Category: Silently Thinking Out Loud

I like to think out loud and see if anything sticks or salutes before I go ahead with it. It’s like the Grateful Dead cooking songs for years on the road before they committed them to commercial recordings. It’s way-social.

The RBE 533 Pink Compact 30 Counter Unit Oven And Its Element

It Exploded
It Exploded

This turns out to be a burned out “baking element” (as opposed to broiling element, which is fine) inside a pink stove which among other things identifies itself as a RBE-533 Frigidaire, Product Of General Motors oven, which I now understand is probably really a range. Something about having burners on top makes it that.

I first suspected our RBE-533 was not operating correctly when it failed to heat the meatloaf inside oven and the green beans in a pan on top of the thing on the front left burner. It worked for a while, because things started to get warm, but I must have missed a pop or a bang of some kind because right after the element blew apart as shown (also making the mess as shown-I’m not that bad), things stopped getting warmer and I could touch either the element inside the oven or any of the burners on the top without feeling any temperature at all.

After a quick turn to the microwave and a hurried dinner, I returned to the scene of the crime and discovered that the oven element had exploded. Aha. That didn’t explain why the lights still worked but it might have something to do with why the top burners were not working.

I find that somehow I have become very insecure without my cooking life and I began to fret. I know we’re not replacing this oven because despite the fact that it turns out to be fifty years old, it is pink, and it matches the pink twirly stools in the kitchen and all of that matches the entire original house. While these are not necessarily my values exactly, this machine is still somehow now my turf (I do all the cooking here) and I must somehow fix it.

I did Internet research. After all, if I can’t do that, what can I do, and I discovered many interesting things about the RBE-533, including a nice pdf of its owner’s manual. The manual didn’t seem to acknowledge the possibility that everything stops working at once, so I decided to concentrate on the burned out element, as it seemed central to the problem.

That part is stamped with a number, and there’s at least one web site that tells us the number has been changed over the years to a new number: 5309950886. That’s good, we discover, because those are available from a variety of sources, including Amazon and eBay, the two venues to which I am likely to turn if all things are equal. The only thing is: part 5309950886 doesn’t have a bar between the two prongs that plug into the electrical stuff, and nobody’s talking about what that bar that WAS on our original piece used to do, so perhaps it somehow became unnecessary. At least the advice to several angst-ridden owners like myself with the same problem was always the same, they always referred to that OEM number and no other variations or possibilities.

Having become unabashedly attached to my pink oven in the middle of a meatloaf, I lost some sleep and hatched a plan. I will get up in the morning and go into town. I never do that, at least not in that order.

I arrived at an appliance store with a national name and they refered me to a fixing place (telephone conversation) that has a national base and after they confused me a little with somebody who lives in Idaho (I live in Iowa) and failed to gather some other information, we finally got to the part where I can give them a model number and they can schedule a maintenance call for December 27. That’ll be ninety bucks whether it winds up fixing anything or not.

December 27 doesn’t fit well into my holiday plans.

I went uptown again to another appliance place, element in hand. When they heard the model number of the oven, they told me they couldn’t even reference that. It’s too old. After some ruminating about what that might mean, I tell them: try #53099500886 in your computer there, and bing! there it was-the element without the middle prong that might not do anything. Thirty bucks. I said, ok, if I can figure out what’s wrong with the top burners I want one. Sensing a thirty dollar sale in the middle of their nine hundred dollar merchandise, the guy suggests: check your fuses. I tell him there are oven lights that are still working. He tells me the range has two power sources.

Oh…………………….I know where that fuse box is. It’s in the back of a closet and all I have to do is move a bunch of framed pictures and Christmas decorations (yes, those could be out anyway) between the box and me and after some quick geometry and other feats, I move the junk, find the box, find a fuse that looks different, replace it, and nothing changes.

I return to the appliance store. I tell the guy I replaced this fuse (in my hand) and nothing happened. He connects me to the guy who actually fixes ovens. We’re standing there looking at each other. This doesn’t happen often enough.

