Day 57: Only a week and a half to go!

Time management

Time is short, so I've been increasing efficiency. I want this documentation finished as soon as possible. I've been missing some hours a day at work the past week or so (have been working 6 or 5 or even 4 hour days - I've been busy with my sisters wedding, which is now finally over), therefore I have a few extra hours to work overtime to make up, so I plan to work a lot longer than usual this week, and probably into the weekend.

Annoyingly I also need to divide up my time for my MEng report, but it will be manageable.

And I've also decided to work at home for most of the next few days, only coming in to get the cabling done in LF31. I can afford to do this now because documentation doesn't really require much rebuilding and testing of the AR, so my home PC has everything I need. This will save a lot of time in travelling and eating and all sorts of other time-eating activities that I normally do, which is great.

I will need to be in the School to test and run some things though, get screenshots etc, until I fully install the AR onto my home machine and find myself a webcam, but I'll be sure to list up everything I need to do beforehand and stop by my office to get it all done efficiently at one sitting when I'm already in Kilburn to do the cabling.

Scratch that - change of plan

Just talked to Toby, decided I'll get the cabling over and done with and then work from home thereafter.

Spent the afternoon cabling, finished half of the whole room. All I can say is that for about half the room, frankly whoever did the cabling there is now my sworn enemy. I have never seen so many shoddy mistakes - network cables just thrown over the desk instead of going down into the tidy hole and out the other one, the USB extension that users will need to swap often being stuffed down the tidy hole and sealed there by using a cable tie in completely the wrong place so they are completely inaccessible, using a cable tie on every single cable around the tidy hole which is frankly horrible, being unpredictable and simply not consistent, and so on.

Sorted it all out now. The other half of the room seems to be much more sensibly cabled (I presume different people did each half of it), and now I'm looking forward to finishing everything tomorrow morning.

Out of interest, takes me 3 minutes a desk on average (provided the cabling isn't too bad, just replacing tie wraps and sorting out cable positioning etc - when I didn't have to lie down under the desk trying to feed horrendously placed cables through tiny holes to their proper positions or fix other horrendous cabling mistakes). I cut out the cable wrapping plastic and put one of them along with one cable tie onto each desk beforehand. Also cleaned up all the left over cut cable tie bits into a bag, from my own cutting and the load that are strewn over random desks from the previous cabler; will hopefully save someone having to go through everything afterwards (well to be honest someone probably will still have to go through everything afterwards, but at least it will save them some time).

I realised after about 3 rows that I was using too little of the cable wrapping plastic, it didn't really reach end to end. I increased the length for the rest of the desks though, looking much better on the left side of the room. I'll probably replace this on the ones that are too short, there seems to be a lot of the stuff left over.