Webb Family Blog

The last time I wrote was just before Kellie and I went to Reno for our critical care conference. We took Amtrak’s California Zephyr up to Reno, leaving from Roseville. Our train was delayed around an hour, and we got in a couple hours late. It was scenic, especially with the recent snow on the ground through the Sierras. The night we arrived, we met up with my sister Terri and her husband Patrick, who live in Reno. We went out to eat and saw the movie Wild Hogs… a very funny movie. We stayed at the WorldMark Resort, which was a couple blocks away from Harrah’s, where the conferences were at. The conference ran through Wednesday that week. We again took the train on the way back. The train was supposed to have arrived at 9:20AM, but it was delayed until 1:45PM… after we were scheduled to arrive. We were going quite slow and just outside of Colfax, we were completely stopped for around an hour, awaiting Union Pacific to finish clearing the track of maintenance. They finally decided to switch us to the other track to bypass the construction. In my opinion, this was just more evidence in a feud between Amtrak and Union Pacific over the use of the rails. To those that are unaware, except for a line on the East Coast, Amtrak does not have its own tracks and uses freight train tracks to cross the country. Passenger trains are considered an annoyance by the freight train companies, but continue to exist due to government regulation. Anyway, we did not get home until around 7PM or so.

While we were at the conference, we started our next class from the University of Phoenix. This was a class I felt should be a fun class. It is finally a class that is relevant to my area of nursing; assessments. It was a little inconvenient to start the class while away from home, but we tried to manage. In this class, instead of having an electronic text book, we had to purchase a physical book. We only purchased one to save some money. We found that sharing a physical book was a little more of a challenge than printing out our own copies from the computer. It also made it harder to find specific text in the book. For the first week, we had to read the first seven chapters of the book and we had a paper we had to write on our definition of health. The paper was to give our definition of health, taking a nursing theorists view. We were then to describe two of our health-promoting behaviors and two detrimental behaviors and then discuss how to make the detrimental behaviors health-promoting behaviors. The entire paper was supposed to be about us individually, but we were not allowed to mention or reference that the paper was about us. This was kind of confusing. The teacher also mentioned that the paper was not about the World Health Organization’s definition of health, but our definition of health, based in nursing theory. In my paper, I decided to list different definitions of the word health. In the manner in which I wrote my paper, I did not state that any one definition was correct; I just mentioned that they were different views. I cited the World Health Organization’s definition as one of those that exist, as did I cite Wikipedia. Ordinarily, Wikipedia is not a valid academic source for fact, but as what I was using it for was an opinion, it should be a valid source for an opinion. The reason Wikipedia is not valid for academic fact is that it is editable by anyone and opinions may influence the “facts.” I wrote my instructor to state WHY I cited the World Health Organization and Wikipedia in my paper. In my opinion, I was in compliance with the syllabus, but wanted to ask the teacher to clarify a portion of the syllabus. The teacher replied irrelevant information and instead of clarifying the syllabus, she copied and pasted a portion of the syllabus. This made me quite upset. The teacher had not only not answered the question, but basically just said to read the syllabus. The problem was, the syllabus was not clear enough. I remained civil with a response back, again asking my question. She again was quite rude and disrespectful in her response. This began a trend. The instructor for the course frequently went out of her way to condescend students in the class. When we asked her questions, she would make a reply, but never an answer to the question being asked. The teacher’s attitude was quite hostile and made this course that I had been looking forward to, be the worst class ever. The teacher’s constant condescending attitude left many questions unasked. I had questions about the second paper due as well, but tried to just “tough it out” as the teacher was worthless in asking anything. Several people asked questions, but she would reply that the information was in the syllabus and if they had a problem complying with the syllabus that they should contact their academic adviser about their future at the University. Kellie and I both received lower than desirable scores on our next paper, due to being unable to read the teachers mind. We both had had enough abuse from this teacher. We decided that we needed to just drop the class, despite being told we would have to pay cash for the price of the class. We filed a complaint against this instructor. Thankfully, we were given a “get out of jail free card.” If all goes as planned, we will re-start the assessment course this next Tuesday at no financial loss. Apparently, several more students from that class have dropped as well. The reason people are not passing her class is not because students are not intelligent enough or the subject matter is difficult for students to understand, but that the teacher demeans and insults students and refuses to answer their questions. This is my definition of a bad instructor. I would not be surprised if there are more students joining the “mutiny.”

