I spliced an RF video cable (similar to coaxial, for Americans, but with different terminators). I had one male/female ended cable, with the female connector squashed and bent, and one male/male cable that didn't work for some reason. I needed a working male/male, and didn't fancy walking to a shop, so I chopped the mangled female end off the one cable, and one end off the other, to attempt a splice. Little did I know that RF cable insides were so stupid - the centre is a standard thin copper wire; around that is a wodge of translucent plastic; around that is a circle of something resembling tinfoil; outside that is a tangle of thin copper wire of the sort that's generally woven together in power cables; outside that, the outer casing. This means stripping off the outer casing, peeling back the thin meshy copper and the tinfoil, stripping the inner plastic casing (which results in the inner less-flexible copper wire breaking repeatedly, especially when your only tool is a pair of kitchen scissors), repeating for the other side, binding the two thicker copper wires together somehow (resulting in them breaking again), taping around that (using gaffer tape because I had no electrical tape), smashing the copper mesh bits together, and taping around that too. The result, surprisingly, was somewhat success. A functional but suboptimal cable. If I were to do it again in future, I would also take some excess of the meshy copper and shove it in with the thicker wire to make the connection a bit less tenuous.

Australian temporary immigration completed - you may recall a few months ago my being impressed with the ease of getting an electronic working holiday visa for Australia-going. A couple of days ago I went in to get the physical passport-stamping. I got to the immigration office at 9:30am, and was out, all done, by 9:40am. As opposed to getting anything from an American immigration office, which involves getting there at 6am, three hours before they open, to stand astern of a line of 60 people who got there even earlier than that, and be out by about noon.

We have an ADSL modem, which is reasonably well set up and functional. It defaulted to stealing a 192.168.0.* address block for some reason, but that's okay because I had thoughtfully taken 192.168.1.* for our network, expecting such a nefarious development.

The ADSL service, whose most recent ETA was (and, stupidly, still is) the 11th of June, is now marked "Held: Delay encountered in provisioning". Curse you, phone company!