Slashdot

finally a sport where steroids wont help you!

Apologies to my Scottish and Canadian friends. But, really??

ESPN 8 the ocho!

The trouble is, the techniques that help you disentangle a bundle of cables not attached to any equipment are not applicable when some of the cables are plugged in and need to stay plugged in, as usually in real life. They need a variant of the sport where there are thirty cables, some plugged into various patch panels at both ends, some at one end only, and some free; your task is to extract the loose and dangling cables and leave the working ones.

From the blurb: The winner, LA web developer Matthew Howell, had to untangle a dozen ethernet cables in record time leaving them in working order to win.

Working order? Man, there's a catch to everything. I guess I can put my weed whacker with it's steel blades back...

My normal failure mode with a cable jumble, that reassuring crack as it breaks off ensuring a lurking connectivity problem when its used in the future. I suppose those tabs need to be maintained in the contest FTW no?

I'll bet the national championships will end up on ESPN2 during the middle of the night... just like those tweens stacking cups.

Another sport that deserves a WTF? award.

This is what one of our wiring closets looks like [earthlink.net]. Untangling cables to have some sense of order is just another job duty.

And in case anyone is wondering, yes, those are punchdown boxes you see. It would be horrible to run the cable directly to the switch without having boxes and patch cables on each end.

Throw in power cables, phone lines, and mice to make it more realistic.

I mean, is this legal [polywater.com]?

The Japanese still have us beat on wacky game shows.

I hear he spent a lot of time training with this [nonoba.com].

...since this is precisely what I do in my sleep, after all the MCSE weenies who weren't allowed to touch the cables in class have left for the day.

Now, a hunt for the loose terminator in a Thinnet network, or the forced-duplex port in your Cisco stack, or the one Linksys VPN router with different firmware out among the 50+ telecommuters, or even the splitters over the ceilings in your Localtalk network at the elementary school, or any number of real-world-ish scenarios.

Bah. Like playing pool for money. Too much like real work. And playing for beer makes you pee too much.

that there is finally a story where my following formalization of the process of wire entanglement is on-topic.

Kevin's First Law: For any number of wires, strings or similar objects, the probability of complex entanglement between them increases exponentially with the inverse of distance. Time required to entangle is also affected in a similar fashion. This phenomenon can be observed in consequence, but not in action.

Also, for those who are interested, my second law is formalized thusly:

Kevin's Second Law: There exists no robot that cannot be improved in form or function by the addition of a flamethrower.

untangle a dozen ethernet cables

What the hell are 'ethernet cables,' anyway? Ethernet is a protocol. Back in the good ol' days I set up Ethernet LANs with 10BASE-2 coax cable.