Hmmm. Mother’s Day is coming up. I’ve got to keep reminding myself of that fact as frequently as possible.

“This week has been nuts,” has started to become a mantra in my life. It’s like the norm rather than the exception.

Difficult to wire

One of our long-time clients had to move into new office space on fairly short notice earlier this week. I found out about the move on Saturday and scheduled Tuesday to go to the new location to set up the network. Mike and I showed up on Tuesday and concluded after surveying the place that it was going to be very difficult to run network cable to every office in the space. This was because instead of suspended ceiling tiles you can move up and out of the way, this office has a concrete aggregate set on wire mesh on which 12-inch accoustical tiles are glued.

There were a few access panels that allowed us access up into the space between the suspended ceiling and the next floor up, but it was small and there’s a lot of pipes and ductwork to get in the way.

In the end, we set up an 802.11g wireless access point to serve the three offices furthest away from the servers and ran cables to three jacks in the rooms adjacent to the room where the servers were going.

Those three jacks were still a major pain. Mike got the unlucky job of climbing up in the ceiling to do those while I set up the wireless network and got the servers and workstations up and running so our client could get back to semi-normal operations by Wednesday.

Meanwhile...

Another client’s wireless connection went down this last weekend. We’ve had poor luck dealing with the particular wireless ISP we used for this client and we’re ready to just say forget it.

Another client is getting DSL this week and will not be needing a wireless connection any longer so we want to move that equipment to the site being served by the very unreliable provider and switch to the more-reliable provider.

I don’t know why it is, though. It’s difficult to find good wireless ISPs in Utah. They all suck, to some extent. If only a company like XMission would enter the wireless space!

And then...

We had a NetGateway installation scheduled for this week, but we weren’t exactly sure when the client’s existing DSL connection would be switched over to use our preferred ISP. Well, this morning, our client called us frantic and hysterical because he desperately needed Internet connectivity and didn’t have it — presumably because the DSL switch took place.

I scrambled over there and got everything switched over and did my best to smooth things over.

So... tomorrow I’m setting up the DSL connection for the client that is switching from wireless to DSL.

Yard stuff

I’ve been slowly working on putting a sprinking system in our front yard. If I had continuous access to a trencher, I would use it, but since I don’t, I’m using a pick mattock and a trenching shovel to dig the trenches I need to lay the pipes down.

I’ve been spending about 30-45 minutes a night working on this. I’ve got the main water line in place from the valve box near the sidewalk up to where I’ll put the valve boxes near the house. I’ve also got most of the trench for one of the three main sprinkler lines.

I think this process will work out pretty well because I’m not spending a ton of money all at once doing it this way. Plus, I’m giving myself a little exercise working in the yard every night.