Bumblebee - Christmas Tree

With the Personal Torturer's (PT) kind permission, I was allowed to walk a little bit (1 to 2 miles) yesterday so the Virtual Walker is back! Just between you and me, I think he got himself locked into a parked car and it took him this long to figure out how to get himself out. Anyway, once he calls in and tells me where he is, I'll start writing more about ye ol' merry (umm) UK.

Since I couldn't walk all that far, my thoughts didn't have time to percolate and turn anything ordinary into a life changing epiphany (I mean my life, not yours). Lucky you.

And I was a little preoccupied with the thought "Well, how does one explain a mapped server hard drive"? I won't go into any detailed explanation of that but in breaking the puzzler down in my head while walking, I thought, "Well, at some point you would mention a network cable" - being that the subject at hand revolves around a Local Area Network (LAN in geek-speak) or "the computer network". The computer network I was thinking about is not the "Internet" but rather a network of computers connected together in an office or business place and more recently, at home.

Anyway, before I babble off-tangent, the network cable is the cable going from your home computer to perhaps a cable-modem, DSL-modem, or a router/switch/hub device (e.g., the common blue linksys boxes or similar). This cable reminds me of a telephone cord on steroids. Now, an ordinary telephone cable is a pretty marvelous thing - even as the world goes wireless.



Before I go on - I realize what I'm discussing right now has nothing to do with mapped server hard drives - but... if I had had permission to walk further, I might of been able to get to that. :)

I'm sure most of you have never seen (or would prefer not to ever see) a phone cord with bare wires - I mean, the plastic do-hickey on the end is so much nicer. Well, back in the day of the woolly mammoths and the loincloth-wearing club-bearing grunting men, telephones were wired directly to the wire without using the plastic do-hickey. Gasp! They used screwdrivers and other icky things.



Being that primitive phone wires were installed unheated caves and such, the folks that designed the wiring decided, that the individual wires were kind of fragile, so let's stick a couple extra wires in there... in case we break one (or two). So the telephone, which only "requires" two connecting wires, has a cord with four wires in it! And the plastic do-hickey, if you look at many of them, only has two gold leads (the center most two). The "extra" wires were eventually used by phones that could deal with a "second phone line" and those phones will only work with a plastic do-hickey that has all four wires run out to the gold leads, a pair for each phone line.



So - how is a poor soul to know what wire goes were? I'll tell you how. Back in the those woolly mammoth days of yore that I spoke of earlier, I went to an engineering school - and was told righty-tighty and bumblebee-Christmas tree were words of immense wisdom that every engineer should know - my learning those words, along with the a few 'laws', such as 'Sh*t flows downhill' and 'You can't push anything using a rope' made me one of the elite technocrats at the time.

Righty-tighty is what you use when using a screwdriver, wrench, or just replacing a lightbulb. Turning the object or tool to the right (clockwise) makes the thingy tighter. To get it out, you turn the otherway. Voila! My life became so much easier the day I learned that.

Bumblebee-Christmas tree is how the phone wires are paired. Yellow and Black make a pair, and Red and Green make the other. And if you are normal, you want Christmas tree before you want a bumblebee, so the first phone line uses the red-green pairing. When I learned this gem, after months of difficult college life - you know, with the partying, beer drinking, dances, and the late night Sorority house visits to obtain panties, there wasn't much time for book-learning.

And now for the truly mind-blowing stuff - a network cable is just like a phone cable except it has eight (8) wires in it and they are blue, green, orange, and brown. Wait you say, that is only 4 colors. Yep, the other four wires are the same colors but have a white stripe on them. And what do you know, they don't use all eight wires - they only use four...and they usually go into the plastic do-hickey this way:



Billy Joel sings it best, "Don't ask me why..." I have to go back to graduate school and get a pHD or something - in order to learn how I'm supposed to remember this wiring arrangement.