I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is really bad, but few will care, and the good news is mediocre, and none will care.

First, the bad news. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Netmonkey is dead. I still haven't exactly figured out what the hell is wrong with it, but it's serious. Whenever any live network connection is hooked to any of its ports, that port's activity LED blinks like crazy, and as near as I can tell, it's not passing any kind of packets between the ports. This is problematic, given that a network switch, at least in a hobby sense, is used to pass packets between ports.

Pulling out all its guts and opening the internal switch up, there doesnt seem to be much wrong with the hardware. I do seem to have caused a momentary short in the power LED, as one of the wires I soldered in was longer than the other, and at some point it bent, and connected with the other.There's some charred flux, but no blown components or anything. It seems kind of odd that that would cause the mental freakout that is currently plaguing the thing, though. Since I'm trying to get things organized, and save money, I can't really afford to grab a new switch and try to reanimate the thing. Now, it is packed into a box, and will live again some day in the future. It will be the Jesus monkey.

Ashes to ashes, and all that. It's silly, but I'm actually saddened by this.

Anyway, the good news. The death of the monkey of course reduces my available network devices by one. I hadn't been using him for a bit anyway, because he had been freaking out, and his absence added a network cable running across my living room, as well as limiting my magic TV box to the 10megabit hub I had left. I've been cleaning and organizing like mad, and it seemed about time to try and deal with the fact that I had 2 network cables running across my living room, one of which reached from up in my bedroom. Nothing adds a touch of class to a home like random cables snaking across heavy-traffic areas, and down staircases.

This was necessary due to the fact that for some damned reason the wiring we ran through the attic and down the bedroom closets was not providing any kind of reliable connection. Additionally, the wiring we ran across the living room celing divider and behind the living room wall was similarly being a bitch.

I have been battling this for aeons, it seems, and only getting it to work reliably at 10megabit - which is chump speed. I wanted to use the 100mbit power I had in the hardware available, which frustrated me endlessly and eventually resulted in me using the half measure of Big Bertha for over a year.

For the uninitiated, Big Bertha is a gigantic, green, 100ft network cable. For the past year plus, it has run between the two levels of my home, filling the void that the nice, professionalish, behind-the-wall wiring left by its being horribly unreliable and intermittent.

Well, no longer.

As it turns out, the good news is that I have, for more than a few years, been incredibly stupid, and ignorant about the proper manufacture of network cables.

I've been through 800 battles with this stuff, gone to greath lengths to test line continuity across a whole house, and it turns out that while my wiring was sound in its integrity and manufacturing, the planning stage was horribly, horribly flawed.

What's sad is that all this grief was simply because the color pattern I chose to use when making network cables did not properly make use of the data-integrity-enhancement present in the twisting of pairs in Cat5 cable. I had considered this problem, but honestly it took until last night for me to find a site that made it as ass-simple as this one. Snip a couple ends, rearrange the wires, crimp new ends on and suddenly all my in-home wiring is happily slugging along at 100mbit and I am doing what must have been a hillarious looking dance to Beck's Loser on XRM radio, streaming to my downstairs computer through the in-wall wiring. I had 100 megabit, and I was no longer abusing Big Bertha.

So, that's the "good news," everyone. I have drastically reduced my need for extraneous network hardware, and completely eliminated the annoying network cables running all over hell. It's a shame I didn't realize how dumb I was a long time ago, or I could have had a nice looking living room without sacrificing geek power.

It's a small thing, but it has been such a recurring, daunting problem, I am insanely happy to have finally won. And now I don't need to resurrect the monkey in order to be able to have all the networked devices in my home be connected simultaneously. Plus, I am saved trying to fix this crap so it's functional for whoever buys this place. It's all working now, so I can point to it and say "Hey! Potential buyer! Behold, networking!" and they will go "Well isn't that the cat's pajamas!" and I'll say something like "And how!" and then we'll go into some kind of vaudeville bit or a musical number about packet routing, I haven't decided yet. Either way, the lindy hop will probably be involved.

Other events of the evening, lessee.

I cleaned. A bunch. You guys would be impressed. I threw a bunch of stuff away. Hm, what else. I went to Wal*Mart at 2am, which is always a surreal experience. At that hour the employee:patron ratio is approximately 32:1. If you tried to start a riot in Wal*Mart at 2am, they would put you down or blow you away with the dogs and the hoses in about 4 seconds. I don't have any idea where I'm going with this.

Funny how an entry called 'endings' doesn't really have

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