Your Japanese word of the week is...

"nichiyoudaiku" 日曜大工 which means "Do It Yourself", like DIY.  And so goes the theme for this weekend.

The first real "DIY"-y thing I did was swap out my winter tires for my summer ones.  Despite all the ominous warnings people have given me, this past winter has been pretty mild.  One day of snow (when the snow tires did actually help... a lot) and just lots of low temps.  Winter tires, aside from working well in the snow, also are made of rubber better suited to cold temps but this past week it's high 10+ degrees so...  really...  there's no point anymore heh......

But the big news this past weekend was that I put a hole in my wall!  But perhaps some context first...

Ever since Japan, I've been using my laptop as my computer and it's spent its entire two year time with me sitting on a desk with its battery removed.  It worked great in Japan because it was essentially a temporary stay so it was fine for all my needs.  But having moved back, I've been considering on and off about switching to a real PC.  As usual, cost being the thing that turns me off about the idea.

(Sorry about the picture quality, I just snapped a pic from my point-and-shoot)

But this past week, a friend offered up his two year old, yet built-with-premium-parts PC for a great deal.  And thus began my search to piece together a desktop on the cheap.  I'm pretty happy to say I managed to piece together the whole thing with used items.  And it's all pretty good stuff too.

Best of all, when I sell my laptop, it would work out that I've spent about $100 total on switching to a more powerful desktop PC.

The only problem came when I had to hook it up to the internet.  With the router being in the room next to mine and my desire to not run on wireless anymore, I decided the best (line-speed and cost wise) solution would be to drill a hole between the rooms and run a cable through it.  Simple enough...

So, I borrowed a stud finder and drill, measured twice, and drilled once.  For reasons unknown to me, I was off by about 1/8 inch but by taping the cable to a wire coat hanger, I passed it through.

That sounds easy but it doesn't take into account having to pull my bed out, clear out the other room's closet, drilling, test fitting the wire, hunting for the mis-matched holes, discovering I had bought a cable that was too short (seriously, I did haha), buying another cable, and then putting the two rooms back together.

DIY indeed =P...  and it was pretty fun actually....  except for the part when the wire pulled taut and I was still about 5ft from the router...  that kinda sucked haha....

But, it paid off.  As you can see below.