This weekend, I set my sister up with some whole home audio courtesy of her iPhone, iMac, iTunes, and a couple of Airport Expresses (Lifehacker’s how to). One Airport Express and speaker pair went in the kitchen but the cables were a huge mess:
- the Airport Express and speakers each needed power
- there was the cable connecting the speakers together
- there was the cable connecting the speakers to the Airport Express
- add to that the existing power cords for a digital photo frame and a cordless phone charger power cord
This is a good time to explain this particular sister of mine: I call her the Indian Martha Stewart (before Martha Stewart went to jail — ie when she was just known for being an freakishly obssessive homemaker). Yup, that’s an accurate description of my sister. So I knew that left alone, the mess of cables wasn’t going to survive more than a few days.
I found a solution in a wicker basket. Here were the ingredients for my solution:
- squid power supply (Amazon link)
- a wicker basket (for some reason, my sister has a cabinet full of these things)
- some hefty scissors
- a bunch of cable ties
1. First, this particular wicker basket had a bunch of internal compartments. I remove most of the walls that created these compartments with the scissors.
2. Removing the compartments made it so I could rest the squid power supply inside the thing. The tentacles plugs were essential — with them, I could bend the outlets around the inside of the basket.
3. I cut square openings (about 1.5″ by 1.5″) on the left, right and back of the wicker basket.
4. Then I positioned everything inside and outside the basket and cable-tied all the loose cables, plugged everything in, and pushed everything inside the basket as low-down as possible. Done!
The Container Store should be making and selling this thing!
Photographs of the final product:
I think it helped that the wicker basket I had stuffed all the cables inside of had this steel frame. Here’s a shot inside the basket…
One of the square openings I made on the left side of the basket:
And the one on the left side of the basket:
Yeah right. Martha Stewart would never let a banana go brown like that. Tsk-tsk.
Comment by Oskar Austegard — March 6, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
You are a very nice brother! It looks great.
Comment by Erin — March 12, 2009 @ 9:49 am
She would if she was going to make banana bread.
What a nice brother, indeed!!
Comment by Jennie — March 12, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
Dear Prof. Agrawal,
My name is lynn, I am a Ph.D. candidate with the major of data mining, you are a so famous scholar in this area that I have heard about you for so many years.
I am in California now as a visiting scholar. And I afraid it’s too rude to ask for a favor, I have read one of your article with the name of ‘Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules’ for many times, unfortunately, I still can not understand the part of 3.3–Generation of Synthetic Data. I feel so frustrated about that because I do need to generate the dataset in your way to testify the algorithm of my own. But I still can not do it yet. I have some question about the generation procedure. Well, I do not think you have enough time to explain to me.
So, would you please send me the programming code of generating the synthetic dataset ?
I am afraid I asked too much. But I really really need your help.
And you are the hero you know, just like the Super Man is Association Rules area. And I am looking forward to your reply. my email address is Linyin_0914@hotmail.com
Best Regards,
Lynn Chen
Comment by Lynn Chen — March 16, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
This is such a great idea! I would love to photolink to this if you didn’t mind.
Comment by Rachel — March 17, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
Ha, I don’t agree with it all but nice none-the-less
Comment by digital photo frames — April 2, 2009 @ 8:20 pm