Comment by k4ch0w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by k4ch0w | Hacker News Reader

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I've been spending my time wiring my house for ethernet. Sure, I could pay someone it would save me time and money but I've learnt a lot about my house and how to fix dry wall :-p. I've had to make 5 different Home Depot runs in the last two weeks cause I always discover something new.

I think a lot of us are type A, we can't sit still but also know our brains need to recoup and do something else. I tried to write some code but honestly I'd rather finish my ethernet project. Life is a marathon not a sprint. You gotta recharge sometimes and honestly you may learn something different that shapes how you think. Steve Jobs always said Calligraphy was the reason he thought about fonts on a GUI. Why the hell was he taking that class instead of hustling? :-p

It's completely wise. We aren't designed to just do one thing over and over. Life is so much more than building a SaaS or making money. You know we could go tomorrow right? Anything could happen and the future isn't guaranteed. Obviously, stay motivated and keep driving but sometimes you gotta replenish your gas tank and take care of your physical/mental health.

I did two runs of cat6 myself as part of my final boss home WiFi reliability battle. The crawl space under my 118 year old house is gnarly, like 99th percentile for tight, dirty places to work in. 6 months later, Monoprice recalled the cable I used due to a bad UL label. They had to pay a contractor to redo the runs. I emailed them details of the crawlspace, and suggested sending at least two people with full PPE. A guy came out, and decided he would need to come back with a helper and protective equipment. For some reason he came out again alone and empty handed again a few days later. He finally came out a third time with another guy, and full body coveralls and whatnot. The first guy was saying that I saved a lot of money doing it myself initially, because it was the sort of job that was so dirty that no contractor would even offer an overpriced quote for.

I suspect they probably billed Monoprice like $5k, and there wasn't even any drywall work because I had put in proper junction boxes. They probably botched it too, at least compared to my standard. At least the new cable seems to work at full speed.

Wait so why was monoprice on the hook to pay for reinstalling it?

They sold a product with a UL stamp on it claiming the cable had a certain fire safety rating that's required by building code for multi-story runs. For whatever reason, they learned the cable didn't actually conform to that rating. They therefore had to recall the cable (and replace any installed runs) to presumably avoid getting sued for any buildings that burn down that happen to have their mislabeled cable in the walls.

In my particular usage it was all single story and so the lack of the claimed UL rating didn't seem to materially matter. I mentioned that to the various points of contact that I had, but it was 2 or three layers deep of subcontractors, and they just trudged ahead with their directive.

The funny thing is that Monoprice sent me another 500' spool of properly rated cable, and the contractors didn't bother to take the 400' or so left of unused faulty cable. So, I have a bunch of "free" high quality but unusable for construction cat6.

Done the ethernet wiring at home thing and more recently expanded to external wifi points :-)

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