He looks at the fuse and says “it’s not that fuse. That’s a 30 amp fuse, you need to find a blown 50 amp fuse”. I find out there are more fuses in the box, not all of them look like mine, and sure enough, after I turn off the whole house pulling out the fuse drawers with the bigger fuses, I find it. There’s another one of that kind handy. I plug it in, the top of the stove works again. Oh hooray, thank you.

I reset all the digital stuff that I turned off everywhere, determined that my computer didn’t die in its unexpected crash, and called the store: yup, you’re right, it was that fuse, please order the replacement thirty dollar element.

I called the national fixing place back and told them they could cancel my December 27 date, I have solved the problem. They told me they have nothing in the system about that and request I call back again tomorrow to make sure there is still nothing in the system, and if there isn’t, I won’t need to cancel it, the order got lost. That’s frustrating, because “we” had a lot of trouble putting that order into the system; it took easily a half hour or more.

Still, unless that middle bar it doesn’t have turns out to actually do something, the problem is virtually solved, although we must wait a day or two for the part. That’s nothing unusual, I’m waiting until Thursday for headlight assemblies for my car.

And if it will just go back to heating stuff again, especially in time for the big holiday coming up, even if I burn myself on it, I will never curse or yell at my pink stove again, even if that doesn’t fit my image.

Maybe I’ll get a 60s apron.





Introducing Lester Tester: Thingery Reviewer

We realized the other day while we were shopping at another site that we do not have any reviews of our products and toward that end we have hired a reviewer.

That is not to say that we don’t want our users writing reviews, but just in case they don’t, somebody is.

Our new reviewer, Lester Tester, has filed his first review on a record chosen from our catalog randomly:

Click Here For Lester’s First Review

Now obviously, we would prefer that Lester rave about our stuff. We might give him a list of Things we think he’ll like, just to get him into a positive frame of mind.

He’s going to be honest, though, because we think you probably like that, and in this case The Big Boss can’t disagree a lot anyway.

Check the catalog often once he gets going-it’ll add a dimension to the experience around here and maybe it’ll start something.

Record Grading Station One

Where We Grind Out The Records

This is where we grind out our records. There are various ways to do this, and this is a temporary set-up because it really should include some kind of intense light or lamp of some kind because you cannot grade records in low light, and it’s missing a thing or two I’d add like maybe shelves for sleeves and other supplies.

And I’d rather be using our component stereo system but that has to wait until I switch in another turntable. Nonetheless, there are maybe 100 records there, sorted into decades, waiting for their turn across the turntable. In general they’ve risen out of piles of junk not pictured, and have been selected for their “possibilities”.

This is just my opinion, based upon experience since 1991, but I’ll be reasonably delighted if five jewels pop out of the group.

That percentage would be lower if it were a “raw” group.

For the past six weeks or so, we’ve been working the 70s section of these records and have a number to go. We might never get to the 80s section as far as offering Things for sale, which is just fine with me because I’m not sure I personally survived the 80s era anyway. I know I did pretty good in the 70s (grin).

After the jewels graduate from this group, they have to go upstairs and live with me a little bit. They have to make it across a second turntable. I have to ruminate about their sleeves and confirm the “correctness” of their labels. This is a critical juncture because it’s at this point that I can and do arbitrarily decide my collection wants the piece more than anybody else’s, and that certainly does not maximize profits for the stockholders.

No, wait, *I’m* the stockholder, aren’t I?

Anyway, I just thought I’d share the process.

Then The Records Finally Go Here


Barcodes: Weapons Of Mass Distribution

raindrop100

We’re due for a little “refocus of the site”. A big part of that is going to pertain to the era in which we want to specialize.

A big part of THAT in the record business happens to be barcodes, a point I’ve wanted to make for a long time.

Barcodes came into general usage in 1974, originally of interest to grocery stores, but they really didn’t hit the record industry until about 1980. We’ve seen one or two from 1979 in our former brick and mortar, and maybe they even reach back a little farther than that. Not ALL records produced from 1980 onward had barcodes, but a bunch of them did.

By 1990 they were reporting to The Industry that records were dead. That had a profound effect on things.

Marketeers are skittish people.

