Well, I finally got my internet up and running in my room. To top it all off, I visited Fry's today, picked up a new L-shaped desk - matches the rest of my pine furniture nicely - and got my computer up and running in my room. It's now been running for 1 hour, 37 minutes - before I moved it, it had been running for 31 days.

But anyhoo, I love this new room. It's got 4 - yes four - wired gigabit ethernet ports, of which, three connect to my nice new DGL-4300 gaming router up in the attic. The router is specifically designed to prioritize gaming traffic over all other traffic and it also is a 4 port gigabit switch. The open port on the DGL-4300 plugs into the D-Link 8 port switch beneath it which provides internet to the rest of the house (currently only my brother's room and the den which I just vacated). But the nice thing for my parents is the new router has wireless "G" access which should give them much better speeds and coverage in their room. It's also wide open right now, so if anyone wanted to leech our internet for a while as they drive by, they could - though I do monitor the logs to make sure someone next door isn't constantly leeching.

But aside from the four wired gigabit ethernet ports (technically, one isn't gigabit since it goes through the standard 10/100 switch), I've also got coaxial cable outlets on three of the four walls, CAT3 on 2 walls (telephone), and 16 power outlets (trying to remember the exact number off the top of my head).

Also at Fry's today, I bought a new UPS. It's a Belkin 550VA which provides 330 watts of power during an outage, keeping me up and running for just under a half hour if need be. It replaces my old UPS which will be used to provide a better electrical feed to my home theater equipment (and will allow me to turn everything off in the event of an outage rather than having it just get shut off abruptly). Speaking of the home theater, the four wired speakers look great in this room and they'll be tested tomorrow night. I was planning on waiting for The Phantom of the Opera to really test the system, but Fry's has been out of stock for over a week now. If I didn't have the raincheck getting me a price of $14, I'd go buy it elsewhere. Good thing I have 860+ other DVDs to choose from to test the system...

Speaking of which, I got a few new DVDs this week - The Life Aquatic and Hoop Dreams: Criterion Collection along with In Good Company and Assault on Precinct 13 (which may be the one to test the system tomorrow night). I'm now at 862 DVDs and slowly working towards 900. Next week will be extremely expensive, but there's some great DVDs coming out - Team America (Unrated), Seinfeld (Season 4), and Scrubs (Season 1) - the next week features The Aviator and Chapelle's Show (Season 2) - it pisses me off though that they're coming out with Special Editions of I, Robot, Man on Fire & The Day After Tomorrow when they were just released a month or two ago in regular edition form. I won't be double-dipping, but it is upsetting when they release DVDs fully knowing they'll release an SE just a month later. At least some studios release the regular edition and the SE at the same time (The Life Aquatic, I (Heart) Huckabees, Kinsey, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.).

URL: What is Gigabit Ethernet? - A Word Definition From the Webopedia Computer Dictionary