Cat 6

I have a Cat 6 socket on the floor of my office. But for months I’ve been using a cable lying on the floor, running to the router. Why? The guy who installed the sockets left a big coil of wire outside on the ground, connected to the system, and lighting strikes about three times an hour here, and at some point, a bolt of lightning managed to shoot current up that coil and into the house. It fried a good deal of cable, including the bit between my router and socket.

I thought I was going to have to go under the house to run the cable and use some kind of special tool to connect the ends, but I decided to try to fish the cable and open the connectors. I taped fishing line to one end of the old cable, pulled it through both holes in the floor, discarded the cable, saved the connectors, and hooked the new cable to them. It turns out you don’t need any special tools for these connectors. They even have helpful decals showing you which color wire goes where.

I am now blogging without a giant cable running through the room. And I didn’t have to call a guy to come out here and charge way too much for a one-hour job.

Tools used:

Klein flat screwdriver
Stanley needlenose pliers, small
Stanley diagonal cutters
flashlight
50# test
duct tape

Knowing how to tie fishing knots is very useful for this kind of thing.

I left maybe ten feet of slack under the house, and I’m going to leave the fish line in place. I am all done letting other people route ethernet stuff.

Those Stanley tools aren’t great, but they’re too good to throw out and replace.

Or Next to the Steak

I just put up a shameful post at Manly Grub. It’s about the healthy breakfast I eat most days. You can’t eat pork fat at every single meal, unfortunately.

I put up my final recipes for pita and hummus.

Comments Read

I decided to remove an entry I put up earlier today, but I wanted to thank everyone for the kind responses.

Crap

Had a problem with the blogroll at Manly Grub. If your site fell off, it doesn’t mean I delinked it. I am working to get all the links back up.

If you’ve ever heard of St. Louis gooey butter cake, go over there and tell me about it.

How Wrong You Are

It’s 9:16 a.m., and I’m already tired. Lots of things going on.

I’m too lazy to write a whole blog post right now, but let me point you to one. Longtime reader Wormathan used my recipe to make a blueberry cheesecake, and it’s gorgeous.

You can see it here.

Don’t forget to join the forum.

EWWWWW

I did a radio show to promote the cookbook, and host Mike McConnell told me to steal his idea and write a book based on it: “Sounds Disgusting; Tastes Great.”

So I put up a board in the forum, with exactly that theme.

I am sure you will have no problem filling it.

Scones

I am now putting unpublished recipes up at Manly Grub. There is a link to them in the sidebar, and you can also find them on the forum.

Today’s treat: scones made with bacon grease, cream cheese, and rum-soaked raisins.

For a Weekend in the Hamptons

I was looking at the Drudge Report this morning, and I saw a photo from the new Batman movie, and I had to ask myself: have gays ruined Batman for everybody?

The photo shows Heath Ledger in his Joker suit, with makeup and a flamboyant hairdo, and behind him stands Batman, who appears to be a pencil-armed, out of shape guy of middling height. And what do they look like? A powerful superhero and an arch villain? No. They look like a couple of gay guys who work in cubicles during the week and dress up for raves on the weekend. What is Batman doing back there? Probably texting another gay guy who has a Riddler costume.

I think Hollywood predestined this when they dressed Burt Ward up like a cocktail waitress in the old TV show. In what was basically a short red silk dress and little green panties. And “Robin”? How is that a man’s name? I mean, sure, in England, maybe. But they tend to be a little ambiguous anyway. Would a professional wrestler call himself Robin?

Okay, bad choice of images. Wrestling is even more homoerotic than comic books. Hell, it’s worse than NFL football. And that is saying a lot.

Before gaydom became so popular, we were not as used to seeing men running around in costumes. Now every Marvel movie looks like footage from Fantasy Fest.

Maybe the problem is me. Sometimes I feel like I’m over movies. Sometimes instead of suspending disbelief, I see a bunch of spoiled rich people with drug habits and multiple STDs, playing make-believe. This is especially true of science fiction. Once you’ve seen video of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford reacting emotionally to big blue things that will later be filled in with monsters and whatnot, it’s hard to take their agitation seriously in the final version. You think to yourself, “What idiots. How can a grown person do that for a living?” Acting seems exciting when you think of John Wayne as a guy who rode around on a horse shooting people, or when you think of Russell Crowe as a Roman general who fights tigers with his bare hands. It’s a little different when you think of actors as they really are. People who sit around in RVs taking drugs and watching DVDs while stagehands prepare for ten-second scenes.

I think Reed Richards may be the gayest superhero. He stretches himself out and wraps bad guys up. Think about this. When Reed Richards wraps sixty feet of himself around you, how much of that amount is crotch?

See what I mean?

Also, how come his clothes stretch along with him? Where can I buy an outfit like that? I could really use one when I’m working on new recipes.

Life is getting weird. These days if you want manly entertainment, you have to watch Rosie O’Donnell or the LPGA.

