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I haven't really written anything lately, but I figured this was worth a post if nothing else was. It's probably going to seem a little… convoluted because I'm going to share my thought process, which rarely goes in a straight line.

Anyway, ever since school started this past January my life has seem terribly cluttered. (It was cluttered before then too, I just didn't care because it didn't interfere with my sleeping in and wasting time.) Nothing but loose ends. Between rushing from class to work and home and trying to keep my relationships with my friends and balance my schoolwork, I've felt like I was going crazy. I was in four different spheres each pulling me in a different direction, and the worst part was that no one in any of the spheres knew the demands placed on me by anyone in the other spheres. It sucked.

Ever since the end of February I've been trying to eliminate the pressures placed on me. I spoke once about Feng Shui on my blog before, and I mention it here now. One of the things that I've lacked is a place that is mine in every way. It's one of the things I want when I have my house built, and it's something that I've been trying to create ever since we moved here in January of 2004. The one thing that has stymied all my efforts thus far has been my PC. There's always been the black box sitting under one-half of my desk taking up space. There's always been my monster subwoofer next to that with four speakers taking up space on my desk.

Now there's nothing but an overgrown 20" LCD monitor with a small, silver external hard drive next to it.

Allow me to explain the impetus for the change. This past week I almost ran out of hard drive space, for the first time in about 3 years. My PC had three drives: a 36GB 10,000 rpm system drive, plus 120GB and 160GB for my media storage. Well I finally ran out of space so I ordered a 400GB drive from Best Buy that I would pick up in the store. I picked it up the following morning and had nothing but problems from the moment I cracked my case open. I fought with it for about 4 hours before I completely gave up. Somewhere along the way, a strange idea seized me: maybe I should forsake the PC world entirely and buy a Mac.

In a fit of cogent rage, I did some research. I hopped onto the Apple Store and configured an iMac. Holy shit. It was only about $1700. Buy an external hard drive enclosure and I'd have 650GB of storage which would be more than enough for the next year or so at least. I could attach the media drives (formatted in NTFS) to my laptop via the external enclosure and suck the data over the LAN.

So I did. I present to you the most ghetto file-transferring setup you are ever likely to see. This was done in the basement laundry room on top of a freezer underneath a clothes rack so as to be close to the switch/hub. (Imagine transferring 250GB of data via a wireless connection. :shudder: )

This first pic shows the old hard drive linked up to the little circuit board that came in the external drive enclosure:

This second pic shows a better view of the blue network cable going up to the switch. You can see the wire morass that was my ghetto setup:

This last pic is the external enclosure that kept getting in the way when we tried to do laundry. It sat on the drier because I didn't have a better place to put it:

I will have pics of my desk with my iMac on it in the next few days.

ghetto computing, mac, imac, os x, apple switch, feng shui

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