Kutiman-Thru-you – 01 – Mother of All Funk Chords

At work we have a 48RU open rack for our patch rack. To those of you who had that fly over your head, it’s where we make phones and network connections happen.

Neatpatch promises to sort that out. After some pretty poor service from the local distributor, I finally received 6 of these at work, choosing to source the cables locally (where I can get a very good discount by purchasing in bulk). And here are some results, using a pair of 48 port switches in my desk-top rack stand to show a dense cabling setup:

OK, so after going through their website and looking at the alternatives, I made the pitch to my employer to purchase these in order to fix up our patch rack. This work will happen when we do our VoIP rollout and our cabling requirements will go from volatile (i.e. constant phone repatches while manglement play musical chairs with staff) to set-and-forget.

Whenever I get something new, I look for what’s wrong with it, and, well… I have gripes with the Neatpatch kit.

1) They talk about dividing by 24 as an industry standard, yet they only provide 16 slots for the cables, meaning some get three cables, some get four. This kind of denser loading makes it trickier to remove some cables, and is also difficult to unclip the inside row of RJ-45′s.

1b) They announced that this was (albeit slightly) fixed with their new product revision, now isn’t that a gripe! They’ve made the slots wider. I’d have personally preferred 24 slots so that in a dense setup you’d have two cables per slot. But maybe there’s a good reason to leave it at 16.

2) We tend to telco mount our switches so that they sit a bit more balanced in our racks. The Neatpatch kits don’t work well at all with telco mounted equipment, so we have to flush mount them. This is ok once some unused rubber feet are put on the back top edge of the neatpatch, thus using the neatpatch to get the switch sitting level.

Apart from that, I’m very happy with the product, and can’t wait to get it into our patch rack

I’ve finally got some time from the last three days to blog-o-rama it up.

On Friday morning I got up early and left for work earlier than my usual snails pace. Before I had a chance to walk down the front steps my phone went off. It was a text from mum alerting me to dilation measurements and other such things to help you keep your breakfast down. I was going to be an uncle by lunchtime, or so it said. Yeah, right.

I went to work with a skip in my step… or something. After months of waiting, my prediction that I would have a niece was nigh…

Complications abound (she decided to come out sideways, drifting into the d-dimension) ruined that prediction and bets followed. I put a lazy ten down for a girl at about 9.30pm. Dad was a bit more accurate with 11.15pm, girl, via c-section (off by about ten minutes). I didn’t know that birth method was being taken into account, otherwise I would have added c-section, given the long history of big Blundell babies, and the fact that myself and my brothers are all c-section for life.

11.25pm, my baby niece arrived into this crazy world, with her father’s nose and all. Some time later myself and Rob arrived, only to see the new parents and baby for all of 50 seconds before being kicked out by a nurse. We drove all night, for just that. Not enough time to get a photo on even my cellphone. We saw the nurse showing Tamati how to wipe baby-poo, we got to talk briefly with the exhausted Sarah, and that was that.

Still, that nurse was lovely, in comparison to the bitch ER receptionist whose attitude problem mixed with my (minor) alcohol consumption may have resulted in cold fusion. Patsy, if that’s your real name, I’m thinking of two words, and one of them is “off.” You haggard arrogant cow.

What a relief that it was a girl, with the lovely name “Sadie Elizabeth Blundell.” The pressure has been on me for some years now to settle down and have kids, in the hope that I would produce a great grand-daughter for my grandfather. This was pressure from a small part of the extended family only, as a discussion with grandad indicated that he didn’t care either way, and would rather that I ran my life my way, rather than throw it away ‘for him’ as some may have preferred.

So congrats to Tamati and Sarah, I can’t wait to catch up and actually see my darling niece for more than a minute