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I don't know about you, but my office is an ever-lovin' mess! I move huge piles of media through it weekly. Mounds of magazines, newsletters, books, manuals, print outs, post-its, and unopened mail cover every horizontal surface. Tall twisting towers of CDs, CD-ROMs, cassettes, 3 1/2" disks, Zips and Syquest carts rise like stalagmites on a cavern floor. I think sometimes I'll go mad from information overload. Help, I'm drowning!
 Given this malaise, I'm always on the lookout for new storage and filing technologies. Kensington, the "mice makers," have just released QuickTrieve (gawd, who the hell came up with that gem of a name?), a multimedia storage unit that doubles as a speaker stand. QuickTrieve (hereafter referred to as QT to keep me from cringing) comes in two models: a multimedia unit that can hold 16 CDs, 18 Zips, 64 floppies, or some combination of both, and a smaller QT for Zip which holds nine Zip disks. QT for multimedia sells for 10 bucks, the QT for Zip for US$8.50. Both units have a thick rubber pad on the top to accept a computer speaker. The pad keeps the speaker from vibrating off the unit and helps absorb vibrations that would otherwise transfer into the unit and screw up your speaker's sound. Raising my Yamaha YST-M10 speakers to ear level did improve speaker sound a bit, and freed up valuable desk space (after I filled the QT unit with all of the disks that were crowding around my PC). The QT units are designed to be stacked (they have feet on the bottom which lock into holes on the top after you remove the rubber speaker matt). Unfortunately, they don't lock together horizontally like other stackable storage systems. They're designed to sit in any orientation (upright, on their side, on their back). Another drawback for me is that the lion's share of the CD-ROMs I've gotten recently (from subscriptions to mags like boot and The Net, and from books with CD-ROMs) are in plastic or cardboard sleeves. These don't really fit into the CD grooves molded into the QT unit. And, in the multimedia unit, floppies and Zips don't actually have grooves, so they just float inside one of the two compartments on the unit. The other thing I noticed is that my slightly larger than normal Yamaha speakers are a bit heavy sitting on top, making the unit sag a bit. I don't know if, over time, this will get worse. Probably as long as the unit is filled with media, it will be OK. At $10 a piece, this storage solution may be somewhat pricier than others, but the handsome design and the speaker stand feature are added bonuses, and for a brief moment, my desk is clean and I'm feeling a little less mental from information sickness. Maybe Kensington should work on a desktop data furnace next. - Gareth Branwyn [9/16/97] |
