coffee table.

So this past Friday I braved the yuppy-laden Bellevue Square to pick up my coffee table - driving up there in my beatup old Toyota pickup (love you Stuart!) to pick it up. Apparently I've had my eye on this thing for years (yes, 'years' = plural 'year') and finally it went on sale a couple of weeks ago. So I ponied up for it to add to my rather sparse collection of furniture (it's a slow process but someday I will also own an actual dresser) -

It serves as a good footrest and place to put the collector's edition coffee issue of Seattle magazine.

Oh, and my National Parks coffee table book -

Oh, and my coffee -

It just needs some maps in the drawers. Or some music paper. Or both.

And about the footrest thing - the timing couldn't have been better as I spent some time this weekend in between crawling around the attic and under the house running electrical cables setting up the Mac mini (for which I can now prop my feet up on the coffee table and put the keyboard in my lap) -

Compared to the Xbox media center (running XBMC which the Mini can also run) the Mini rules - it is absolutely silent (the Xbox sounds similar to a small airplane taxiing down the jetway) and runs digital video/audio out without an adaptor (well, I have to convert the DVI out to HDMI but that's an easy $8 cable solution) whereas I had to get a special connector in order to run optical audio and component video out of the Xbox.

I'll keep the Xbox for playing the old video game ROMs (like Super Mario, Tetris, Raiden and the like) Julian and I do from time to time just for a hoot but the Mini will be the new media center. It sounds awesome, too - I had to get a tiny female optical coupler to put on the end of the mini optical cable out of the Mini cos my receiver is fresh out of optical ins (using the available ones for the TV, DVD and CDR) but it works perfect. I just unplug the optical cable from the TV (plugged into the receiver) and connect it to the optical cable with the coupler attached cos I do not need both of them connected at the same time (I have to admit it took me a little bit of a configuring headache to come up with that nifty little solution after I tried figuring out how to maybe move around the components between the optical and digital coax audio ins available on the receiver).

And for video we can now stream Hulu (episodes of The Office I'll never be around to watch when they actually air) and all sorts of network TV and other stuff (in addition to the LG that already streams our Netflix). No need to ever actually, um, watch traditional TV anymore (i.e. time to cancel our $15/month über-basic cable). Sweet. And no more headaches trying to convert stupid proprietary iTunes playlist XML files to .m3u files which was giving me a total migraine. To celebrate - the first thing I tested listening to was the playlist I tried to convert a few weeks ago but from which couldn't get the XBMC to see more than one song (of the 60+ in the playlist).

And - when the living room is finished there will be white paneling like this and the walls will of course be painted a beautiful Benjamin Moore HC fairview taupe and the LG will be mounted to the wall and ...