I mentioned a few weeks ago that I switched my broadband provider.

And I mentioned how I decided to shift the main router from one room to another.

Now this has worked extremely well up to now, but there was one thing pissing me off – the number of cables running from one room to the other along the floor.  Today it crossed my mind to tidy them a bit.

The telephone cable comes into the house at the back room where the router now is.  But seeing as the router used to be in the junk room office, the telephone wire ran along the skirting into the  junk room office, and I had to run it back again to the new router.  With me so far?  Of course you are.

I had removed the old router from the junk room office and replaced it with a split, and there was a cable running from the split to the satellite box, which coincidentally is being used to prop up the new router.  So today I removed that cable and connected the router and satellite box directly which seemed to make sense.  Still with me?  Good.

I then discovered another cable which I followed and discovered it was a phone line that ran to a fax machine that I haven't used in years so I unplugged it and traced it back along the floor whereupon I discovered it was plugged into the satellite box.  So for the last while my satellite box had been happily chatting to the fax behind my back but not running up any bills because they weren't connected to the main phone line.

Things were beginning to look neater.

I was down to just one wire running between the junk room office and the living room, but the telephone wire was a bit messy as it was about fifteen foot longer than it need be, having been doubled back on itself.  Now I'm no fool so I carefully noted the colour coding, as there is a moxy load of wires in the cable and I wanted to connect the right two.  Red goes to red, and white goes to the other colour.  Grand.  I cut the wire.

Now I always understood the idea of colour coding wires was so you'd know which one is which at either end?  So what bright spark of a fucking idiot decided to bundle two reds and two whites in the same fucking cable?  There was a rainbow of other colours which left me with a choice of four.  Trial and error time.

My network is now simplicity personified.

The router is proudly sitting on my satellite box where it powers the latter and another little yoke for pirating viewing films.  A cable runs from there to the junk room office where it is split a couple of ways to connect to my printer, some hard disks and a dud spare laptop [which only really works well when I control it from another laptop].  Finally another cable runs out the window, across the roof to the front of the house to another wireless router because one router won't cover the whole house.  That's the fault of the twits who built the old house out of solid fucking granite two foot thick.  Surely they must have known at the time, a couple of hundred years ago that radio waves don't travel through solid granite all that well?  Very short sighted, I call it.

Anyhows, normal service has been resumed and the place looks a lot tidier.

I even managed to time it to perfection so that Herself missed most of Joe Duffy's programme while everything was disconnected.

I do not like Joe Duffy.

She does.

She'll calm down eventually….