I are teh uber master

Well, it's good to know that four years of education in electrical engineering didn't go completely to waste...

So, I'm up in Colorado at the moment, staying at my friend Brian's parent's place for the week. Brian's dad is ... well ... loaded, and I'd estimate the worth of the home to be about $1M. His parents retired out in Colorado and once a year they host Brian and any number of Brian's friends for a week. It started as a Spring Break thing, and usually is a ski trip, but this year for whatever reason they're doing it in the middle of June, so it's just a hanging out trip.

Anyway, they have a wireless network set up (like seemingly everyone else on the planet nowadays) but for whatever reason I couldn't connect to it. The wireless in my laptop is moody (I just plug it into my router at home), and I was stuck with no Internets. Since I plan on making this a working vacation (i.e. I can't afford to take a full week off) that was unacceptable.

So, Brian's dad, Sam, has the place completely wired with CAT-5. Seriously. Like, every room has 2-3 CAT-5 jacks on the outlets. But, since they use their wireless pretty much always, most of this CAT-5 is just hanging free in an electrical cabinet downstairs. They use CAT-5 for their phone jacks (since RJ45 will plug into a CAT-5 jack, and just use the middle 4 conductors). So it's all basically a big mess.

To compound the mess, about half of the CAT-5 is terminated at the connectors in, shall we say, a "non-standard" way. A normal straight-thru cable will go like: 1) Green Stripe, 2) Green, 3) Orange Stripe, 4) Blue, 5) Blue stripe, 6) Orange, 7) Brown Stripe, 8) Brown. This was more like, 1) Brown Stripe, 2) Green Stripe, 3) Orange Stripe, 4) Blue Stripe, 5) Blue, 6) Orange, 7) Green, 8) Brown. They just ordered the cables with stripes than solids, LOL. That ain't no straight-thru cable and it ain't no crossover cable. In fact I don't have the slightest idea WTF it is at all.

So. Before we figured any of this out, I got the genius idea that I could take an ethernet cable and run it from an output of the router in the office upstairs and plug it into the nearby CAT-5 jack, then use a female-female splice cable in the electrical room downstairs to hook that to the cable that runs to the wall near where my computer lives (moving my computer up to the office is and was not an option as the office has become the baby's room where Brian and Cam's 1yr old twins are sleeping). Brian's dad had plents of spare connectors lying around but no spare cable: no problem, I just took one of the free-standing cables that was hanging unterminated in the electrical room, snipped about a foot off of it, and reterminated it.

The next step was the creation of the cable itself, which involved taking two female CAT-5 jacks, wiring one side up in standard straight-thru configuration, and wiring the other side up in the screwed up fashion described above, as the cable from the computer's location was terminated correctly but the cable going up to the office was not.

Amazingly, the sumbitch worked on the first try, and I'm now connected to the Internet again, allowing me to play thepokers. Even lost $10 in a tourney last night :)