My Review of Atlantic Oskar 1080 CD, 504 DVD Multimedia Storage Tower in Maple or Espresso

Originally submitted at Cymax.com

The Oskar 1080 Media Tower has a clean and simple traditional design ideal for any contemporary home that needs a little help organizing favorite music and movie selections. With plenty of room for CDs and DVDs, this media storage tower will be a welcome addition to any room in your home. Features:...

Atlantic Oskar 1080 CD, 504 DVD Multimedia Storage Tower in Maple or Espresso

CD shelf for Books??

By Adam the Mathematician from Lowell, MA on 10/6/2011

 

5out of 5

Pros: Adjustable shelf heights, Attractive Design, Easy to build

Cons: Adjustable Shelves Thin

Best Uses: Cds, Small Rooms, Dvds, Video games, Books, Large Rooms

Describe Yourself: CD Collector, Movie Enthusiast, Book Collector, Video Gamer

Was this a gift?: No

I now have three of these shelves in my apartment. I bought one many years ago and I was sad to see that they have changed the design slightly when I decided to buy more. The shelves are much thinner than the original design, so they are not as sturdy as the original one I purchased.

That being said, I've decided to re-purpose these shelves to start handling my collection of paperback books. CD/DVD shelves are simply the perfect width for these things and you can fit hundreds of average sized paperbacks on a shelf! Rather than using a typical wide bookshelf to store these types of books, these shelves are perfect for this purpose.

I am even planning on buying a shelf to put hardcover books on, though I am slightly nervous about the shelves holding the weight. I suspect an average sized fiction hardcover should hold up just fine, but these shelves are simply unsuitable for my text books. In that regard I use a typical larger sized bookshelf. A regular fiction hardcover sticks out only a few inches beyond the shelf, but I find the width is still perfect to manage these books as well. We'll see how my future shelf buying goes over the year... I project I need 5 more of these! One will be for my DVD's/Xbox games though.

(legalese)

Update on Work to be done

I thought I would update since I hadn't posted in quite some time. I've just finished my Undergraduate Degree in Applied Mathematics, and I've just been awarded the Teacher's Assistant position for the next two years. This comes with a bit of a tutoring stint, so I've become rather motivated in getting my tutorials up to par for next semester. Maybe if direct tutoring doesn't help students my tutorials can help them further. Also it will help me review the material quite a bit so that I am well prepared to tutor students for higher level math. I suspect most people will have trouble with Calculus and usually the reason that is true is because people never really do well with Algebra. Despite usually passing an Algebra class at the High School level... it does not mean they've learned enough to succeed in Calculus.

Also, I am thinking about switching programs for my Tutorials. Right now I am writing them in Mathematica, and they look fine, but there's a professional quality that is just sort of missing. After speaking with my professors, they made a good point about how it was designed. If you design something to do this one thing and then you want it to do this other somewhat unrelated thing... then it's not going to perform as well as you'd want. I feel this is true, because even though Mathematica is on version 8 at this time, I would still not consider publishing documents with it. The formatting for written documents is really frustrating to deal with. Instead I'm probably going to switch over to LaTeX, which is very widely used in the mathematics community. I just need to learn all the syntax for writing up the documents and then I will start switching everything over. For the time being I am still going to use Mathematica to write my tutorials, luckily Mathematica can be extracted into a TeX file so I can convert it when I know more about writing in LaTeX.

That's about it for now... I do have some interesting articles brewing in my head, but for now I think I'll be focusing on writing the tutorials for a while. They actually take me a long time to write, so they are rather time consuming. Anyway, I'm off to write another one now.