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.

And then they changed the water

It’s been stormy around here lately and maybe a week ago or so the power got interrupted for a second and my old computer went down. That was the Mac G3 my son “loaned” me in 2002 after my junk computer of that day died protesting the paces I wanted to put it through.

They don’t last forever.

Blue really took a beating. When the power went down the other night Blue was over nine years old in my possession, under constant usage and sometimes a little confounded by my requests. The Internet is advancing, Blue’s Operating System was generating lots of warnings almost everywhere: Steve, you’d GOT to upgrade something. Blue had a hard time coming back on that night, and I thought, uh oh, what if………..but it DID come back on and that leads up to the lightning storm of two nights ago.

I thought, THIS time, let’s power off the computer the way it’s supposed to, and go downstairs and sort stuff until the end of the storm, which I did. In fact, I added “watch some television” to that program and didn’t check the computer again until the next morning.

This time Blue was NOT waking up, and I tried every trick I know how to try, and it could be such a thing that it’s as simple as needing a new on/off button I suppose, but the machine just is not today’s machine for (especially) somebody trying to mismanage a business the way I am.

I should mention that Blue’s a Mac.

Uptown I go. I’ve seen a vehicle with advertising: The Computer Shop, which turns out to be Drew and Deb across the street from where Rainy Day Music operated from 1991-1994. Cosmic, I always liked that spot, I bought some Pakistani stuff there once in the mid-seventies that I’ve since given to my daughter.

They have sort of an Adequate Laptop deal for $300.00. I don’t have $300.00, and even if I did, my brakes on my van are destroying themselves and I must fix them. But they ALSO have a $100 Old HP Computer With Free Monitor deal.

Hmmmmmmm.

If it’ll somehow connect me to the Internet, and also edit photos, as far as I’m concerned, that’s worth a hundred dollars a day on half a good day.

I walk out with that. It does what they say it’ll do, and unfortunately, it doesn’t want to install my printer, so this is not a permanent solution but it beats the hell out of the 30 minutes you can spend at the library (that used to be an hour in ’99 when that’s how I DID all this without a computer at all).

The monitor scared the hell out of me, but we got that switched around and I can see colors about the way I know I left them, and a day later, I have in fact launched one listing at eBay just to prove I can do it.

Learning the vagaries of a new machine, a new operating system, new software, new everything on-the-fly has been a giggle. And I’m not sure how I’m going to edit my site yet, there is one hurdle there that I don’t remember how I solved it even when I HAD FTP and text editing software, but fortunately I do know my own code, and if I have to I’ll just do it from a control panel one page at a time like I also did once-upon-a-time.

Some days, my Dad has always told me, “you eat the bear” and some days “the bear eats you”. I’m not sure I ever completely understood that, but today I ate tater tots and chicken nuggets because I didn’t have any Super Burrito budget left.

I should be grateful I can still operate though, and at least my new modern browser solves a few problems that were driving me batty, right after I remember those places’ passwords and convince them that yes, that’s right…..I’m a different computer now………….yes, I remember my next-door neighbor’s middle name………







Don’t forget to ship your item

Don’t forget to ship your item! Based on the handling time you selected, your buyer is expecting you to ship this within 3 business day(s) from when you received payment.

Ensure buyer satisfaction, and protect your feedback score by following the steps below.

eBay started mentioning that a few weeks ago. Sellers can specify their intended handling time and I’ve had mine set at 2 days for as long as you could do that. I usually ship in one day but I don’t want to promise to do it.

Then I got stuck for some reason and let one slip past the two days and blip! a little note from eBay-don’t forget to ship your item.

Since I don’t like them looking over my shoulder, I changed my handling time to three days.

Along comes the Canadian postal strike. I ask a Canadian customer if I should ship their purchase into the strike, they say no, wait, let’s see what happens here.

Blip! Don’t forget to ship your item………………..

I’m not going to forget-the buyers punish that. My “stars” say I don’t forget. But now eBay is hands-on about it.

Ok, fine. If eBay monitors handling time anyway, do this-take away the distraction of making the buyers rate that star. If it goes out on time, five stars. If it doesn’t, some formula.

Nobody likes those things anyway-they’re arbitrary, without definition, and annoying to both users. Only eBay cares about them.







John Prine Iris Dement SUX 6/15/11

Tom and I attended John Prine’s performance at The Orpheum, Sioux City, Iowa, last night. Iris Dement shared much of the night, opening with about ten tunes solo on the piano and at various times with Prine, including the encore.