Anyway, let’s say a guy wanted to focus his retailing attention on a span of about ten years. Maybe because he doesn’t feel any more ambitious than that, but maybe he wants to present himself as Some Kind Of Authority.

In the case of yours truly, a great starting point would be 1969. Music was powerful then, bands were discovering how to take control of their projects. The world changed, people landed on The Moon, Bob Dylan landed in Nashville.

That decade would end in 1979 then. That’s really convenient. I’ll tell you why.

Say you’re glancing through a thousand records. I do that sometimes. Say you’re trying to add to your stock. A quick way to do that within our 1969-1979 model would be to flip through the lot looking at their BACKS for the barcodes. Quick way to calculate the percentage of the material we might be interested in.

So, all the barcodes go over “here”, out of the way. Is that to say every barcode is evil? Of course not. For example, yours truly is a Grateful Dead collector and they certainly churned out some stuff in the 80s. In fact you could almost make the point that they churned out some of the ONLY stuff in the 80s.

No, barcodes on records are inherently evil because they produce “data” that is analyzed like data about bolts or plastic dolls. This is not a good thing when you’re peddling art.

The music industry was better off when corporate guys didn’t have data. By 1990, they were buying computers for guys like me so that the computers could call each other on Saturday night and report via barcode data what was going on in The Industry.

They had to call me because my highest volume item was one stick of incense and they didn’t have my self-made number in their database. I might have sold a lot of Guns N Roses, but I sold millions of one sticks of incense.

It took almost no time at all, once this system was in place, to declare that Garth Brooks was the Best Selling Stuff in the world, and mass merchandisers starting just going crazy.

I myself banned Garth Brooks, but that was for his refusal to stop by when he was in town.

Once we had barcodes on music, it was a commodity like socks. What a fortunate turn of events for guys in management, but it started the demise that ironically is going to be my re-entry point into the business.

Weapons Of Mass Distribution, I say.

Now, if I could just think of some snappy slogan that means Before The Barcode. Maybe something Latin. What’s “barcode” in Latin?



End Of An Era At eBay: Trading Assistant Program To End

August 13, 2013

Hello eBay Trading Assistants,

Thank you for your participation in the Trading Assistant program and the work you have done to help others sell their items on eBay. We’ve been listening to feedback from many of you and have heard that the program is not meeting expectations or delivering a significant number of sales leads. As a result, on September 20, 2013, the Trading Assistant program will be retired. Please note, this decision has no impact on your eBay account or your ability to buy and sell on eBay.

Here’s what it means to you:

eBay will no longer host a Trading Assistant directory or provide sellers with Trading Assistant program leads
eBay sellers can no longer use “eBay Trading Assistant Program” logos or other marketing materials referring to the Trading Assistant program

To allow time for processing any remaining leads, the Trading Assistant portal will be available until October 18, 2013 to all registered program members.

For eBay sellers who are “Registered eBay Drop-off Locations” or any other sellers who have physical program marketing materials (flyers, cards, signage, etc.), the deadline to discontinue all usage of these items is October 31, 2013. As stated above, use of digital logos, marketing materials or other program marks will be prohibited as of September 20, 2013.

Note: all eBay sellers may however continue to use the eBay brand within the guidelines of the eBay seller agreement. Click here for more details.

Today’s announcement has no impact on the eBay Education Specialist program.

We appreciate all of our eBay sellers and the work you do in your local communities. Our strategy at eBay is simple: provide our customers the best possible selling and buying experience. We are committed to your success. As new programs and initiatives continue to be developed, eBay will make every effort to find more compelling ways to engage with our sellers.

If you have any additional questions, please contact us.

Sincerely,

The eBay Seller Program Team

Important Dates/Actions Needed:

September 20 – Trading Assistant program is discontinued, public access to Trading Assistant portal/directory is suspended, all digital program logos and other marketing materials must be taken down
October 18 – Registered program members must process all remaining leads from within the Trading Assistant portal queue as access to the portal will be discontinued on this date.
October 31 – Any physical program signage or other program marketing materials may no longer be used

The Electronic Cigarette

Today I invested 1/7 of my available funds in a disposable electronic cigarette. It said it delivered the rough equivalent of two packs of cigarettes. At its price that’s still more than I spend now for two packs of cigarettes, but I smoke very cheap cigarettes.

