Top of the (Fantasy Baseball) World

This may be the only day I lead all season.

Spring Break Day 2

Day 2 started with a trip to Hobby Town USA. Then Fremont Central Park, Hooter's, Mountain View Shoreline Park, and finally, Palo Alto Junior Museum.

So excited flying a kite for the first time! Lesson learned: gotta fly at somewhere spacious (and windy, of course) We failed at Fremont Central Park but it was piece-of-cake at Shoreline.

Spring Break Day 1

It was a field trip day to SF: Caltrain, Muni, Rincon Center, Metreon, SFMOMA, and finally, SpecialTea.

Use DLink DI-704P as a hub

Now that I got my ethernet ports activated. The next step is, of course, to hook up all my desktops who have been on wireless for too long. To hook up 2 computers to 1 port, I need to repurpose my long unused DLink DI-704P router as a hub. I figured out the setup after a bit of Googling and trial-and-error:
For the WAN setting, I chose "Dynamic IP Address" (I don't think it really matters but I'm not sure)
For the LAN setting, I picked an IP address for the hub that is in the range of my router. Disable DHCP (since that's the job of my router)
You would think the cable from the wall plate should be inserted into the WAN port (i.e., "input") and this is the most important/non-trivial part: plug the cable into a regular/numbered ("output" if you will) port instead of the WAN port.
And you're all set.

Put a RJ45 connector on a Cat 5 cable

Why did I have to do this? My house is pre-wired: each room has 1 or more RJ45 (ethernet) port wired directly to a central cabinet, where I put my router. However, the wire at the cabinet end has no connector (I guess the builder gives opportunities for others to make some money) Fortunately, my brother knows this very well and taught me how to do this. We bought our crimper from Home Depot for $20.

The first thing he did was unscrewing the wall plate to figure out how it is wired at the port. In our case, it's 568-B standard. Next, we look up the wiring diagram at Wikipedia All these colored wire are actually inside the jacket of the Cat 5 cable. So we use the crimper to "peel" off the tip of the cable. Un-twist the wires. Straighten and fan them out. Arrange them according to the diagram, pin 1 - 8 (left to right) Then insert those 8 wires into the RJ45 connector "upside down" and make sure each wire gets into its own "slot." Finally, insert the connector into the crimper and press real hard (make sure the wires won't come lose) For a better description with pictures, check out this web page.