My Head Hurts

I Just Can't Leave Well Enough Alone...


The day we closed on this old house I live in today, while the movers were still backing into the driveway with boxes containing all of our "stuff", at the same time I had the Comcast Cable guys drilling holes in my wall and checking TV and Internet connections on old wiring that had been around in the building for at least 20 years.

Since I didn't want to pay them $50 an hour to do wiring inside the house, I just asked that they get me a working feed to a spot inside my "third bedroom" office and figured that I'd handle working out the details needed to get Internet and a TV signal to the other rooms.

Things have sort of proceeded on a "helter skelter" basis since then with the addition of an under counter TV in the Kitchen and TV's in the living room, Master bedroom, and a cable flopping around in the basement that served the shop and laundry area.

The living room TV signal has been annoying on certain channels apparently because of the aged wiring, and with other recent technical revelations...I've decided that now it's time to "Pay the Piper" and straighten things out for good.

You see, yesterday I moved my old HP laptop into the new World Headquarters of Plastics Engineering Technologies upon receipt of a shipment of the last cables and technical do-dads relating to uploading my new program to the Horner PLC, and in the process I learned...

gasp...

my Linksys wireless signal doesn't reach through the 1963 vintage concrete walls and heart oak flooring and framing from the first floor to the basement.

Now it looks like I have to go with a CAT 5 hard wire from the router to be able to Google and Blog from my area of the basement.

Dangit...

Of course if I'm going to start moving ceiling tiles and drilling holes I might as well re-wire the crappy vintage cable TV wiring at the same time, so a couple hours of this morning will have to be dedicated to pulling out and replacing the old cable wires to a couple of rooms and putting in a new CAT 5 feed to the computer workstation in the shop.

And of course when they added central air conditioning to the house in the 1970's they ran the central trunk duct work down the middle of the basement, right underneath the spots where I want to drill holes and make cable drops against the baseboards on the first floor, so instead of two hours I'll probably actually spend four hours cursing and banging my knuckles and fishing around with a bent coat hanger for wires rendered invisible by the duct work.

Oh well.

It has to be done...and I'm the cheapest technician I know that can get it accomplished.

Is it just me, or am I getting too old to do this crap?