What a week

Where do I begin!
I'll begin with last friday, no not 2 days ago, 9 days ago.
I was busy most of the day finishing off testing and packing camera equipment and other pieces of equipment that was going to installed on the monday / tuesday / wednesday.
All packed up and tested by 4pm :) ready to be packed.
Early starts all week which helped (kinda!)

Monday - customer #1 - 2 fixed dome style camera to look after the way in and out of the site, customer changed the spec on us, we can't see the barrier they've since installed as where we were putting the camera can't see it if a truck is being weighed on the weighbridge.
Loaded up the 4 cameras, digital video recorder (DVR), keypad, cat5e cable, power cable, co-ax cable, connectors for the cat5 & co-ax, tools, etc into the hire car so my boss and his son & camera tech, could drive 450 miles to customer #2 to do all the work needed.

Tuesday - they arrive at customer #2, meanwhile I'm let out the office (they do this now and then) to go to help my colleague finish most if not all the wiring to an alarm system that I'll need to help program at a later date for customer #3, as I was seriously the only one small enough to get into the attic spaces as well hmm the hatches to get to them are shall we say "small" I could just get in them.
I hear you asking why, 2 cables needed run from sensors back to the main panel as it would be easier to do that than run them to where we were running the other cables for that section of the building. It's a garden centre with a restruant attached and all the walls are erm 18" thick. We got there about 10:30am , we didn't leave until 6:20pm, the place closes at 6pm. Got back home late. During the day I was getting phone calls on this and that from the boss, like why no video here I said to check the cabling and then this or that.

Wednesday - Im back in the office, discovered after I had asked the question yesterday to my boss - are all the cameras and the cat5e to co-ax convertor hub (which needs power!) on the same phase, reassured by 1 guy onsite yes but we are on the limits for our supply! then discover they aren't, Great!
We had them re-wire them all to same phase of the supply, now I don't know if you've ever had to work with cat-5e and tried to put connectors on the end but it's not the easiest (cat-5e is that cable that has what looks like a big phone connector on it 8pins, sometimes called an RJ-45 connector on the end and is used to connected pc's to other pc's and switches, routers, cable modems etc) Those are Fiddly to up on if you don't have small fingers / cable fanned out in the right order and cut square as well cables don't always connect! We got it all resolved by 5pm (i finish at 4).

Thursday - Return to normallity, everyone is back in HQ, now all we need to do is get pictures back from customer #2 to base.. Easy - NO!!! Need to get into router to configure it so that it points at the dvr so our software can connect to it, Simple, you've guessed it dear reader - NO it wasn't!
Called the ISP who provides the adsl line to customer #2, 1st call was very helpful that let us get into the router with the username and password they provided us with - yeah they password protected the router (stops people changing stuff on it) now the thing is what do you when it says "Speedtouch 510" on the outside but when you get the page up for it, it says "Speedtouch Alactel" (didn't get around to till late on thursday as it was catch up day). We weren't (I wasn't!) getting anywhere and it was like 4pm so I went home and we stopped for day)
Friday - 3 calls to ISP (Demon Internet - named and shamed - 1 from the guy down there like we were told to do) couldn't resolve what we wanted to do which was where do we go to get to "Port Forwarding / NAT / Port Mapping" as said yesterday it was a Alactel (looking at isp's webpage says the supply a speedtouch 510 nothing about speedtouch alcatel!) - they all said can you call us back when your in front of a pc by the router which we had the guy down there do with us listening in via the guys mobile - I said I was offsite and it was a distance away - I gave up, called the maker of the router and in 2 minutes resolved the problem what it had taken 3 calls and 30 minutes of wasted time by all to get the ISP tech support to tell us. Got into the router got the guy to set up what we needed for each of the "ports" there were 3 needed to be done, set the ip address of the router to somewhere that wouldn't be used as well needed to fix that as well if the power went out and there was no pc attached it would get a different IP (possibly - didn't want that) so we were done with the router had the guy go the DVR and set that up to the ip address we'd given it, had him save the all the changes and exit, and then tried to connect. Success 1st time connect :) Thank ****ing god! this was done at 3:30pm Friday only taken 2 days - I'd have been down or the boss would have done it if he had, had time wednesday but took so long on simple things like connections, power etc not his fault..
Saturday - Installed broadband for my dear sister :D - now Aol broadband says it needs 98se and won't work below that my 98se cd wouldn't play ball with the cd-rom in her machine so when I ran the CD it went and told me it couldn't find bits to finish the install, had to re-do the install of 98. Once I got back into windows I then just had to install broadband usb drivers - AoL CD said it couldn't do that, I knew otherwise :D - i ran the driver installer manually and it worked sister has broadband and she happy with it..