Home Audio System - Doh!

I couldn't sleep last night and finally realized why. In all my planning for the audio system, I seem to have left out connectors for half the speakers. I planned for one wire for left and one wire for right. Obviously there are two wires for right and two for left. That means I need to order more connectors from DeepSurplus and goto Home Depot to get some more low voltage boxes. I feel like such an idiot; this project probably would get done much faster and correct the first time if I hired a professional, but then I wouldn't get the joy of knowing I did most of the work myself.

Home Audio System - Weekend Update

Since I had some spare time this weekend and still don't have anyone to pull my cable, I went ahead and started tackling the project. First off, I installed a light switch (not really part of the audio system, but part of moving our family room) which only took 3 hours; it shouldn't have taken that long, but getting the old single gang box out took far longer than it should have and getting all the wires back in was a royal pain. Next up, I decided to run a few runs of cable. This turned out to be an interesting task. I knew there was some access to our walls from the garage and had been told by the previous owner that the owner before him had a darkroom in the back of a storage area; this got drywalled in some time ago. I chopped out some drywall and discovered the "hidden" room. Running the wires was relatively easy, but extremely time consuming. 2 runs down, 26 more to go.

Putting in the first speaker control turned out to be challenging. I cut in the low voltage box, wired up the Cat 5 and tried to put the control in the low voltage box. Unfortunately the company that makes the low voltage box (Carlson) must never have talked to the company that made the control box (Russound) as the low voltage box was a few millimeters too small! The volume control box is huge because it contains an amplifier (it's an A-BUS control); after a little modification of the low voltage box, I managed to get it installed.

More pictures are in the gallery. Hopefully this week I'll be able to run some more cable.

Tendonitis

Almost 3.5 weeks ago, my foot started hurting, so I stopped running and exercising for about a week. When the problem didn't get better, I went to the doctor. He diagnosed it as tendonitis. It's now been over 2 weeks and things are getting much better. However, not exercising for that amount of time is making me stir crazy. I use my exercise time (running 2-3 times a week and cycle class twice a week) as time that I can do nothing else, but think. Hopefully I can start full force again next week. I'm so used to regular exercise nowadays, it just seems strange to sit around. I don't wish this upon anyone.

Gigabit Ethernet

As part of my home audio system project, I decided to upgrade my network from 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps (Gigabit). I installed 2 gigabit switches and a new ethernet card in my server. Luckily 3 of my other computers already had gigabit ethernet. I changed a few patch cables from Cat 5 to Cat 6 (Cat 6 is recommended for gigabit) and still have to replace the main cable from my office to my server. Hopefully this upgrade will speed up my backups when I drag down 65 GB of data from my server to my removable drive. I never thought I'd need/want gigabit and now I wonder why I didn't do it before. Cost is pretty minor (~$60 for each switch and ~$70 for a new ethernet card).