I came away with two immediate thoughts: Prine somehow reminded me of George Gobel, and I really should have caught on by now that Dement is and has been a resident of Iowa for some time now.

I’ve never been to a show at that venue, and maybe it’s customary there, but I thought the crowd was a little tame. Judging by the kind of surprised laughter much of his funny stuff evoked, I’m guessing there were a number of attendees who were not necessarily his “devout”.

That first album was 40 years ago; maybe his “devout” aren’t that mobile anymore (shudder).

I had a wonderful time, it’s a great venue, the sound was adequate (I would have tolerated louder), and all the performers turned in a solid night, albeit without “Illegal Smile”, or something maybe from Common Sense, and without the audience bursting into much sing-along, but I had several transcendental moments, notably during Angel From Montgomery, a song that has always “gotten me”, during which Jason Wilber’s guitar playing was positively sublime, throwing me into a brief Nils Lofgren moment from years ago……

Sioux City (known locally as SUX) is trying to cope with flooding and it’s hard to say for me whether that somehow impacted attendance, but the show wasn’t sold out, and that’s kind of surprising. Prine thanked the audience a couple of times for coming out on a Wednesday night and I wonder if that isn’t a nice way of saying gee, I notice there are rows of empty seats in the back…..

and maybe that has something to do with the part where tickets are sixty dollars. I wouldn’t begrudge the economics of that, but I also wouldn’t have been sitting in the seat if Tom hadn’t bankrolled the operation, so I need to express special appreciation for that.

It was a beautiful night for a drive, even through a couple of wrong Sioux City neighborhoods on the way out, and another successful event for the Rainy Day Music team of the 21st century.







Inside Glimpse Powerselling Insanity

There was a time I thought this stuff was for eBay boards, but now I just call it transparency and post it here.

I was rushed today, had a lot on my mind, aspirations of doing more than I could accomplish. And a pretty good-sized stack of postal shipments to handle, including three oil lamps which can be quite labor intensive when it comes to packing.

I’ve been running two IDs at eBay and both IDs had sales, so I needed to “administrate” a little, making sure I had orders printed out for each. That’s where things started to unravel. The newer ID has been offering airline timetables from 1967-1969, a custom project, and that’s been pretty successful, generating some repeat orders from buyers and multiple purchases from buyers to combine for shipping.

I got some of that flipped around and wound up convincing myself I needed to include a third timetable in a package of two when that wasn’t the case, shooting out into the wilderness twenty dollars worth of Thing that wasn’t mine in the first place. That’s one of those first rules of survival: don’t do that.

I’ve contacted both those buyers of course, and have no reason to believe we can’t straighten it out without anybody getting mad, and I’ve done the same thing before once. In over eleven thousand transactions. I really try not to. So I beat myself up. Oh no, I should probably refund the guy I’ve shorted, at least until I know I can fix it, but I just spent all the money on the day’s postage and my monthly payment to my ISP and that isn’t going to work too well. I manage to drop everything I’m doing while I fret.

In the meantime, downstairs is a very nice Cross Classic Black ball pen I stumbled upon at Goodwill. I don’t source at Goodwill, but I do buy candles there (yes, I spend money on stuff to light on fire). I glanced in a case standing in line at the checkout and there it was: a Cross box.

My brother bought me a Cross pen for my high school graduation. It was a silver one, with a gnurled (sp?) grip that was later discontinued, and when I sent it in for repair at one time they sent back the “carcass” because it was discontinued with a new pen as its replacement. He had popped for having my name engraved on it, and I was just impressed to death by the entire act.

So, I’ve collected and used Cross pens ever since the early 70s, rarely go anywhere without one clipped to me (present “traveling” model is a gold one with Firestone engraving), and keep one at my computer (silver), and one at my packing bench (classic black) and one upstairs in the loft with my tax junk (another gold one I think), and then I have a standard brass pencil holder with the rest of them: a rollerball pen, several pencils, a couple of other stand-by pens……

The Cross Classic Black is worth about twenty bucks if you hold your mouth right, as my dad used to say, or sometimes it’s worth five bucks when people price them like that and they go overlooked (it’s quite possible to day-trade Cross’s at eBay and I have).

So I think I’ll have another mini-drama: should I keep it because it’s one of my favorite styles or should I sell it because I never seem to stop needing twenty bucks?

Shouldn’t those two mini-dramas cancel each other out?







Today Is My 12th Anniversary At eBay

I registered at eBay twelve years ago today, originally as a buyer. I found I could cherry pick The Venue and stock my store with records that really weren’t as expensive as everybody thought they were.

