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old KVM cables
Thursday, April 1 2021
Throughout the workday, my attention kept returning to the rat's nest of wires on the floor just to my north. This nest is the result of a nearly-two-decade accretion. In that amount of time there have been various waves of technology that rose, crested, and fell. For nearly and year and half, for example, household internet happened via dial-up (as DSL didn't arrive until 2004). In those days, Woodchuck, which then ran some for of AMD processor, also had its own dedicated phone line so that our internet could be always-on, shared over the household ethernet network. (The internet was primitive in those days, so for flipping between news sites to read content, dialup wasn't really that bad.) Then at some point I upgraded the household ethernet to gigabit. Up until about 2012, I had several computers hooked to one monitor, keyboard, and mouse using various generations of KVM switching systems. Those systems come with lots of wires, which often can be proprietary (I have some cables that combine USB with VGA and sound, for example). In recent years, I've stopped using KVMs because now I rely more on the command line or web interfaces or technologies like Remote Desktop, meaning non-workstation computers can all be "headless."
I wasn't just looking at the wires in the rat's nest, I was also gradually deconstructing it. Fairly early in the day, I figured out that nearly all the power cords plugged into an outlet strip didn't actually go to any devices; the devices, being bulky, had been removed, but the cord remained as a ghost. Removing and putting away these cords eventually led to removing and putting away powerstrips. And then I could begin to segregate the powering of the few devices in use so that, for example, one of the cords powering a device necessary for household internet didn't have to run across the floor in front of the steps to the laboratory deck. And nearer to my feet where I sit in front of my main workstation (Woodchuck), I kept removing cable after cable belonging to long-unused KVM switch systems. Some of the cables were for carrying signals for PS/2 keyboards and mice and date to a KVM switch system I started using during the year I lived in Gretchen's Brooklyn brownstone. And as the cables gradually disappeared and more floor came into view, I could do something about the huge collection of mummified insects, which included many stinkbugs, ladybugs, moths, a few crazy late-summer creepy-crawlies, and at least one hornet. Decommissioning all those old cables was addictive, mostly because the progress was so visible and the things left to be dealt with (mystery cables) were mixed in with the visual evidence of success.
I'd had a set of two large HDPE (high-density polyethylene) drawers, each measuring 17 X 29 X 6 inches taking up a large amount of the under-desk space of the northwest desk. But I'd recently decided I wanted to take up less of that space so I could more easily crawl under that desk to make better use of a largely-unused void behind that desk, an adjacent bookshelf, and a bigger set of platic drawers. The new plan was to put the HDPE drawers just west of the steps out the to laboratory deck. Ideally, the drawers would fit beneath a set of shelving on the western third of the north wall. But it was about 3/8 of an inch too low. However, since the conflicting plank of the shelf was 3/4 of an inch thick, if I could somehow remove the bottom 3/8 inch of it for the part conflicting with the HDPE shelves, I could make it work. So this evening I broke out my good oscillating tool, my battery-powered hand circle saw and a chisel and managed to remove the requisite wood somehow without destroying the plank. Initially I cut with the oscillating tool, the vibrations from which kept causing objects from the shelf to rain down upon me. This part of the cut was pretty clean. Further back, though, I was forced to use the cicle saw set to a 3/8 inch depth and the chisel, and that part of the cut was rough. But nobody would ever be seeing that. Despite being under the effects of a 150mg diphenhydramine dose I'd taken before a bath, the effort was successful, and the HDPE shelves had a new home against the laboratory's north wall.
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