[Bitscape lights all the candles.]

Today, I woke up at I have no idea what time. (We'll get to last night's events a bit later. I think.)

The Lair was in a greater state of disarray than ever before, it seemed. Random stuff strewn all over the floor. Electronics. Papers. Styrofoam. Trash. On the shelves too. Nothing connected. Argo's pieces lay strewn about, as did various speakers and audio components. Nothing was even hooked up to a power source except Illian and the hub in the closet.

I knew that, given the latest addition to the Lair's hi tech gizmory, simply trying to set Argo up where she had been, and put everything else back in its "place" just wasn't going to do. Saturday, I had knowingly hooked up the front speakers in an extremely temporary floorbound position squeezed between Argo and the closet, on either side of the tv. (Diagram to come shortly... I think.)

Okay, so this is my first pathetic attempt at an inline ramblings image. (The idea was rather inspired by some of the cool stuff at KIllustrator. Gimp is great for a lot of things. This task is not one of them.

Back to the topic.... I needed to create an environment where I could do all of the following:

1. Use my PC
2. Watch movies
3. ...with my surround sound equipment put to optimal use
4. Listen to music
5. Read
6. Sleep (unfortunately)
7. All that other crap that life requires

Sat down (as much as was permitted by the piles of junk everywhere on the floor), twiddled my thumbs, thought about it, and came up mostly blank. Eventually, I decided the bed needed to be rotated 1/2 pi radians. (Okay, so maybe that was a bit too obtuse. 90 degrees, okay? Same corner, but parallel to the windowsill wall.)

Of course, this would require moving the dresser. My first idea was to place it against the west wall, and so I attempted to do so. (Much shuffling, crowding, and pushing stuff back and forth.)

Just a few centemeters too long. It wouldn't fit without blocking the door. Bed tight against the wall, dresser pushing against it. Just not quite enough room to close/open the door. Doh!

Then another bright idea popped into my brain. (And here is where the drawing's total lack of scale shows itself, because it doesn't look possible in the picture. But it is. Very easily so.)

Argo's case gets moved (exactly where wasn't known just yet), as does the table above it, and the dresser goes east of the bed, parallel to the windowsill wall. In the northeast corner of the room. Makes perfect sense, eh? Fit beautifully too.

Then the question arose... Where to put Argo?

My first attempt was to try a real cram job, and move the tv north, so it would be next to the dresser, and put Argo's console to its right. Essensially swapping positions. Argo's table would be right next to the closet. It fit, but not comfortably. It was very tight. In fact, I had to fold up one of the table's legs to keep it from being an extreme nuisance. (Don't ask. Maybe one of these days, I'll do a properly scaled 3d rendering of the whole thing.)

(I'm way too insane to stoop to somthing like... eh.. an actual photograph? Hah!)

It quickly became apparent that this new arrangement would not work.

Long story made very short: I went for the extreme solution. Here's what it looks like now.

(Blue blurs indicate a sound source, since I didn't feel like trying to draw speakers.)

The of having Argo's console in the middle of the room, with no wall to be anchored against seemed very odd at first, and perhaps it is. Cables hanging out the back, and instead of being push up against an invisible wall surface, there're just out there. But now that I've got it this way, it's AWESOME. No exaggeration.

I can sit at Argo and type like this in the center of all the sound. All I have to do to get optimal movie viewing mode is scoot my head a few centimeters to the left. When I really want to be a lazy bum, watching movies from bed won't be a problem either.

[Bitscape gets up and puts another disc in. The Antichrist. (Yes, I mean the artist who has been referred to as the Antichrist. Not the album by the Revered which has that word in the title.) If this seeps through the walls.... Oh well. The rest of the family knows I'm a nut anyway. lol.

Another unplanned perk of this new arrangement: Some may note the "trash buffer" label on the above diagram. It is exactly that. The area of the floor between Argo and the DVD display can be utterly covered with crap (like it is right now), and there is almost utterly no hinderance to my activities.

The console desk is high enough that I can't see it. No junk gets in the way when I walk in the door to sit down at Argo. I could get up in the morning, get my clothes from the chest, out the door, take my shower, and be off without stumbling over the Taco Bell trash from two nights ago. As long as things don't pile high enough to block my view of the tv, this is paradise! (I still have to get through there to insert discs, but such are the burdens of life.)

So anyway, by the time I nearly had all this stuff setup and powered, darkness had pretty much set in outside, which reminded me that I needed to reconnect my electrical light sources to their proper extension cords. (Don't ask where or what those are. I don't even feel like trying to describe or draw that. But I will say I should buy some more spray paint one of these days.)

Oh, and another possibility of web content that this setup would be extremely conducive to: A nunning viewer's commentary about the director's commentary. Or something like that. Yes, I do plan to revive the movielog. Really, I do!

Well, here I was just going to do a brief rambling describing the events of the day, as a break from the shelf revamping (gzip -9-ing their contents), and it turned not only into a full-blown wander about, but I have effectively committed myself to adding some hacks to the lounge code to process my newly non-defined inline pre-display tag spec. Yaha.

I'll be back with another ramble or two in a couple hours. Sleep before work would be nice too.