I became a seller after I thought one day: hey, I can do that.

The rest of course is history, and it became my permanent gig.

I would like to thank The Little People, whom I occasionally see in action from afar:

The Ex Landlord
My Ex’s Attorneys
The Accountants
The Physician’s Group
The Utility Companies
The Law Enforcement
The Credit Mongers
The Thieves
The Rules Which eBay Writes On The Fly
The World Economy
The News







Ray Manzarek, Roy Rogers Pearson Lakes Art Center April 19, 2011

Pearson Lakes Art Center, April 19, 2011: Ray Manzarek And Roy Rogers

My concert-going buddy of some 24 years called me a couple of months ago and suggested we attend this event at this venue which is maybe 60-70 miles north of me. Book lecture at 4:00, performance at 7:30, sort of a different kind of format, but especially since I can, and my partner Tom could, we made it to both with ease, despite the strange snow we had earlier today.

Lots of things went through my head. The Pearson Lakes Art Center is a small venue, and there was plenty of meet-and-greet time for everyone. As has actually been my custom now for a decade and a half, I didn’t ingest any stuff that made me forget anything and I remember too much. There was enough media there that I’d like to anxiously await somebody else’s review, but in the meantime I need to catch some thoughts.

Ray strode into the lecture refusing to lecture. He said “you better start asking questions or I’m going to talk about LSD” with a grin. I instantly called out a question: “talk about LSD please”, but it soon proved more popular of course to talk about his days in The Doors. I wish I would have counted the attendees, that was quite doable, but now I’ll have to estimate there were no more than 50-75 people in attendance. We were free to take pictures and collect autographs. I collected my autographs on my ticket and on my original Doors self-titled album I bought from the Columbia Record Club and subsequently took to college in 1969, neatly writing STEVE in block letters on the label so my record wouldn’t get mixed up with my roommate Findlay’s.

I’ve kicked myself ever since because we do not write on our records if we are serious collectors and the cover got damaged in small wet basement incident right after we moved into Royal in or shortly after 1984. But now that record is signed by both myself and Ray Manzarek. It’s “repurposed”. That’s what I do.

As many in the room posed for photos, the conversation continued, and when it became my turn I said “really, talk about LSD”, and Ray said “it certainly opened the doors of perception” (a reference to how they selected their name from an Aldous Huxley book which mentions a line from a William Blake poem). I’ll bet he gets reasonably sick of that crap, but he was very gracious about it.

When I sensed we could ask more than one question, I asked him about Dave Diamond, who apparently is mentioned in Manzarek’s Life With The Doors book. Dave lived down the street from where I am now and taught at Buena Vista College (now University) at the time. I met him through Rainy Day Music’s fledgling #2 store here, and fell in with him and a group of reasonably serious whiskey drinkers for quite a length of time. Dave and I spent one memorable night lying to each other about stuff in an uptown bar that resulted in my relocation to a ditch north of town in the middle of the winter, to be rescued by a state trooper who let me go even though I obviously barely knew where or who I was. I’ve always been grateful about that.

Anyway, Dave had some Doors stories, and when I asked Manzarek, he said “oh yes, he IS the guy who insisted Light My Fire was a hit. Wow. Small world. The book lecture was a great success even though they ran out of books very quickly.

Did he and Roy Rogers PLAY Light My Fire? No. They did play “Love Me Two Times”, “King Snake”, and an interesting instrumental version of “Crystal Ship”, but they also did play some stuff from their upcoming album “Translucent Blues” as well as some Miles Davis and several other jazz numbers. They also seemed to compose “Okoboji Blues” on the spot, although I suppose the song could have been a template that you could stick any name into.

I don’t get out very often. It’s amazing how small the world is getting-I’ll bet I recognized about half the crowd, and as been happening now for ten years, I also renewed several old acquaintances from the store.

From the middle of the fourth row, allowed to take photos, I was possibly ready for something just slightly more intense than I got during the performance. The format included several pauses for question from the audience, and those were fun, but I didn’t get to watch these guys really delve into any of those deep hour-long sessions that develop at many concerts I go to.

They knew that though, and Manzarek in particular has a wonderfully developed sense of humor and after joking about the LSD thing again, he did mention that dosing really didn’t turn out to be the answer either if you looked at it like Charlie Manson did.

He and Rogers semi-promised to come back to the area again in the Fall, this time with a full rock band. If they do that, I humbly suggest it’s a must-see.

