Handbags and Gladrags

The office. Every guy needs one. Your manhole. Put all your stuff in there and arrange it just the way you like it. After eight years of scraping by with a chipboard desk that had buckled under the weight of a 17-inch CRT and had one of those sliding keyboard drawers that never worked, it was time to get a new desk and re-arrange the home office.

Also central to this effort was to move the Triton keyboard within striking distance of the Macintosh and the new Edirol FireWire audio interface, to actually begin to have a working home studio, as well as to avoid having to run instrument cables  across the floor from one side of the room to the other.

Glass desks are cool, but there's always the chance of overloading them and having something tragically hilarious happen. The best thing about the wood one that we found is that it has two trestle-like pieces on either side for computer storage. The Macintosh, being needlessly tall, didn't fit without removing a drawer, but I probably wasn't going to use the drawer anyway. It's pretty great having the Mac on one side and the PC on the other, keeping the earth in delicate balance. A KVM switch in between keeps everything switching nicely, but it basically looks like a squid with cord tentacles and contributes nastily to the cord problem.

When you mix musical instruments with networked computers and numerous wired peripherals, cords become a real issue. Since I don't think I'll be replacing everything with Bluetooth devices anytime soon, I'd like to get some sort of cord snake to at least hide the problem. It's probably time to invest in a UPS as well, especially given how many things are plugged in. And then, it's on to the next project. I'm looking at you, bookshelf.