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If you probably couldn’t guess, I have a baby. Eli was born a little over six months ago, and what used to be an inert sack of potatoes is now scooting around, starting to get a bit mobile.

This instilled the panic reflex in his parents due to this thing.

That entertainment unit contains the following:

- Denon 3808CI Receiver
- Mac Mini + Lacie 2TB Hard Drive
- Slingbox + HD Connectors
- DirectTV HDR-23 Receiver
- Sonos Zone Player
- Sonos Bridge
- Apple TV
- Samsung BluRay player
- Nintendo Wii
- Cable Modem
- Netscreen 5GT Router
- 8 port Netgear switch
- JBL center channel speaker
- Cisco ATA Voice box for Vonage
- Apple Airport Extreme

That’s a lot of equipment. Too much to be contained in this unit, so a lot of spilled to the back and floor underneath it (especially all the networking gear). It also spit out a lot of heat, and due to the unit not being well ventilated, required the sliding door to be kept open.

With a six month old, this is not a good situation.

Cue the reengineering of the entertainment unit.

Choosing the Unit

I had my eye on a BDI entertainment unit for a long time, as a friend of mine has one. They are super high end, ventilated and designed for high density equipment. They also have a distinctly modern look with clean lines and no curves, which I appreciated. One of the biggest selling points for me was the center channel drawer, which would hide the unsightly brick of a speaker.

BDI units however are not cheap. We purchased the Avion Series II 8927 from Modern Essentials. While I’m sure we could have found a cheaper place, the price differentials were in the $100 range and Modern Essentials had the best reviews.

The Accouterment

If you know me, no project is worth doing if its not worth over doing. Usually my projects start with a simple goal (ie, new child proof entertainment unit) and end with more purchases. In this case, I had to get a few new items:

- New center channel speaker
- More ports on a switch
- Cable organizing material
- Power switch

Center Channel Speaker

The BDI unit has a limit to how big the center channel speaker can be. I searched around, but ended up going with the same speaker my friend who also has a BDI has, the NH2 Classic Two. My old center channel speaker was OK (JBL Venue Series), but lacked some clarity in the high end with dialog. I needed a bit more punch for the center to counter the emphasis from the two Polk RT12 speakers I have as the mains.

Switch

This was easy. I bought a 16 port gigabit switch, unmanaged (no fan) from Netgear. I have four ports free on it now.

Cable Organizing Gear

I ended up getting a bunch of cable enclosures (the hose kind) to make “trunks” of cables for specific purposes. Any cable bundle leaving the unit was to be enclosed. I separated the trunks with power, telco (DirecTV and Cable), TV (power, two HDMI and one Cat-6 network) and speakers.

I also got some spools to wind up excess cable. They come in handy.

Power Switch

This unit has a total of about 28 power outlets required. As such, I needed a good space saving power strip, but that had room for a lot of the big transformer bricks. I ended up buying a TrippLite 16 port power switch. The networking gear is currently on its own power strip, and will be moved to a UPS soon. I like this strip because it fits precisely behind the entertainment unit, and doesn’t get crowded.

Installation

To get all this installed in the new unit, I first had to take everything out.

That is all the equipment laying on our floor. I have a way of doing this that involves first unplugging all cables from each component, and taking the component out. Then taking out the cables and sorting by use (HDMI, Power, Opitcal TOS-LINK, etc). This way I keep cable tangle at a minimum. I of course still had the inevitable more cable than should have existed, but that’s part of the game.
That being done, I put the new unit in place. The BDI’s arrive nearly assembled. You only have to put the legs on, which are actually on very carefully hidden wheels. Since the unit weights a metric ton, this comes in handy. The unit has two side compartments, a center channel drawer and a center compartment with a fold down door.
I organized my system as such:

Left side: – BluRay Player
- AppleTV
- Mac Mini
- Sonos (player and remote charger)

Right side:
- Receiver
- Slingbox
- DirecTV

MIddle
- Networking gear

I organized it this way to accommodate varying cable lengths, as well as keeping cable clutter to a minimum. I still ended up with some cables going back and forth (below, before zip-ties), but not as much as I would have otherwise.

Having the center compartment for the networking gear was good as its a shorter, longer compartment and gave ample room for the Cat-6 and Cat-5 cables to be plugged in without getting tangled. It also kept it all accessible for swapping in and out of connections. And the geek in me likes the green blinking lights behind the glass.
Hooking everything back up was painless, especially with most connections only requiring HDMI cables. The most complicated aspect was getting cable lengths proper for the Cat-6.
The Result
Here’s the result:

I’m super happy with the look, and that i can keep the doors closed without the gear burning up.

A very happy birthday to John Michael Stipe, who turns 50 today.

Patti Smith said in her honoring him today, “He has used his half-century well.”

I couldn’t have said it any better.

Happy birthday Michael. Thanks for being a good friend and an inspiration to me for over half my life.

New York City – 6x (I think, maybe 7)
Washington DC
Austin, TX
Dallas, TX
San Francisco, CA – 10x
Vancouver, Canada
Las Vegas, NV
San Jose, CA

2010 Anticipated:

Park City, UT
San Francisco, CA
New York (a lot)
Vancouver
London, UK
Toronto
Hawaii

I’ve been a horrible blogger. Not out of my own choice, but because I have several exciting things in the works, but I can’t talk about them until ink is dry on paper.

