, we’ve got a switch or coupler or something… But we can’t find it.

Then it came time to start on the second building…but nobody had been told about downtime. Roughly half a day of downtime. And absolutely nobody could live without network connectivity for that long. So we had to reschedule around them… Did part of it yesterday over lunch, and part of it today. This building wasn’t quite so bad, especially since we were watching for screwy cables as we worked… But we still ran into some problems. More strange cables that apparently change standards mid-run. More hidden switches. And then people started complaining that they couldn’t get their email. Apparently when you tell folks that both the server and Internet are going to be down, they don’t realize that means no email as well. So we had to hurry up and get things put back together as quickly as possible for them.

We’ve got the patch panels and switches all installed… And one of the buildings is almost completely re-terminated… But we still aren’t done by a long shot. We’ve got 3 HP JetDirect print servers to install…which all need network cables run to them. We’ve got to run 5 additional cables to replace those switches. We still need to properly terminate a lot of the cables in the second building. We haven’t gotten a single NIC installed either. We’ve got at least another day over there, if not more…