South for the Weekend

There are pros and cons to renting. Pro: I am able to live in a nice house within twenty minutes of Sydney for $500 a week instead of $800,000 over thirty years before interest. Con: I have been connecting to my router wirelessly instead of via ethernet since the day I left the nest.

My signal strength has ranged from "fair" to "shite" over the four houses I've lived in since then, but I lived with it up until the last week when I bought myself a new router. My old Billion router had been my internet champion for over two years. However, it took a few tumbles in the last couple of months and starting losing line sync and shutting itself down more and more often after that. I knew the time had come to put it in a home and find a new hero. I bought the Billion 7800NL and after a few tweaks I have it syncing at 9000/900kbs and only one drop out in the past seven days.

The bad news is that while I was able to connect to the old router wirelessly with no issues, connecting to the new one was a painful experience of high latency and unacceptable packet loss.

I'm an IT professional, but I am not able to understand the voodoo of wireless networking to any great degree. From what I understand my new router transmits on a powerful, new protocol that unfortunately all my neighbours are using too. In the past I had been avoiding their packets, but now their routers have awakened to my presence and I am caught in a digital crossfire.
After several days of laggy, teasing internet connectivity I did what any sane person would do: I dragged my computer to the edge of my desk, dragged the router to the middle of the living room and managed to stretch a 15 metre ethernet cable down the hall to connect the two. For the first time in three years I was connected by cable and I was giddy with joy. I never wanted that feeling to end, in fact. However I knew I couldn't live with yellow ethernet cabling hovering above my hall floorboards. So, I decided I would crawl under the house to evaluate my chances of running cables underneath the house.

At this point it's important to mention that I have no idea how install an ethernet socket in the skirting board, nor have I ever been underneath a house before. I was confident someone at a Bunnings Warehouse could teach me to be a licensed electrician in about five minutes, so I just had to conquer the second part.

Above the floorboards my house is, as mentioned, quite nice.
Below it is extremely scary.
I crawled through the trapdoor and discovered that the underneath had rooms that had the same floor plan as above the floor. Unfortunately the entry point was far from both the living room and the study, so I started crawling through the inverse-laundry and into the inverse-kitchen, which contained some rusted out lanterns, old bottles and a large pile of young girls shoes from the turn of the century.
This disturbed me, but driven by my connection fevour I crept further along the dirt towards the inverse-hall.
As I dropped to my belly to deal with the decreasing height my torch started to flicker out on me.
At this point I decided that a yellow cable running down the hall whenever I felt like playing Starcraft 2 was better than this. I slowly reversed out.