This past weekend, I went down to my parent’s new house in Waterford to work on the wiring. I left Roseville quite early in the morning, leaving around 6AM and arriving in Modesto around 8AM. My dad and I then took off for Home Depot to get a few items we’d need for the project at hand. I don’t recall exactly what time we made it to the house. We had 3 major tasks that needed to be done. We needed to work on television, telephone and Ethernet (computer network) connections… both terminating the ends of the wires and labeling each wire with where it goes. I had previously come up with a naming scheme and brought a few pages of printed labels to put on the wires. The television wire is RG6 coaxial cable and the connections are fairly simple to attach. I quickly trained my dad to put the connectors on and I started on the task of wiring the Ethernet network. The Ethernet and telephone wiring were both done with CAT-5e cable and physically identical. I needed to trace out what wire went where and connect one end to a patch panel in the wiring closet and place a network jack on the other end. My dad was able to finish doing all the television wiring and map it out quickly and he began assisting me. Each CAT-5e cable has 4 pairs of wires, (blue, orange, green and brown paired with a white and colored stripe). I have a pair of tools for tracing a wire and another tool for verifying proper wiring. For the network, we’d first place a jack on one end and then connect a “sounding” device to the jack. In the wiring closet, I’d touch a detector unit on every wire until I got a signal. Once I found the signal, I’d connect that wire to the patch panel. Once connected, I’d use the other device. We’d replace the “sounding” device with a little module, and I’d plug in the cable verifier unit into the patch panel. I would make sure that all 8 wires are connected properly, no shorts, crossed pairs or any other issues. The device also could tell me how long the cable is electronically. With my dad’s help, it seemed like things were going well. We traced down each wire and thankfully everything was OK. We had one jack that I initially thought was bad, but upon changing the batteries in my tester, I found out it was OK. We had one other room where the orange and brown pairs were reversed… the colors look very similar… especially in poor light. I thought I MIGHT get it all done in one day, but time seemed to fly by faster than anticipated. By 5PM, I had finished all the television wire (10 potential TV jacks) and network wiring (21 potential network jacks). I just had the telephone wiring to go. I realized that I was quickly running out of time I wanted to work there, so I decided I’d need to spend the night and start again the next day.

On Monday, I started a little later, probably around 10AM. Each room now the wires terminated neatly on one face plate with telephone, television and network jacks on it. I just needed to wire the telephone connections in the wiring closet. This turned out to be an extremely time intensive job. First off, I had two termination blocks called “100-pair 110 Blocks”. These needed to be pre-wired. This meant weaving wires on them in a very precise fashion. As I had two of these blocks, my dad and I both sat down weaving wires. It was very sore on the finger tips. The wires are in a tight twist and they need to maintain that twist as much as possible. As soon as both blocks were woven, we took off for lunch. (On an interesting side-story, we stopped at a vehicle accident on the way back to the house from lunch. A guy hydroplaned his big work truck off the road and took out about 3 almond trees. He was un-injured.) After lunch, I mounted the 110 Blocks to a board and started terminating all the telephone connections… about 19 in total. I finally finished around 5PM and my fingers were now extremely sore. I then decided to check out every telephone jack. I was able to verify that all the jacks were wired properly except one. That one jack had a dead second line. Not a major problem, as we only intend on hooking up one phone line, but I want the job to be perfect. Actually, there is a capability of 3 independent phone lines per telephone jack. I checked the jack that had a malfunctioning 2^nd line and found that the orange pair wires were both broken somehow. I fixed this and then all 19 jacks were now verified for 3 lines. I finally left Waterford around 5:30PM.

The Ethernet patch panel and many other electronics will be mounted in a nice rack box, which was there, but they are planning on putting in flooring in the closet, so I just left the patch panel hanging free in the closet. My father took off for several weeks to the Philippines. Upon his return, the house will be ready for move-in. At that time, I will need to return to make the final connection from AT&T’s telephone service to all the phone jacks (connecting up 1 wire will accomplish this). I will also install several satellite TV units, a multiple-channel RF modulator (to place the satellite receivers on standard channels) and a signal combiner/amplifier for the television hook-ups. Lastly comes the network; it appears that for internet, my parents will be getting HughesNet satellite Internet. I will then connect the satellite modem to a self-built router, and then to a Ethernet switch. All this will be mounted inside that rack/box. Finally, I’ll need to place patch cables between the patch panel and the switch for every outlet I want to be live. Telephone service should be easy and quick, but the rest may take a day or so to finalize. It is fun, but time consuming.