Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
I'd advise you to avoid catching a cold just before…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I'd advise you to avoid catching a cold just before Moving Day. It's just so darned inconvenient.
Yesterday I started moving stuff in earnest to my new place. I stopped by beforehand and ended up learning how to make an Ethernet cable with a huge spool of Unshielded Twisted Pair cable, connectors, and a crimper. (Start with the spool of cable. Cut off the length you need. Remove about an inch of insulation from one end of the length. Splay apart the four twisted pairs of wire. Untwist the wires a little bit and insert them in the correct order (white-orange, orange, white-green, blue, white-blue, green, white-brown, brown[0]) in the connector. Use the crimper to force the copper in the connector all the way through all the wires. Repeat for other end.)
I went in to that apartment a political science major and I came out an amateur engineer. What'll happen to me once I move in proper?
Well, time to continue packing and moving. Keith Knight is harsh and slightly funny, and someday this might be me.
[0] I think. (The order applies to viewing the connector "upside down," with the plastic tail towards you.) And evidently that's only for one type of cable, "transmit," I think; for a crossover cable one of the ends has the green and orange switched or something. As Michael explained it, there are three types of Ethernet cable, and one can tell them all by looking at both ends. If all the wires are in the same, correct order in both, then it's a transmit. If one end has that configuration and the other has the correct wires switched, then it's a crossover cable. Anything else, and it's broken.
