Paladin Roaming

Next Move

Been busy at work -- the next section will be moving Wednesday evening. The area they were moving to was short of communications cables. Had to run eight pairs of cat5 cables. Back to the terminal room. About eighty feet. During working hours. Without disrupting the workers. Without overtime. Your typical OCS mission impossible.

Looking around under the floor I spotted an inch and a half flexible plastic tube -- one of the old tubes that carried fiber from the ODS 241 hubs to the 8-port (AUI ports!) Ungermann-Bass hubs that connected the 286 computers that went in back in the late '80's. Trim the end out on the floor, place it up to my laptop speaker and ran up Winamp and some Oldies. In the terminal room, over where the ODS 241's were racked over a decade ago, listen to each tube 'til I find the one with the Tunes -- pull back to the cat5 patch bay and trim.

I go back the barn at noon, pick up four boxes of blue and four reels of pink wire, a snake, some blocks and jacks, and out evening man, Doug. Doug has a couple fo troubles to take care of first, so I head back to Western. I snake the tube from the teminal room to the floor. Pull and cut four pairs of cables, 80 feet, lay out in a zig-zag ready to feed into the tube. Connect the next four pairs, tape all eight pairs to the snake. Doug has shown up by then and he feeds while I pull. And it's done -- cables run without having to open the floor in three places and pull foot by foot. Leave Doug to place the cables in each box.

This morning I arrive to find that the construction people have finished up -- the cloor is closed and the carpet has been replaced. I check the boxes -- all the cables are in place. Except there is no box for the south end of the In-Charge desk. Found it! It was under the carpet -- the box was there with no cables. The cables were no problem, I had existing cables under the floor for the two In-Charge positions. Grace is back, she stopped by and put the biscuits on the floor ends of the cables. I put the jacks on the pink cables in the terminal room. Put my Pinger on the floor end, found the room end, place in the jack panel.

End of day -- all of the floor ends of the cat-5 cables are in and terminated and labled. The red (pink) cables are in identified and teminated and labled.

Tomorrow -- ID and terminate and lable the blue cables. Get the list of from and to of the 'phones that will be moving and pre-lim the jumpers.

Posted by at August 30, 2004 08:45 PM