Anyway, I’d pay a little more to “fit in”. I’m getting kind of tired of smoking in odd outdoor places and of course I no longer go anywhere that doesn’t allow some kind of smoking at all.

It’s not so much about the judgmental people who explain to me the various reasons why I should not smoke, especially around them, as it is about the funny places where I have to do it. I attend something and I wind up on the fringe of the event or ducking and hiding and missing an event which one way or another cost me money just to attend.

It IS a little bit about my workplace, because people get real mad when something that smells like tobacco comes through the mail addressed to them, but even more about that, it’s about burning my sweatpants.

I often dress for comfortable combat if I know I’m going to be spending a lot of keyboard time and the standard uniform for my combat is a t-shirt and sweatpants. I burn them a lot because I smoke like a loon while I “keyboard” (verb).

I rushed home from the store with the eight dollar cigarette. After a bit of a struggle I penetrated its hermetic seal and read the little slip of paper. “This cigarette” it said, and I shouldn’t be quoting because I’m making it up “will work when you draw on it, and glow red, and you will exhale some stuff that looks like smoke but is really water and it’ll last for about as long as two packs of cigarettes”. The clerk had warned me: they don’t taste very swell, you have to draw hard and they’re not worth it.

I have previously not cared about what things taste like. I didn’t care what these tasted like, but it was acceptable anyway.

And it worked. Right away I started to jones for slightly more nicotine, but I had bought some medium version and there was a higher nicotine version, so no big deal. I sat down to the keyboard and began to compose (actually, I think I began to game, but they’re similar). In the summer, since my room is upstairs and a bit warm at times like during unrelenting heat waves, my sweatpants become a pair of Iowa Hawkeye hiking shorts, so I usually burn my leg rather than the pants. This did not happen. I am ecstatic. The thing dangles right in my mouth. I can walk around with it. I can pack stuff while not-smoking it. It doesn’t have any odor.

I didn’t keep track of the time but I can rarely be intense at the keyboard for longer than an hour or an hour and a half without having to change activities and I had already mowed part of the yard in the heat earlier so I decided to nap, having discovered this amazing new technology.

I gave me and the cigarette an hour’s rest and eagerly returned to the experiment but this time the little front part that glows like it’s on fire blinked instead, and blinking means it’s “out”. No vapor that looks like smoke but isn’t. Fail.

Dammit. I am either capable of smoking the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes in a hour when I’m doing it enthusiastically or so or the thing was defective or the claim is a little exuberant. The thing’s guaranteed in some way so I wrote to the company and I also ordered a sample of the more-nicotine kind.

I really wanted it to work. There are other kinds, and there is a non-disposable refillable kind and maybe among those is a solution. Like I say, it isn’t so much about the judgmental people as it is about the sweatpants, but as it turns out it’s ALSO about the ashtray which occupies valuable real estate on my desk and the lighters all over the place which occupy certain real estate in my brain keeping track of them……….

If it just isn’t to be though-if I really am capable of vaporizing eight dollars worth of nicotine in a hour or so, I’ll be very disappointed. I really thought I was on to something.

Catalog Change: Records By The Year

Help me not overthink this but the entire record industry has organized records wrong for all of its existence.

Look anywhere, and they’re organized alphabetically by artist. They might be categorized by genre on the store shelves but anywhere else they’re not because why would they be?

With that in mind, we are reworking our store catalog within the record album category to be organized by date, at least by decade (for the time being because we have such a tiny selection).

That’s strictly because our admin likes to think about the date while he’s playing the record. He just got done with a (skipping) Billy Joel album he’d never heard because it was released the year his son was born.

But I digress. Music record albums (or any record albums for that matter) are a snapshot that includes time as one of their main dimensions. They’re blogs from several decades before when we thought of those.

So we’ve got new categories like: Record Albums 1960-1969, and those are still alphabetical by artist, last name first.

