Speedcabling

Here’s a fun sport to try out: Speedcabling.

The idea is that you try to untangle a jumbled up mix of computer wires, and do this against the clock.  The first competition of this kind has been held in Los Angles, the article reports.

It’s the sort of thing that I often do for my customers – labelling all the cables and them removing them all, only to replace them with a much neater arrangement, preferably using new, colour-coded cables.

But once I remember doing this in the server room of a company with about 50 employees.  I spent an entire Saturday morning re-wiring all the patch fields to make the system more presentable and understandable.

Another time I had to remove old network cable out of the ducts in the wall, and back then this was so-called BNC-cabling, where everything was joined to one big circuit – not like the structured cabling used today.

Again, I spent several hours trying to rescue as much cable as possible to be able to re-use it later.  But sometimes there was not other way than to cut through it, especially where the plugs had been attached after the cable had been put through specially-made holes in the wall.

So how would I fare in a speedcabling challenge?  I think I’d be pretty good.  When the sport makes it Europe, maybe I’ll have a got!

Why I think I'll avoid the United Arab Emirates

An interesting piece of news caught my eye this week – tourists are being warned of tough drug laws in the United Arab Emirates.
This is the only country that I have ever been to in the Middle East, and even then I only saw the airport as I was in transit between Singapore and London. I can remember how the cabin crew told us to leave our hand luggage on the plane to avoid any problems when re-boarding.
Maybe now I understand why – the article describes how people have been sentenced for having minute amounts of cannabis stuck to their shoes. Other had prescription medicines with them.
The one that really makes me shudder is the man traveller who had poppy seeds on his clothes from a bread role that he had eaten and was sentenced to four years in jail!
It all makes me want to stay away from that country.  But wait – only today I read that Germany has a similar situation.  Apparently eating three pieces of poppy seed cake is sufficient to fail a roadside drugs test, resulting in the loss of your driving license.
I think I’ll stick to cheese cake!

The longest trip yet in my bio-ethanol car

Yesterday was a real test for the bio-ethanol car – I drove to a meeting in Cologne and back.

This may not sound like anything special, but with Cologne being about 200km away and the car showing 409km remaining on a full tank I was a bit worried as it would be the first time that I had had to fill up anywhere else and, of course, mix the contents of the tank.

In the end though – I didn’t have to. The journey turned out to be about 370km, and even though there was a hold up on the motorway on the way home the on-board computer still calculated that I had enough fuel for 100km when I arrived home.

Of course, this is all down to the lower fuel consumption on the motorway compared to driving around the local towns. The computer worked out that I used 11.6 litres per 100km for the trip – about 2.5 less than normal and hence the extra distance available.

Another interesting fact was that Cologne now has an environmental zone in place – your car needs to display a green “fine particle disc” in order to enter the city. I didn’t see anyone actually check mine, but I did have it on display. More about that another day.

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