Well, it's like this: we need a new kitchen, so we're having it done in about 3 weeks time. Guess where my 'office' is? Yup - ya got it in one...

Given that I don't work from home any more, it's been decided that my office will move into what is now the utility room (it's only 6' x 4', but I've used it as an office before, and it'll serve the purpose). However, this means several weeks of utter chaos, so for now we're all on laptops (I'm flippin' glad we still have the old powerbook G4, as that's gonna be my primary comp for the next month or so). Service may be intermittent until then.... ;-)

The good news is that we'll have room for Rose's 17" HP laptop on the new breakfast bar in the kitchen once everything is complete, so we'll each have a surface to work on when we both want to use the computer at the same time.

In other news, we've just switched ISPs. We used to be with Pipex, who were once by far the best service provider in the UK. Unfortunately, they've been split off from UUnet (later MCI) and are now in private hands. Since then, service has deteriorated (putting it mildly) - they're not offering the latest high-speed products to their business customers and their billing department has gone all to hell. I therefore decided to move to Zen internet, who seem to be about as good as they get at the moment. It took 'em less than a week to switch us over, and better yet, our download speed has almost quadrupled to just under 8mbit, upload increasing from 256kbit to 448 - all this for about two-thirds of what we were previously paying (and this is still a business account with a static IP). Not too shabby. It's still early days yet, but so far things look promising. Zen offer a monthly billing cycle anyhow, so we're not locked into them for a year if things don't work out.

Last year I bought a Roku Soundbridge for about half price on eBay (although I now wish I'd hung on a bit longer and bought an Apple TV instead, but that's another story. I'll upgrade one of these days...). Anyhow, at the time, we had around 60 gigs of music in the iTunes library, and that was what we used to feed the Soundbridge. The only thing is that the tunes on there had been ripped at relatively low bitrates for listening with computer speakers or ipods. Through the system in the living room (which is pretty high quality), everything sounded rather 'flat'.

Soo... I bit the bullet and am nearing the end of re-ripping our whole CD collection in Apple Lossless format. A long job, but DAMN is it worth it. Sound is every bit as good as the original CD, and WAY better than even 320kbps AAC. I'm sufficiently impressed to have decided to pack away our CDs (especially given that I've ripped 'em ALL this time) and just rely on the Soundbridge for music (which will save us a LOT of space in the living room).

Apple Lossless format still offers quite a bit of file compression, so the iTunes library is still only around 200gb - despite having several hundred CD's worth of music in it. It's residing on a RAID 1 array in our G4 fileserver, and just to be on the safe side I've also got a backup on an external HD.

Downloadable music (legal, of course) is quite obviously the way the market is going now, and I can't say that I'm sorry. Certainly, I'm pleased with the amount of space we're going to be saving in the lounge with all those CD's packed away and stored in the attic, and I'm looking forward to the day when the same can be done with DVDs - it's quite obviously on the way, just waiting for storage technology to catch up. I find it amusing that the G4 we use as our media/file/mail server originally shipped with a 20gb HD - which was deemed adequate at the time - now, however, it has around a terabyte of storage in it, and that's no longer considered excessive. How things change in a relatively short space of time...