As far back as I can remember, I've loved grilled cheese sandwiches. The combination of melted cheese with a little bit of char plus the toasted bread is really all you need.

Grilled Cheese & Sandwich

The earliest grilled cheese sandwiches I remember eating were at Friendly's, a family restaurant chain on the East coast. This must have been in the early to mid-seventies, either before we moved to California or on family visits afterward.



Since then I have definitely become a grilled cheese aficionado, and love the current trend toward "homestyle" grilled cheese sandwiches with a couple kinds of cheese and good homemade bread. We also have a panini press at home that makes the best sandwiches ever.



How to ruin a grilled cheese sandwich: overthink it. Don't put too much stuff on it! Grilled cheese sandwiches need cheese, bread, butter (or a little bit of some other creamy spread) salt and pepper. Allowable options are a small amount of mustard and a pickle and/or bowl of soup on the side. I love grilled cheese with turkey ham, but it's no longer truly a grilled cheese sandwich.

Updating this post from earlier this year, here is the current network map done on Gliffy.

Changes/additions from last time:

• Added Apple MacBook Pro notebook (GJETOST)
• Added Maxtor 500GB NAS box (EDAM). Still need to switch this to static IP addressing.
• Added Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4 1TB eSATA box (MOZZARELLA) for DirecTV DVR storage.
• Removed the “TBD” file server from the diagram, since now with the 500GB NAS there is no need for a full-fledged file server.

Total live storage:

Not all of this storage is immediately available for arbitrary use, but if I really wanted to I could ftp to either of the DirecTiVo boxes or mount the eSATA box as FireWire on the Mac. Also, somehow the two DirecTiVos don’t have cheese names. How did that happen?