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.

Notes From Saturday In The Park, Sioux City, 7/5/14

I’m a senior citizen:
I never think to ask, but I got a discount for the shuttle bus from the Tyson event center to the venue because I’m a senior citizen. The woman who took my money said she just had a sense for that sort of thing.

Tobacco is getting really hard to smoke:
Anywhere, even outdoors. I was caught five minutes after arrival. Thanks to the guys manning the Coke truck for letting me smoke there.

You can’t be a 60 year old hippie unless you are a 60 year old hippie:
Over time, the ranks have thinned at events like this. There were guys older than me, guys who might have been hippier than me, but not many. We now nod knowingly to each other without introductions.

People really like my Gypsy Rose dashiki:
As in previous years, numerous strangers liked my shirt. I didn’t see another one. These are still readily available from Gypsy Rose. They’re the only way to go on sweltering days.

Rainy Day Music made a lasting impression:
It might have been only one guy, but he went out of his way to say he loved Rainy Day when it operated. There were three of us veterans of that era in our group.

Boss Hog Beef Brisket is really good:
If you’re in Sioux City, go there, get that.

Grateful Dead are fading:
I only saw three Dead t-shirts at the event. There was nobody associated with them performing, but that’s still a really low number.

Bottled water is difficult math:
I don’t buy water. I know where to get it for nothing. But not at sweltering events where everything is controlled. I bought a 20 ounce bottle for three dollars and a 24 ounce bottle for two dollars. I am still baffled by that math.

Bands:

Wild Feathers:
Just guitars, harmonies, and good writing. These guys are going places. Buy the album. Available on LP.

Ziggy Marley:
Longest hair in the business, dreads well past his knees. Great sound, flawless delivery, oddly the crowd behaved, probably because it wasn’t dark yet.

Bonnie Raitt:
Wonderfully humble (“I used to think I was really hot until right now”), don’t buy the records, catch her live. The most telling thing about Bonnie’s stunning performance was that her soundboard was analog-the other bands’ were digital. Yes, she did do Angel From Montgomery.

Avett Brothers:
High energy lunatics. All over the place, but weirdly most effective when they did a gospel number. These guys can’t possibly keep it up for thirty years and it’s difficult to understand how the fiddle player and the cello player keep strings on their instruments. At one point the guy running the lights lit the trees beside the stage. Lots of fog.


Fifteen Years at eBay

Today is my fifteenth anniversary at eBay. I had discovered the site in a hotel room using something called Lodgenet (which I think was Webtv for hotels). I knew right away I had to get involved.

I used to run little classified ads in Linn’s Stamp News and enjoyed the trading I did in collectible stamps there, but THIS let a guy use pictures and more words and reach a “worldwide” audience.

Of course, I didn’t have a digital camera, so the pictures were out, and I had to rely on just text, but that’s another story.

After the hotel stay, the following Monday I hightailed it over to the Spencer Public Library since I didn’t have a computer, and used theirs to register. Dewey The Cat, later to be the subject of a New York Times best selling book, watched me do that.

Pick a user name, the thing said. I’m a fan of a band called the Grateful Dead and they had a song called St. Stephen which has a line that goes “one man gathers what another man spills”. I thought that probably fit nicely, so I chose “saintsteven”, a play on my name and that song. It took. I was later to lose the name and had to adopt a variation, but that’s yet another story.

For the first few weeks or maybe months, I was a buyer. I had a little indie record store and I discovered right away that I could buy low at eBay and sell high at the store. The record business is like that, full of folklore about what’s rare and what isn’t. Some titles that sold well in Spencer were plentiful on the internet at low prices. Mason Proffit’s album Wanted comes to mind. It was a hot number in Iowa due to their appearance once at the Wadena Rock Festival, but not particularly difficult to run down at seven or eight dollars at eBay, and it regularly commanded twenty-five in my bins.

One day it occurred to me that *I* could do this stuff. I had records that were picked over and unsold, and I listed a box of bluegrass records at some low price because I couldn’t get a nickel for them in my outlaw hard rock store. Wham! Seventy-some dollars, as I recall. I photographed that guy’s check, minus his contact info and framed it. First Internet dollar.

Since I couldn’t use photos, I had to rely on crafty text, and I didn’t mind that challenge one bit. It became my daily routine to do several write-ups at my store, close it for a few minutes and run over to the library to post the new listings. Stuff sold. You could sell anything there, even though eBay was already four years old. The novelty was powerful.

Eventually the library figured it out, thanks to a newspaper article about the guy who augmented his store sales with this Internet stuff. Dewey The Cat’s author sidled up to me one day while I was posting and said “we couldn’t help but notice that nice article about you in the newspaper”.

I thanked her, thinking that was nice, when she mentioned “But you can’t do that here. Our computers are not for commercial use”. I promised not to do that anymore, trying to figure out a go-around, and the next day when I popped in to check my email, they made it obvious they intended to enforce that rule by peering over my shoulder while I was computing.

I HAD acquired a Webtv unit by that time, or rather, my girlfriend had, but I had to travel forty miles to use it.

Miraculously, Bruce from the Beehive appeared at my counter one day and GAVE me an obsolete computer that was good enough to list via a tool called MisterLister (and a dial up connection), and I could drive the 40 miles and start that stuff in the evening, which I felt was the optimum time to start and end auctions.

That went on for a long time, although he eventually did want that computer back so he could give it to a grand kid. I broke down and rented one, continuing to use the dial up. I probably had a thousand “feed backs” already by that time.

