I am tired, hear me snore

[mdlbear]

It's been raining gently most of the day; no walkies. Just as well, since my left ankle has been bothering me a little this week, and it's good to give it a rest. Got my exercise, though, going up and down the garage attic stairs about a dozen times installing phone cable.

For a long time, the flower_cat has wanted a wired phone on her desk instead of the wireless one, which isn't doing very well. Don't know whether it's signal problems or a weak battery, but it doesn't matter. That was the easy one, though it did mean installing a new wall-mounted box for a two-position keystone plate, and drilling a new hole in the wall to run the cable through. I'm using Cat5, BTW, since I have most of a 1000-foot spool of it that I bought a decade or so ago.

The more challenging one was the phone in the bathroom: it's a waterproof, cordless phone, and not only was there no place to plug in a phone on that wall, there's no power outlet either. So what I did was to run the power in the phone cable, putting the wall wart upstairs in the garage with the ones for the 802-11 access point and the ethernet hub, and leaving the plug hanging out the bottom of the wall plate.

For reference purposes, the inner two conductors of a standard phone cable are green and red, corresponding to blue and white/blue respectively in a Cat5 cable with standard 568B wiring. The outer two, usually used for a second line, are black and yellow, corresponding to green and white/green. I used black and yellow for the black and white-striped lines in the power cord. The terminal blocks are overloaded and need to be replaced.

And as if that wasn't enough, I then went to Fry's and bought chaoswolf's computer for her, since she's been tied up in the Baycon meeting all afternoon. It's a cute little HP s7410n; it came with a free-after-rebates Canon MP150 MFP, and I got her a Hyundai L72S 17" monitor as well. She owes me about $833: $1020 total less $140 in rebates and $27 for other purchases and tax.

While replacing the battery on my APC BackUPS 500 I noticed that, unlike the older ones I'm familiar with, it has a little switch next to the main switch labeled "test" on the top and bell on the bottom. The crossed-out bell icon does appear to mean that you can silence the alarm; you have to do it every time you unplug it.

The hardware cloth over the crawl-space vents will have to wait -- I can't find my tinsnips. Can I go to sleep yet? Oh wait, dinner. Right. Then I can sleep.