The weather was nice, but I managed to avoid having to clean out the garage by doing some work in the attic. I pulled fiber optic lines thorough the attic to replace the ethernet lines that ran between switches in my home network. That fiber optic line is a great improvement- the traffic bandwidth from one switch to the other and from the main switch to the server is now 10 gig per second, four times as fast as the old lines. The only bottlenecks left are the speed of the devices themselves (my laptop’s router tops out a about 600 mbps) and the internet speed. Rumor has it we are getting a multi-gig fiber optic line in the next year or so, and I am ready for that.
The lines themselves were tough to run. There was a boundary across one of the trusses in the attic made of fiber board. I tried drilling a pilot hole and putting a camera through it, but there was insulation behind it, then another fiberglass boundary, and after that, there was an air conditioning duct. I gave up on that route, and finally managed to route through a wall. The project got done, but took nearly all weekend. My thighs and knees are now painful from all of the crouched over walking from one truss to the other. Getting older means stuff that used to be easy are now more painful. I spent some time in the hot tub, but my legs aren’t quite finished complaining yet.
The second thing was a work related item. More and more things are becoming apparent and making sense at my job. The manager who wrote me up so another, less qualified nurse could be promoted, then had me pulled from the schedule while other nurses got over time and bonuses?
two of the nurses who work there got ten overtime shifts between them, complete with $500 per day bonus money. Each of those bonus shifts is costing the company $800 to $1000 more than a PRN nurse (me) working that same shift. I asked why I wasn’t scheduled and was told it’s because we “are fully staffed, so there is nothing left for you as a PRN.”
Yeah, one of the nurses who is getting 60 hours a week and multiple bonuses was working with me a few days ago. The manager walked in and said she needed him to come with her to setup for some PR event that was happening the next day. They got in his car and left the ED for 3 hours. While they were gone, the nurse and I who were left had to deal with 14 patients between us, because our third nurse was off doing whatever. Once they returned, she immediately left for the day.
Suspicious. I wonder what kind of “help” he was off giving her. Before anyone says anything, no I am not interested in getting ahead like that. I’m married and I have actual ethics.
10 Comments
oldvet50 · September 28, 2026 at 7:16 am
They’re all a ‘NO’ for me.
#1 – “….unless certain conditions are met, and allow the legislature to withdraw funds for critical state needs.” Who defines the ‘certain conditions’ or what ‘critical state needs’ are?
#2 – Obviously a tax break for BigAgra, not the small mom & pop family farm.
#3 – Will be overturned in court due to the five-year restriction (14th requires equal for all persons). It goes on to say it restricts what the taxes may be used for, then says the tax can be used for anything unless it’s prohibited by law. I believe the technical term for that language is legal mumbo-jumbo.
Divemedic · September 28, 2026 at 7:27 am
So nothing will be harmed by voting yes on 3.
RichX280 · September 28, 2026 at 4:48 pm
Hey man, find a new place to work. Those are just low-IQ mean girl behaviors… not worth your time.
Grumpy51 · September 28, 2026 at 6:50 pm
Curious – why fiber optic versus Cat 6 or 6A??
I get having fiber optic to the ONT.
Divemedic · September 28, 2026 at 7:27 pm
My switches all max at 2.5g on Ethernet. SFP+ maxes out at 10g. This was the cheapest way to hit those speeds
JimmyPx · September 28, 2026 at 11:33 pm
The other nice thing about fiber is that in a few years when 25gb sfps are in consumer gear, that same fiber should work at the faster speed.
KurtP · September 28, 2026 at 8:54 pm
As an electrician, wouldn’t it have been faster and easier to cut an end off your ethernet cord and splice/tape your fiber to it and pull it back?
Divemedic · September 29, 2026 at 3:54 am
They don’t pull like that. Staples, bemds, fireblock foam, etc.
Fido · September 29, 2026 at 2:03 pm
If I was hand routing a cable through a tight attic, for a *second* time, I’d be installing an interduct instead.
I once routed 200 pair of twisted copper, two 50 pair shielded CAT5 cables, *AND* a 2″ interduct into an unused four storey elevator shaft, because I didn’t want to have to belay down that thing again. A year later that shaft was so full of HVAC ducts that there was no way to get down it again.
Rick T · September 29, 2026 at 9:41 am
OM3 or OM4 fiber pairs are also more fragile than you think, pulling it around a tight corner will turn the glass in the core into what is effectively sand and make the strand unusable. It may let enough light thru for 10GbE but will fail for higher speeds. I’ve been pulling fiber in datacenters since the 2000s and we learned early what was possible and what cost us a fiber pair.
We used to have a LOT of hardware at Compaq/HPE computer shows including tons of fiber channel gear. We were packing up after the show and a bunch of us watched the show hall union guys grab strands of fiber, wrap them tightly around their elbows like you coil rope, then tie off the free end with a nice neat overhand knot and throw the coil on a table. The team that owned that gear just shook their heads and swept the entire table ($1,000s of dollars of cables) into the trash because they were destroyed. Union workers, so no correction and no recourse, just part of the cost of attending the trade show.
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