Archive: Dec 2007

This post made me look around and realize how much I adore our bookshelves…

Sometime in 2005, we ran out of bookshelf space. Done. All gone. But there was a small problem – we still had about 30 boxes of books in storage and we had to get them out.

The boxes showed up, we doubled up every shelf in the house – so there are two layers of books on every single shelf – and yes, you can’t see the second layer at all. Even after all that, we still had close to a thousand books and no clue where to put them.

Then we discovered these really cool stand alone bookshelves. In fact, when fully stocked, you can’t even see that it is a bookshelf. It looks like a stack of books rising from the floor. We first got a couple and then, over time, acquired a few more.

Life savers. Space savers. And elegant. These now dot the house. I can’t recommend them more highly. But as much as I love them, R is on a book diet and is also armed with an eBook reader in the hope that we don’t have to buy more of these!

When I lived in California, I listened to music all the time when I was home. Moved to NY, married someone with overlapping but different tastes in music, combined our music collections and put it all on a shared server. In concept a great idea, but the damned thing never worked properly and connecting from my Mac was excruciating (old NAS boxes were very Mac unfriendly 2-3 years ago). And back then, our collection was too big to put on a single iPod.

Barely listening to music for over two years = less happiness.

But all that changed when my friend and tech savior George visited and came up with the idea of making a Mac Mini into our server. With a couple of external hard drives plugged in, all the music is shared and we can each listen to anything. Everything is online. One central, in-sync library. Perfect.

I have all my various versions of Offenbach’s Barcarolle/Belle Nuit on continuous repeat 🙂 Happiness.

Thank you, George! You rock!