I want to thank everyone who joined the forum. It looks like it’s going to get plenty of business. Now I have to worry about bandwidth expenses. The hosting company says bandwidth is unlimited, but I have a feeling that is something they only say until it starts to hurt them.

Ordinarily, I get around 340 page views per day. Today it’s over 4,000. The unique visits aren’t high, but maybe they will be in a month.

People are posting recipes and food photos. I have a beer board up. I’m now putting submitted photos in the Coppermine gallery.

Come on by, if you get bored.

By the way, a well-known Blogosphere personality will be starting his own forum pretty soon. I am not cleared to reveal the news, so I can’t tell you who it is. But I’ll pimp it when the time comes, and you WILL join or face my disapproval. I know that would just tear you up.

Eat, Burp, Post

To stimulate participation in the Manly Grub Forum, I have created new ranks based on post count. Everyone starts off as a Tofu Eater. Then eventually you work your way up to Human Garbage Disposal and beyond.

I hope this is inspiring.

More

Readers Aelfheld and Pepi have graduated from Smelly Vegan Hippie to Salad Boy! Congratulations!

No Fuss

I keep meaning to tell everyone; I found a way to grow healthy tomato plants without much work.

First, you have to have a complete break in the waste line leading to your septic tank. Then you have to pay someone to fix it and re-bury it, using the same dirt that came out when he dug it up.

Do the math.

Unbalanced

A bunch of people have signed up for the forum. And as far as I can tell, only ONE is a woman.

God help her.

I also tested the profanity filter, which substitutes terms of my choice for common bad words. Seems to work quite well.

Don’t forget: if you have food pics you want the world to see, you can email them to me, and I may put them in the gallery.

Thanks for signing up.

Forum Open

Let’s give this forum thing a shot.

I put together two forums. One uses PHPBB. The other uses Simple Machines. These are forum programs. I picked them because they were free, and because I was able to set them up using Fantastico. The SMF (Simple Machines) forum was much better looking and easier to operate, so that’s the one I plan to go with.

I’m going to run it for at least a week and see how it goes. Because I have limited time to administer it, I had to make horrible draconian rules, which I posted in the “Say Hi Here” subforum. I’ll repeat them here. I’m not making these rules to be a pain in the ass; I have to minimize the time I spend babysitting, and this is the only way to do it, for the time being. I can’t play around, adjudicating trivial disputes, so I’ll have to ban or suspend people. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone except dedicated troublemakers.

RULES:

1. No heavy-duty profanity. Only the mildest three of George Carlin’s ten deadly words, please. You should be able to figure out what they are. Also banned: the A.H. word. If your username is dirty, you’ll have to change it. Don’t say anything here you can’t say at 9 p.m. on national TV.
2. Try to be polite.
3. Don’t get involved in repetitious, endless arguments that bore everyone to death. Take it to email.
4. Don’t post anyone’s personal or private information, or anything about another person that isn’t true.
5. No spam.
6. No dirty pictures. If in doubt, keep it to yourself.
7. Expect to be held to the broad disclaimer language you agreed to when you signed up. If you didn’t read it, that’s your problem.
8. I may add to these rules. You have to keep up with new rules, without being informed.
9. No photos of salad or tofu.

This isn’t a court of appeals, so you have no rights. I try to be fair, but I may screw up, and I or my moderators may ban people or alter or delete their posts unfairly. That’s life, and you consent to it by being here. It’s not that I’m a jerk, although that is probably the case. It’s that I only have so much time to fool with the board, so I can’t get dragged into lengthy arguments over whether I did the right thing.

Have fun, if that is still possible.

Here’s the URL: FORUM.

Tell me what you think.

All is Quiet

Wondering, in view of recent events, why we’re not being treated to a solid two weeks of over-the-top, off-putting, talking-head gushing about Tony Snow?

Me, too.

Here is Moxie’s take on his passing.

Name Your Amperage

I appreciate the advice on the bare 220 wires I found hanging by my air handler. I would still like to know who left them there, so I can attach them to him at some point in the future.

I was asking whether a 20-amp 220 circuit was useful for anything, and it turns out it would be. Not all 220-volt tools are huge. Someone suggested running a bigger wire with a bigger breaker, but that’s pointless. The whole point of the exercise is to make use of free Romex and a free breaker, which are already in place. Besides, I have a 60-amp circuit and a 40-amp circuit already.

The way things stand now, I can drill one hole, run the wires through it, plop a box on the other side, run a short piece of conduit, and slap on a 20-amp receptacle. That’s a one-hour job, and it will cost nearly nothing. Upgrade to a bigger circuit, and I have to spend more time and money. And I don’t even have a use for the receptacle. Why add it, then? The alternative is to pull out a perfectly good set of wires and disconnect them from the panel.

After all this is done, I get to find out why I have small blackish bees dying in the living room.