Cabling our house…

So this week I’ve been working on re-cabling our phone jacks to be Ethernet jacks. Since we get our internet through the cable company, use an VoIP phone, and wireless handsets throughout the house, we had no particular use for the phone jacks in the house.

At the same time, I do run many computers throughout the house, and while wireless was an OK option, it really wasn’t reliable enough for running the server from, meaning we had to put the server with the wireless router. This was a bit of a problem, as I’d like the wireless router in the higher floors of the house, and the server in the basement, where it’s noise and heat won’t be an issue. Similarly, I’d like to stream video and audio throughout the house, and wireless really isn’t the best option for this.

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Happy New Year! — Leap Second Update

So I realized yesterday that all the news about the New Year’s countdowns should be 3-2-1-1 were just dramatizations of reality. I guess I should have figured that all along, but got caught up in it myself. You see, the leap second was added at 23:59:59 UTC (coordinated universal time), and therefore, in my time zone, had been added to the clock 5 hours prior. There was nothing unusual about our countdown (at least, for the last 10 seconds).

But I have yet to find a reporter who actually reported what happened in Trafalgar square (or other places celebrating New Year’s with the UTC leap second in play). Did they start their countdown a second later? Or did they count some number twice? Or were they early? The public wants to know (or at least I do)!