In the meantime, I’m going to spotlight a few things on the blog from the decade past. I’ll do a Top 10 Moments of the Last Ten Years.

My life has changed so much in ten years that it’ll be an interesting list to compile.

Sorry this has been so delayed. Since I’m on an airplane now I figure I have time to update this. In prior My So Called Digital Life series, I discussed that I live on multiple machines (two primary machines and the iPhone).

In terms of applications I use to make my digital life work, they are no heavily focused on the cloud. To wit:

DropBox

DropBox has become the entire hub of my “file” life. For a long time, I had the challenge of how to keep all of my machines in sync in terms of file storage. I tried iSync, external hard drives, USB sticks and even WebDav. None of them had a combination of no latency, ease of use, lack of wash-a-bility (I know for a fact which USB sticks survive a washing).

I store all my primary files on DropBox and sync it to about six different machines. As well, we use DropBox shared folders for file shares in my department, and my wife and I have one for our shared files.

My department uses the DropBox public folders and URL’s as a method of sharing files with external partners.

Evernote

I use EverNote as a method of storing excess, miscellaneous and tangential information. That includes serial numbers, passwords, account information, random notes, etc. It’s often a stopping point before things get distilled into more rigid forms, such as documents, wiki’s, etc.

Instapaper

I use Instapaper to store articles and informations that I’d like to read later. I’m often not very good at catching up on these items (I should be doing that now instead of writing this). I created a MenuBar extra for Instapaper on my mac at work so that I can easily reference the items. Instapaper desperately needs a desktop application.

Entourage

A requirement until our company upgrades to Exchange 2007, and then Entourage will go so firmly into the dust heap of my life, and I will piss on its grave. It is, by far, one of the worst applications ever written by a programming team. Sorry Mac Biz Group, but honestly, it’s like people designed this app by committee while tripping on shrooms in a dark conference room lit only by red lights, with a smoke generator in it someone spiked with a sedative. After that they randomized all the wireframe elements and started programming by outsourcing to a group of third graders who somehow knew Carbon programming.

Tweetie

Used for Twitter. Self explanatory.

Launchbar

Replaced Quicksilver because Quicksilver was getting buggy.

Skype

Used by my department as a chat engine for our team chat. We tried Campfire, but browser resident chat was a pain in the ass. Skype works well because it’ll catch up on the backlog upon signing in.

NetNewsWire

Much better now that it works with Google Reader. I’ve used it loyally since its first version. I seldom, if ever, use the Google Reader website. RSS will never be replaced by Twitter for me, but I still wish people would Free the Feeds and provide full text. It is 2009 after all.

Spotify/iTunes

I use both of these interchangeably. It does suck that they both respond to teh Apple keyboard play/pause button. I wish there was a way to turn one off without closing the application.

Ecto

Used for blogging on this here blog. It needs a serious over-haul, but it still works, and I dig the bookmarklet, although Twitter has replaced my “asides” mostly.

Fluid

I use Fluid.app to make Single Serving Browsers (SSB’s) for Backpack, Basecamp, Lighthouse and others.

Basecamp

My department and other departments at WBR use Basecamp extensively, to the extent that we are featured on the homepage for the product. We use it on a per-project basis, which means with the insanity of the Warner Bros. Records universe, we have almost 100 active projects in Basecamp. Insanity. It works for us. We’ve never found anything better. Is it perfect? No. Is it useful. yes.

Backpack

On the other hand. We use Backpack, and it’s lack of hierarchial organization capabilities has forced us to start looking for alternatives, including OpenAtrium, Google Docs and DropBox.

Lighthouse

We use Lighthouse currently as a bug and issue tracking system. The only issue here is that we work on about thirty projects at once. The “project oriented” sensibility of Lighthouse causes scale issues if you’re managing more than one or two projects. All told, we work on thirty or so online products (websites, etc) at once, and probably two dozen other projects.

We are trying Pivotal Tracker right now for Agile Development, and I quite like it.

OK, next installment: engineering!

I’m going to, periodically, do a tribute to old computers of mine. Today it is the Dell Optiplex GX-Pro

I had this machine from 1996 to 1998. My configuration was a Dual Pentium Pro 200mhz with 64 megs of RAM and a 720 megabyte Hard Drive. The OS that this machine ran was Windows NT 4.0 (aka Daytona).

This machine was a dream. The Pentium Pro 200mhz was a pretty substantial processor in terms of power, and coupled with the 32 bit only splendor of NT 4.0 ran more like a “modern” OS than Windows ’95, which I had prior. The only challenge was, drivers for Windows NT 4 were in scarce supply, and often flaky.

The internals of this machine were also really nice, especially for a home-tinkerer like me. The power supply flipped up and out, and the entire drive cage was removable to operate on, making adding hard drives (I eventually had three in there) easy.

The machine served me well until I upgraded to an Intergraph TDZ-2000 3d workstation (more on that in a later post).

The GXPro then went on to serve as the primary machine for my parents until it was retired in place of a Pentium IV and eventually their iMac.

The machine currently is buried in my parents garage.