Oren’s Weblog

Last weekend I went to put away all the CDs that have piled up on various surfaces around the house, and realized that things had gotten completely out of hand and that it was (long past) time to do something about it.

I have a lot of CDs – somewhere around a thousand, and I can no longer fit them all into the cabinet where I’ve been keeping them for the past ten years, filed alphabetically by artist in jewel boxes. Michele’s been wondering for years about when we could do something about the physical clutter of the ever-mounting CD collection, and after spending a lot of time looking in vain for affordable CD storage cabinets that can handle that size of collection somewhat gracefully, the technology solution seemed cheaper and better.

So I went out to the University Bookstore and picked up a Mac Mini, a LaCie 500 gigabyte external drive, and a 15.4 inch widescreen monitor from Fry’s new online store – the monitor was $89, which I thought was great, but now I see it’s come down to $69 in the last week! I had an Apple keyboard around, and I added a wireless Mighty Mouse, and set up the whole shebang on top of the cabinet with the CDs and plugged the headphone output into the stereo.

I realized last night that I now have over a terabyte of data storage capacity in my house – it wasn’t that long ago that a terabyte represented the total capacity of the commercial data center the company I worked for had (okay – maybe it was that long ago – around the late ’80s).

I moved the 30 gigabytes of music I already had in my iTunes library on the family room computer, and started ripping CDs that I hadn’t yet encoded, starting with the ones that I couldn’t fit in the cabinet. My goal is to spend time working through the collection until the CDs can safely be put under the house. It’ll be interesting see how it goes and how long it takes to get there.

Technorati Tags: music

Last weekend I went to put away all the CDs that have piled up on various surfaces around the house, and realized that things had gotten completely out of hand and that it was (long past) time to do something about it.

I have a lot of CDs – somewhere around a thousand, and I can no longer fit them all into the cabinet where I’ve been keeping them for the past ten years, filed alphabetically by artist in jewel boxes. Michele’s been wondering for years about when we could do something about the physical clutter of the ever-mounting CD collection, and after spending a lot of time looking in vain for affordable CD storage cabinets that can handle that size of collection somewhat gracefully, the technology solution seemed cheaper and better.

So I went out to the University Bookstore and picked up a Mac Mini, a LaCie 500 gigabyte external drive, and a 15.4 inch widescreen monitor from Fry’s new online store – the monitor was $89, which I thought was great, but now I see it’s come down to $69 in the last week! I had an Apple keyboard around, and I added a wireless Mighty Mouse, and set up the whole shebang on top of the cabinet with the CDs and plugged the headphone output into the stereo.

I realized last night that I now have over a terabyte of data storage capacity in my house – it wasn’t that long ago that a terabyte represented the total capacity of the commercial data center the company I worked for had (okay – maybe it was that long ago – around the late ’80s).

I moved the 30 gigabytes of music I already had in my iTunes library on the family room computer, and started ripping CDs that I hadn’t yet encoded, starting with the ones that I couldn’t fit in the cabinet. My goal is to spend time working through the collection until the CDs can safely be put under the house. It’ll be interesting see how it goes and how long it takes to get there.

Technorati Tags: music