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So, we're back again, now that the network at the new house is finally ready, servers installed etc.
Hot damn, I have too much stuff. I've been shifting it downhill by the boxload and there's as much there as there was before. Something has to give, or else I will. When I come back from holiday, I'm gonna have to sort a shelf a week or something...
Speaking of, I'm off to Denver on Monday. Man, that's crept up, what with the attempting-to-move and the workload and everything. Hope I can sleep on the plane...
Side-effect of this site being down over the weekend is, of course, that I haven't kept up the usual play-by-play of things that happened while setting up the new house. So, in the interests of general amusement, and getting my housemate craigk in trouble with his girlfriend and parents, I present the Tale of the Barely-Caged Daemon.
It's a thought little entertained, that lighting, and cleaning, entertainment and so many other things we take for granted in modern life are powered by that kinda-sorta obedient elemental we know as electricity. Exploiting baby lightnings like this works well so long as the containment mechanism works. All the switching, wiring and connectors need to be undamaged and correctly installed, or the consequences will be unpleasant.
Craig and I replaced several sockets and switches over the weekend, either because they were oddly stained, or damaged (the one on the staircase was wrecked, and barely holding itself together, bits of casing everywhere). This after we'd spent a little while studying the airing cupboard into which we were planning on installing the core of our house network and deciding that, although there was a breaker for the immersion heater in the distribution board downstairs, the heater was plainly no longer present, so its circuit should be available to power the switches and servers at the heart of the network. We found what we thought was the feed for the heater, opened it up and put a multimeter (AC voltage mode, 250V full-scale-deflection) on it. Te nada. Nothing, not a volt. So, we made plans to rip that spur out, because it was in the way of a planned shelving unit. At the point of rip-out, because I am (a) the son of an electrical engineer, (b) well trained in the art of shocking myself, and (c) not stupid, I opened the case with an electrician's screwdriver and prodded the live terminal carefully. Imagine my surprise when the neon in the screwdriver lit up, indicating AC voltage present...
So the spur wasn't as dead as we thought. The meter had read 0V... We brought the meter back, and it still read 0V. The neon still lit. In a moment of slight space-cadetism, I figured that maybe there was a DC fault on the line, causing the neon to light (but, being DC, wouldn't register on a meter in AC mode). We flipped the meter to DC mode, then I held the meter while Craig probed the contact carefully.
*ZZZERT!*
Craig tells me a fat spark leapt from his probe to the contact. I was a little preoccupied, because the yellow, opaque casing of the multimeter in my hands had just lit up, buzzed and jumped out of my hand. So, live circuit then...
I kept an eye on the switch at the end of the spur, hanging open as it was so we could get at the contacts, while Craig trotted downstairs and tripped breakers until the screwdriver said the circuit was dead. Wouldn't you know it? Immersion heater. 13A of power, dedicated to the network core, like in the last place. FTW. So, after several trips to B&Q (the pattress had to be replaced too, as it fell to bits as we were screwing the new socket plate in place), we have power in the server cupboard.
So, deferred success. I need to gut that multimeter at some point and see if it's fixable (it's a moving-coil meter, and I like them, damnit, but they're hard to find). It looked like it arced straight between the terminals, so if I'm lucky there should be minimal damage to the sensitive electronics beyond that point.
Alright, so for just a bit, we're back on the Wired, no real thanks to the shaven monkeys^W^Wwondrous people working at VirginMedia.
It all went down like this, y'see. $housemate rings VirginMedia to arrange for our account, and the associated connection, down the hill to the new house. They say they can turn off the connection here somewhen around midday on Friday, and send an engineer to connect us back up at the new place Saturday morning. Wonderful, think we, how can this go wrong?
...
About twenty minutes after that phonecall, the internet just goes away. We're used to occasional failures, but this one lasted too long. Eventually, $housemate rang and complained, loudly. The connection came back up almost immediately, and it transpired that not only had the connection been turned off earlier than anticipated, but the 'Friday' and the 'Saturday' mentioned previously were a week apart.
......
Still, once we got that sorted out we got a discount on the first six months in the new place. Monetary compensation, woo. Yay. Maybe. I suppose it'll do, though really I'd settle for a lack of initial fuckup.
Anyway, DNS repointed in record time thanks to my good friend Al (to whom I've not spoken in far too long)
In other news, I've installed more shelving in the last seventy-two hours than I thought possible, and my room is starting to look like my room in the new house (IYSWIM). Onward, ever onward, and hopefully I'll finish shifting stuff about before I have to go to the States this year...
Thirteen days to go. How did that happen?
Left work early today, so I could spend the afternoon putting up shelving, laying cable etc.
Drilled three holes and laid conduit for later cable runs. Replaced one power socket, installed another, ran data cable between two rooms and the comms cupboard. (That was me and Craig, I should note). Painted three coats of varnish onto a battered old chest of drawers I'd sanded down yesterday, got shelving units, stacked them in the corner of my room and looked at them.
*zZzZzZzZ*
The great Move has well and truly begun, now: there's a vacuum cleaner stood in my new room as we speak, and assorted detritus from flat-pack furniture going up over the weekend. I still need to get over there again this evening and finish the cleaning, ready to start moving things in properly, but the desk and chair are there, the wardrobe (I am corrected on spelling by Firefox here: I've been writing that 'warderobe' for years...) and a single bookcase are stood forlornly amid the mess, and it's staggering toward looking like home. A few more days of enthusiastic tidying, fetching, carrying, building and cleaning, and we'll be ... well, at least halfway there.
On another note, today was annoying at work. Over the years, I've bothered to train a couple of autohypnotic commands into myself, which do things other people do naturally. The most useful essentially allows me to unwind, by sequestering all the information in my brain about a given topic (normally 'work') and moving it out of my immediate awareness, so I can try to enjoy myself over the weekend without thinking about work too much. Of course, there are days when I forget to unset it, as it were, and spend most of the day hopelessly unfocussed and wondering why my thoughts keep bouncing off the subject of work...
*sigh* Oh well. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Since I've run out of clothes, have to put the washing on and will probably go to work wearing something mildly damp, I rather doubt it.