Think about it: I personally wouldn’t be caught dead listening in the 80s, with a few exceptions that occur if you want to keep your Grateful Dead catalog complete, but show me a 70s category and I’ll dive right in. More specifically, show me a 1969 category and I’ll dive right in but that’s the general idea, we don’t have one of those yet.

We hope the little bit of re-disorganization will be useful to our browsers, and like we have since 1987, we’ll keep thinking about genres.

Record Part Of The Catalog (click here)

How I Spent My Summer Vacation 2013

You know the Jimmy Webb song sung by Glen Campbell, “Wichita Lineman”?

There’s a line in it which goes “I know I need a small vacation”……….

I take off a couple of days a year, probably not enough. Ordinarily one of them is on or about July 6, at which time I go to the Sioux City event, Saturday In The Park, but this year they had nobody on the bill I wanted to see.

So, I signed up to attend a local mini flea market (I’m going to call it that anyway) in the parking lot of a local antique store where I like to hide sometimes.

I haven’t sold outdoors for over a decade. It’s a complete disconnect from me and my regular glued-to-the-computer existence.

Started in the morning too, and I usually start in the afternoon. Didn’t have much preparation time due to events that took place the two days prior to this one.

But I boxed up several hundred pounds of stuff, loaded the van, appeared at the sale and spread things out on a bench, “sort of”. Since I had selected my stock on the basis of its being in my way, there was not a lot of focus or cohesion to what I brought and I figured I’d watch the shoppers and shuffle things around as I noticed what they were looking at.

I didn’t price very much, with the exception of some records which had Rainy Day Music pricing on them.

Unfortunately July 6 in Storm Lake competes with THE major flea market weekend at Lake Okoboji, some 60 miles north of here, and the stream of shoppers I wanted to watch were a bit of a sporadic trickle.

I don’t mean that I didn’t do a little business, because I did, and one of the major buyers was a guy I’ve been happy to sell records to in the past. But I didn’t sell my water skis, and I didn’t sell my Old Style Beer advertising piece, both of which I did really kind of want to sell.

The action was largely in polished rocks. Of course, after a decade of slinging those around at eBay I really don’t HAVE a lot of polished rocks anymore, but it was over the rocks that the most interesting conversations took place.

Like I say, it was the disconnect that was interesting. I tweeted a little, so I guess I cheated there, but seven or eight hours without any keyboard time is a radical change for me. The Empire survived (somewhat) although I failed to get out 10 listings on one ID, no calamities occurred without me unless you count the notice from eBay that they were yanking my Top Rated Seller status from my main Id (and I do count that), and it was a pleasant day and I had a tree and didn’t burn all my skin to pieces.

Garage salers or antiquers or flea market shoppers are interesting to me. I’d almost like to add a live loop like this to my regular yearly routine. Dickering is more the norm there than on the Internet (find that surprising?) but there’s a social aspect to it that makes me think it’s more about being able to tell the provenance in an entertaining fashion than anything else. You just slip in the prices at the appropriate time.

I was called upon for the provenance several times. I knew the answers. That was really neat. That’s how I started at eBay: it more about the song and dance then the Extremely Valuable Thing, but over the years due to my affinity for eating, it has become strictly about the money.

Having surrounded myself with things that didn’t carry with them any Selling Drama, I noticed right away that I can remember how to be creative and that being creative is something I like.

If I did three events a year like this one, I could support myself for one day of Real Life, so there’s a bit of a disparity there between the economic rewards and reality, but I noticed one other thing last night-I slept like a baby. I haven’t slept like that for a very long time.

That probably means something.

Personal Note: The Injured Shoulder

Me Thinking And Typing

Not long ago, perhaps a week now, suddenly my left shoulder hurt. A lot. I couldn’t sleep on it, and I prefer to flop around all night, sleeping on either shoulder. I don’t like to be deprived of the opportunity and being only offered a one-position option.

Arthritis, probably, the barometer had gone down, sometime I react to that.

As the next couple of days progressed, the pain became unbearable. I was reduced to lying in bed and gritting my teeth and sweating through it. I began to imagine maybe the Blastomycosis from ten years ago had returned and I would die. Naturally, by now, I am remembering to pray, but I try not to plead.

