Four Walls Eight Windows

Four Walls Eight Windows
Status	Defunct (2004)
Founded	1987
Founder	John G. H. Oakes and Daniel Simon
Successor	Thunder's Mouth Press
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	New York City
Publication types	Books

Four Walls Eight Windows was an American independent book publisher in New York City. Known as 4W8W or Four Walls, the company was notable for its dual commitment to progressive politics and adventurous, edgy literary fiction.

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I have received several requests for a tour of my home network so here you go. I have dedicated an entire closet to be the heart of my home network. I actually screwed a piece of plywood to the wall so that I could freely mount any network hardware that I needed. My main connection to the internet is this standard old cable modem, provided by Charter Cable. I actually have 2 terabytes of file storage. The way I have this configured is with 4 hard drives, each one being 1 terabyte. However, only two of the hard drives are used for file sharing. The other two are backup drives and each night a script is run to automatically clone the data from the main hard drives. These drives are all daisy chained through a single firewire connection on this old Mac Mini G4, which works as my file server and web server, amongst other things. I also do my voice narration recording in here. That is why I have the big microphone connected. All of these ethernet cables go up into the attic where they're distributed around the house to wall jacks, like this one. I labeled each jack with a number that corresponds to a particular port on a particular switch. That way if I ever need to troubleshoot a connection, I know where the other end goes. I'm a strong believer in ethernet. While I do have two wireless access points in my house, one at each end, I do not use these for anything except mobile devices. So I have quite a few things connected to my ethernet switches. I'll show you some of it. I have a color laser printer. I do not believe in inkjet printers. I think they are a big waste of money since the ink costs more than the printer. I also have a black and white laser, copier, and scanner on the network. This is my main office, or computer room. This is how things look day to day, I didn't clean anything up for you. This is my main computer, which is a Mac Mini. This is where I edit all of my videos. Here is a workbench I use for everything from repairing computers to shooting videos of things. These two Mac Mini setups are for my two kids. I even have a computer in my garage. I have a cheap monitor on the wall and this old Mac Mini G4. I use it mostly for displaying PDF images or searching the web while I'm working on projects in the garage. This is my wife's desk, and yes it stays that messy most of the time. This is my living room TV. Besides the Nintendo Wii, you'll also little black Western Digital box. This thing is wired into my network and allows me to watch Netflix, Hulu, or files stored on my local main file server. I have one of these on every TV in the house. This is essentially our only source of television content. We have no cable or satellite. Well, I hope you enjoyed the tour. I would just like to point out that a lot of people think I have this extravogent, expensive computer network. And really, I don't. Most of the equipment I've bought used off of eBay for nearly nothing. So I don't have a lot of money invested in my network. But what I do have a lot invested is time. Particularly when it comes to running all of the ethernet cables. I've typically done it over a period of years on an as-needed basis. I started off with one switch, then two, and now three. And it more or less works like this. We re-arrange a room and we're like "Oh well, now we need an ethernet jack over here" so I run a new jack. And just over a period of several years I've ended up with nearly 48 network jacks in the house, so I have a live ethernet jack on every wall. I'm really, really a proponent of ethernet. I mean, I know everybody loves wireless because it's so convenient. And nearly every device I have in the house is capable of wireless but I just don't like it because it's not fast enough, its not reliable enough, it's too complicated. You've got to deal with SSID's, encryption, interference problems, and range issues and you know, so I just do not use wireless unless it's a mobile device like an iPad, or laptop, or iPhone, or iPod, or something like that. Everything else, I just much prefer to plug the wire in. It works, and it always works, and it keeps on working, and I don't have to worry about any of the complicated mess of wireless. So that's just the way I do things. Anyway, leave some comments. Tell me what you think. Till next time!

History

Four Walls debuted in the fall of 1987, under the direction of two young editors, John G. H. Oakes and Daniel Simon. (Simon had previously had an imprint under the same name at Writers and Readers Publishing.)

In 1995, Oakes and Simon parted ways. Oakes remained as publisher and Simon went on to found Seven Stories Press.

In 2004, Four Walls Eight Windows was acquired by the Avalon Publishing Group.^[1] Its entire list was incorporated into the Thunder's Mouth Press imprint of Avalon, of which Oakes became publisher. Thunder's Mouth Press itself was acquired in 2007 by the Perseus Books Group. (Oakes then became executive editor at Atlas & Company under James Atlas; he is now publisher of The Evergreen Review.) Perseus stopped publishing books under the Thunder's Mouth imprint in May 2007.^[2]