This version is going to leave out a lot of fun details, because I want to compare THAT eBay to today’s eBay.

It was the wild, wild west. Almost anything went. Feedback might have been the backbone of the system, but it wasn’t the stick and carrot that it is today. The unexpected part for me was the community aspect. It wasn’t efficient for me to use the chat boards and the discussion boards while I had a half hour at the library and it took me a while to discover that community. But one Saturday night I saw Alicia Keys (September 29, 2001) and I thought she was pretty good, so I made my first post on the Music Board. It didn’t take long for one of the regulars there to tell me Alica Keys was terrible. That fascinated me and I vowed to not let him get away with that. Eventually we became fast friends, ultimately meeting at West Bend where he and his wife were traveling on a vacation that included lots of visits to rock places (the geologic kind, not the music kind).

But back to then versus now. There was no PayPal. There WAS the ubiquitous feedback, but it wasn’t as detailed as it is today and it was really ONLY for the buyer to assess a seller (and vice versa), not a weapon for The Venue to control sellers’ behavior.

There were no Buy It Nows, no Stores. And for me, no pictures, although I did eventually figure out how to get my film digitized (thank you Seattle Filmworks), so if you could write cleverly, it was a powerful tool. I specialized in thorough descriptions with a large pinch of irreverence, often making light fun of the Thing I was selling.

It worked. I was in heaven. I sold records, CD’s, other commercial stuff I could replace through the store’s vendors and even sticks and rocks and found objects, and even the styrofoam packing peanuts some of my shipments were packed in.

Eventually, by 2001, my online sales outstripped my counter sales. I made that fateful decision: pack up the store and take it all home, which I did early in 2002.

From that point, things became a little less fun. Kind of serious, in fact, since the mortgage payment and grocery bill now relied strictly on those sales and my supply of record collections that USED to walk through the door weekly dried up.

Still, it worked, and I racked up around a thousand feed backs a year.

Things loped along until 2008. Then something terrible happened. Management at eBay changed. I had sold my house and moved three years prior to that because the bank was getting a little uptight about me and my late payments, and I had also launched my own site at the same time. Good thing too, because the new management (hired from Bain & Co), hated the “flea market”.

I have never figured out how he got the stockholders to embrace that concept, but he did. They began tightening down the screws. I had created an eBay Store, with some 750 items, mostly because they made it incredibly attractive to do that, but it didn’t take very long for them to create a buyer-vs-seller dichotomy. New rules upon rules became rampant, fee structures bounced around wildly, and by 2010, The Purge was in full swing. Whatever seemed broken to insiders at eBay was the sellers’ faults. I found myself violating rule after rule that I had never heard of, even though I never did (even to this day) anger any buyers badly enough to draw a “negative”. Well, yes, there WERE a couple of negatives, but they were from kooks and kids and I managed to get them removed.

By the Fall of 2010, it had become intolerable and I closed the store, moved it to my own site and never regretted that. I did continue to list, even to this day, because I had a partner feeding me antiques to sell and paying me a commission for those sales that I didn’t care to give up. But I stopped enjoying it-it had become a “business”, the thing I was trying to avoid. I was trying to have a good time.

It’s been love/hate since then. Even though us sellers are the scourge of the site, somehow endangering the executives’ multimillion dollar deals, I’ve continued, but these days I have to drag myself to the keyboard to do it. I’m not crazy; I don’t want to walk away from the money, which in reality is so far below poverty level that I qualify for all kinds of government assistance I don’t actually use.

It looks a LITTLE like they might lighten up a bit this year. Now those of us who sell “collectibles” have a new deal, and now we have SOME protection against rogue feed back which increased dramatically when sellers could only leave buyers one kind (good). I have long wondered why sellers can leave any feed back at all, and I’ll bet money by next January that they won’t be able to. That’s fine, it’s a pain to meticulously go in there and leave every trading partner the same thing. I’ve used canned feed back for years and years now, since it’s meaningless when it’s from seller.

eBay seemed so obsessed with becoming Amazon Junior that I’ve flirted with Amazon for several years now, cutting out the middleman. Amazon has never hard-assed me at all, except I can’t sell toys during Christmas time because I don’t have enough of a track record.

But my real love is my own site, saintstevensthingery.com. Too bad I’m not a better code writer, it’s not real flashy, but it does some business. And it doesn’t concentrate on commodity junk like both eBay and Amazon do. Personally more fulfilling.

I owe eBay a lot, mostly from eye-opening. It’s a bigger world out there than I had ever imagined. If Mason Proffit’s album never WAS particularly hard-to-find, it’s also true that Things mundane to American me are quite highly sought by International buyers. Today, since I’m actually retired, the money thing is not very important anymore, but the citizen-of-the-world thing is priceless.

I’ll probably continue at eBay, at least as long as my partner in antiques wants to, but at least for this horse, the carrot and stick technique just isn’t going to work anymore.

I didn’t even thoroughly read the August update, where they start punishing people for “defects” that drive buyers from THEIR site. Their site was not built by committees and lawyers, it was built by guys like me. They can have what it has become. I thought I ran away from that once anyway, when I bailed from the brick-and-mortar and the landlord.

Like Neil Young said in his album Greendale,

Got to get past
The negative thing
The lawyers and business
You get what you bring
No one’s sorry
You did it yourself
It’s time to relax now
And then give it hell





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)