This event was recorded by Mediacom. Apparently, according to the Mediacom guy, it’ll probably show up in their channel 22 programming (?) in the next couple of weeks. See: http://www.mc22.net/

Wish I would have remembered to keep a set list, but I didn’t.







No Thanks Omaha, Thanks A Lot

Yesterday, I got one of those scripted calls sellers get when eBay raises prices.

I was busy working on my accursed income tax reporting, and didn’t want to give them the time, but I knew the call would be reasonably short because these scripted ones don’t allow any time for me to say BUT…………so I listened.

You should start a store. You should offer free shipping. Buyers really love free shipping. If you had a store and free shipping you’d be almost back to where you were two years ago.

Twice.

Yeah. I HAD a store. They started telling me I should have a store the day after I closed it because I was utterly sick of complying with nearly incomprehensible rules about selling toy cap guns and other intrusions like multiplying my listing costs by six times and calling it a price reduction.

The Detailed Seller Ratings were going to accomplish all the goals of chasing away the bad sellers and I came through that phase pretty well, I like to think. I often get pretty good Best Match results.

Now those ratings (which translate directly into money every month) aren’t enough-The Venue is just going to end the controversy over sellers hiding part (or all) of their income basically under “and handling” (or, if you’re from England, “and p”).

In order to flourish, I am told, I should calculate my best guess at what postage would be to send my Things to the farthest points in the US for domestic shipping, and add this to my starting prices. That won’t save me fees on shipping which eBay will charge one way or another for a service they didn’t even provide, but it MIGHT save me some if buyers in the US either ask me to overnight them stuff (I have over 15000 sales at eBay probably and I have served that request exactly once), or it MIGHT save me some fees if the buyer is International.

Of course that International buyer (a third of my business) is now looking at higher starting prices, and it’s lost upon me how he or she gets enthusiastic about that.

To compensate me for this grief it is suggested: a.) I should raise my prices, and b.) I will see some lowered Final Value Fees, which vary by product, and to date, I cannot find so I can plan some stuff.

And, of course, if I follow all these instructions, I get a nice discount as a Powerseller on my Final Value Fees, but I already AM a powerseller getting the discount and that represents no change.

My real personal assessment at this point is that “they” have gone stark-raving mad.

I pride myself at developing good work-arounds. I’ll figure out these adjustments, but this time it looks like I can’t project the changes, I just have to ride through them and study them as I go. For example, another “compensation” to sellers is that they get 50 Free Listings a month (as long as they don’t own a store), at any starting price. Yes, that’s nice, but they were giving away 100 free listings a month in October, November, December and part of January. This is a reduction in that gesture.

My solution will be to run two ID’s, rather than open the store as the script recommends. Whether that will justify the additional bookwork generated by running two ID’s remains to be seen.

The one thing I will NOT be doing any time soon is slugging in another 750 Things to the endless cycle of guess-what-our-billing’s-going-to-be-this-year. All of my stuff is hand-crafted; I don’t use any third party software to do bulk listings, nor do I do big file transfers, and it’s really unfunny when the landlord comes along and says “oh, you need to add another attribute to everything that we’re not going to pay attention to for two years”. It can take me MONTHS to cycle through a typical list making the dinkiest little changes.

So, as I go about my day’s business, I now think of myself coming from here, even though my volume is in its infancy, and planning brief little campaigns at eBay and getting really good at exactly what they’ve always worked so hard there to discourage: using that platform as a signpost to my own place.

Landlords

My story is basically that I took a brick and mortar store from an alley in an Iowa county seat town of around ten thousand to the Internet. I was thinking at the time it’d probably be lucrative to change to a pay-as-you-go venue where I could reach the world.

It wasn’t like I didn’t test the theory. I overlapped the venues from 1999 to 2002. I compared.

The brick and mortar landlord’s roof was leaking, his light fixtures were fizzling out, he was mad about how much the improvements in the alley cost him (since he owned the entire block), and he had raised the rent exactly one year after he personally promised never to do that.

I was right. I reached the world, they paid better prices than the locals, and the new landlord only charged me money when something happened.

I overlooked something though.

The guy who wasn’t fixing the leaky roof was satisfied with the same amount of money every month. If my business got really good, there was a point where I DIDN’T have to pay as I went. It wasn’t trending that way-business was not particularly good after MusicLand swiped eighty per cent of it, but there was still that incentive to meet “fixed overhead” and then flourish.

At the dotcoms that point never arrives, at least at the venues I’ve found to be viable. Except of course at my own.

I think that probably means something.