During the height of this I was trying to write up maybe five times the new listings I usually do and had been manic at my computer. Oh, oh, maybe I should Google “manic at my computer with left shoulder pain”. Sure enough, I found somebody who had typed their left shoulder into oblivion. I moved a light so I wouldn’t crane my neck, changed keyboards, moved the keyboard (I take lots of notes and have a wad of them at the left of the keyboard and lean a little to the right to accommodate for that).

I consciously changed my posture. I took some aspirin. I tried to stay away from my war game even though one of my cities was being blown up by a marauding bad guy.

I missed stuff I usually attend. After I had to skip a Thursday night thing I dearly love to attend, I decided enough was enough. I decided to go to a doctor Friday.

Unless you read me ten years ago you don’t know how hard I’ll resist that, and I just chose the option most obvious-go to the new place that didn’t sue me for ten thousand dollars of fooling around while failing to produce a diagnosis a decade ago.

For whatever reason, the new place is obviously a favorite of our Central American population and in fact any signs on the wall are in about five different languages. They were quiet, without that strange hospital/factory atmosphere. The receptionist seemed slightly startled by my approach which was “I need to see a doctor please”. There’s some paperwork, she informs me and she assists me smoothly through that. Then there’s the part where I don’t have an appointment.

She calls to someone “there’s an, ah, old guy out here with shoulder pain”. I don’t remember ever being called that before, but I think oh good, that’ll get some attention, I might be a heart attack, even though that wasn’t on my list of likely suspects.

They worked me in after a short wait, in which I was beginning to think I was quite out of place because everyone else who was waiting spoke Spanish and I don’t. But I’m accustomed to being out of place: I qualify under various other attributes besides language.

The nurse practitioner (I think it was) who saw me asked some stuff, eliminated some things and finally came up with maybe we should take an x-ray. However, that was up to me, and I had just blown my backup supply of money getting in the door. Let’s not, I shared.

Ok, she tells me, the most likely culprit is that you bumped it against something or moved funny when you put on your shirt, or some other scenario like that. These things can happen when we get “older”. There it was again. I know I looked like death warmed over because I FELT like death warmed over, but two times in one day? Come on, I can keep up in conversations among people MUCH younger than I am, and they’re often surprised when I tell them my age (despite my overall gray-ish appearance).

She prescribes some prescription version of Aleve and a muscle relaxer. I tell her that second one sounds helpful, it feels like a muscle that won’t let loose. I go get the stuff.

It helps a little bit and when I think about it, I DID have an incident one night. I tend to wander around in the middle of the night, usually checking the computer to see if anything has blown up. I vaguely remember smacking into the corner of some wall and thinking boy, I can’t be doing much of THAT. But that’s all I remember.

I assign the task of recalling that to my Very Deep Memory. The wheels are still turning when I decided to come upstairs tonight and check the usual things.

I manage by throwing things on the floor. People have never scoffed at the idea right to my face, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. The Important Things that I throw on the floor will follow me around, finishing that journey upstairs next to the computer where I will take care of them. Slightly Important Things wait on the stairway, Unimportant Things never get out of the spot in the living room where I relegated them to floor duty.

I hear you: piling things on the stairs is dangerous. I guess it is, because tonight I was coming up the stairs, which have a left turn at a landing, and I wobbled a little bit and smacked my shoulder into the corner. There could be no doubt whatsoever, judging from THAT pain, that this is where the original incident occurred.

So I’ve moved most of the stairway waiting line to other places, and I wont make the useable part of the stairway so narrow in the future. And I don’t have to worry about the manic typing which was a huge concern: a lot of good it does to work like a fiend only to wind up in bed writhing in pain.

The lessons I’ve picked up here are so many that I believe it’s roughly the equivalent of a semester of college with 17 hours of courses.

The main lesson is that I’m Older Now and must be careful because I might totter. But I got other lessons: I found some health care people who were almost pleasant, and for the first time in over 15 years I had to have a prescription filled and I found a pharmacy that was pleasant enough, and I still love my job.

All for around fifty bucks. To quote The Who, especially considering my advance age, “I call that a bargain-the best I ever had”.