Ahhhh... Monday. I haven't had a Monday in nearly a year as I haven't had permanent, official employment since July 2000.

Connecting in Boise

This last weekend, I drove up to Boise, Idaho to finish wiring my friend Joe's house. About three or four weeks ago, my good friend Roberto and I drove to Boise and he, Nate (who is in Boise working at Hewlett-Packard), and I pulled category 5 cable throughout Joe's house. Joe showed up late in the afternoon after work and helped for an hour or so until we were finished.

The house was only framed and had exterior siding at that point. Since then, the wallboard has gone up with texturing and painting. The carpet, appliances, electrical and plumbing is all done. Joe and Becky are planning on moving in this next week. The house would not be complete without 100 megabit per second ethernet connections in 16 locations in the house.

We ran two cat-5 cables from the coat/wiring closet under the stairs to various boxes throughout the house including two in the garage, three in an upstairs office, two in the living room, and three in the upstairs family room.

We punched down all the data lines we put connectors on to two 66-style punchdown blocks mounted on a cut sheet of waferboard in the closet. The cables we didn't connect were tone-traced and marked for possible future use. We punched down and bridged all voice lines to a third punchdown block.

Since Joe intends to use a Dish Network satellite dish for his television reception, we ran two cables from the closet - under the house - to the outside of the house on the east side and up to the roof. This will allow him to have two satellite dish receivers in use at once if he wants. Nate had fun crawling in the crawlspace under the house and boasted of his lack of claustrophobia.

We didn't finish with all the wiring until around 9 p.m. Saturday evening. We hadn't had any dinner so we went to find someplace to eat. I was really hungry so we headed toward Chuck-a-Rama. We got there at 9:40 only to discover they closed at 9:30. Someone remembered seeing the lighted sign of a Golden Corral on our way, so we went back to find it. When we did, the sign was no longer lit and the doors were locked. Then we tried Sizzler and arrived there at 9:59 (by my watch). Their posted hours of operation read that they were open until 10:00 p.m., but their doors were locked.

Finally, we found Applebees. They were open until midnight. For most of the time we were there, we were the only customers in the restaurant. It was good food and, as you can imagine, very responsive service.

After dinner, we went to a Wal*Mart to get me some socks since I had neglected to bring any extra socks with me.

The drive back

I stayed in Boise Saturday night and began my journey back to Logan around 10:30 a.m. It was a pretty uneventful journey.

I stopped in Twin Falls to get lunch and stopped at a scenic overlook looking over the Snake River. The highway crosses over the river valley to go into Twin Falls and there were several people preparing to bungie jump from the bridge.

I took the above panoramic picture with four shots with my digital camera. I then stitched the frames together later.