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Last Great Internet Bubble Auction
jlouderb writes "At least that's what they are calling it. Cowan Alexander is getting ready to auction off the assets of MP3.com (now owned by CNet) on March 10th and 11th. The items up for sale include lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular, along with servers and notebooks that are probably hopelessly out of date. The best part, though -- a 1997 yellow hummer and a 1994 "Fat Boy" Harley. Plus, they've got pictures!"
Too bad they aren't selling the mp3 database itself! All those songs, lost.. there should be a law or something.
Although that Axis Systems (now part of Verisity Design) machine looks pretty nice. Hm, $1M initial price.. I wonder for how much it'll go now. We could use one at work for various things.
eden.h4xx.com - whacky free for all image board
Aerons are quite nice, especially if you get the "fully featured" ones. I used one for about a year at one job, and now even 4 years later, I still long for an Aeron. It's not like they're going to massage you while you sit there, but they are quite comfortable, and since the "fabric" has lots of holes in it, they keep you cooler than a standard chair does.
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
lots of those dumb Herman Miller Aeron chairs that were so popular
You got something against the Aeron? I'm sitting in one right now, I've been using it everyday for years, it is hands-down the best chair I've ever plopped my ass down in.
I used to have back pains every morning after sitting a lot, and discomfort after long coding sessions, even with an alarm that I set to tell me to stand up every 30 minutes. But all that went away with the Aeron, it is a "life changer".
It got popular during the boom, like every expensive luxary item. How come you don't say "big dumb Hummer trucks", it seems like every dotcom CEO had one.
Just sticking up for a good product. I have several other Herman Miller products, including a *very* nice Eames lounge chair, they are worth the money.
The Hummer has 50,000 miles on it and it's on its second engine. What did they do to that thing?
-N
I've nothing to say here...
As an artist that had music offered on MP3.com, I am very disappointed that MP3.com died. It's very sad, really. I've listened to bands for the first time on MP3.com which I later went out to buy a CD of. The people who suffer most from this failure is the underground music scene. The ability to get your sound out to a large audience was really a good thing for both the artists (free distro, big audience) and the listeners (free songs from a wide variety of music). All my favorite bands (MeWithoutYou, Nina Pinta and the Santa Maria, Zao, etc.) had a few free songs offered on MP3.com, and it was great if you ever wanted to show someone else some cool band. If MP3.com closed because of lawsuits, it's likely partly because major labels (or corps like ClearView) felt threatened by the ability to hear any new band out there from any musical style without being controlled by the major labels. And the idea of free AND legal music downloading must have been horrible to them. As far as those people who want to control my freedom to express myself to a large audience and to support talented bands without having to pay a large record label (most of the bands are on indie labels, if any label), I hope they rot in AO*cough*L.
The kneeling chairs take a bit of getting used to. You have to adjust your position to the desk a bit, they aren't just a "drop in" replacement for a standard chair.
They also take a bit of time to build up the necessary muscular structure. People who sit in standard chairs have woefully underdeveloped trunk muscles, since the chair is explicitly designed to use as few muscles as possible, as seldom as possible.
It becomes a feedback cycle. The more you use a standard chair, the more you need one.
If you're willing to adapt your desk to the chair, rather than the other way around, a simple and common Japanese meditation bench will replace the sort of kneeling chair you are talking about. The trick for comfort with these is to place the bench on a zabuton, not directly on a hard floor.
What I like to use though is a simple platform, about 30"x36" on which one can sit crosslegged, move around, change postion constantly, etc. These can be built at normal chair hight for use with a standard desk.
Once you get used to these and build up a certain amount of supporting musculature you'll be loath to every go back to a standard chair. No matter how "ergonomic" a chair is it just isn't designed to hold a person in a position for which human body was designed. The old Greek and Roman benches on which one relined were far more suitable for human use.
Good luck getting one into your office though.
KFG
That's a desk from BioMorph. If you have an Aeron chair, you need the Herman-Miller of desks to go along with it, which would be BioMorph. Seriously nice desks, with the attendant pricetag. *sigh*
Oh, things I forgot:
Most of the fancy furniture and stuff was in the tech building. The business, HR, legal, and music types were in the building next door, and it wasn't dressed up quite as much. It still had some pretty cool things in it, though.
The techs were in 1-, 2- and 3-person offices. This was very nice, compared to cubes. I miss it. Some of the higher-ups had argued and managed to get those for us. I miss the care of employees that the whole tech organization had- it certainly helped motivate employees, or at least keep them from being demotivated (read Good to Great).. a lot of time was put into making sure the techies were kept happy, even through low-buck things.