One year ago today: September 14, 2023, wrong-think.
Five years ago today: September 14, 2019, a generic day.
Nine years ago today: September 14, 2015, one of my heroes.
Random years ago today: September 14, 2012, northeast of Denver.
I still cannot get over that blog coincidence from yesterday. Exactly one year that the PA acted up and I checked it out. Then it conked out, and I checked it again. Only a day later (today) do I discover both days were September 13. This happens a freakish number of times on this blog. I do not believe in coincidence and I have no explanation for this phenomenon.
This morning you get a nice lecture on the realities of dealing with eBay. Even if you already put up with their arthritic system, this is still a good read before you go further with it. This morning I listed 800 tubes in two hours. There are some conditions and tradeoffs I’ll mention. Listing these tubes separately would require, non-stop, over 250 hours, not including the pictures. And I chose no pictures, figuring most people in our target clientele alread know what a tube looks like. I uploaded six tables which took time as I was wrestling with the eBay template all too often. How about I throw in a couple pictures here to liven up this droll topic? Here is a brute of an airplane engine.
The eBay search is another challenge. I can’t name the tables consistently or it will reject duplicates; I ran tests to discover the eBay algorithm only compares the 16 left-most characters in the allowable field of 80. So I reversed the order of the titles so anything repetitious is to the right. However, eBay uses the Google engine so all 80 characters can get involved. I stopped at loading six tables because if I ran into any snags, that is the amount of work I am willing to repeat if need be. I have most of my own templates made up, the total number of tables is less than 15 unless I change something.
Other items of note, you can bypass many of the eBay edit restrictions by word processing your copy and pasting it into their box. If you like HTML, eBay seems to have deprecated only the current tags they don’t like. Try using a list from their early days, say 2005, before you give up. I was able to use a few that still worked, but pardon if I don’t tell you which. That brings up the last consideration for me of this morning. Copycatism.
Back to the listings. Can this method be copied? Yes, but not very easily and that was part of my goal. I’ve been uber-conscious of duplication since the early days. You can put hundreds of hours to create a unique system and somebody copies and pastes it. That is not going to work on my tables, I’ll tell you one of the reasons, but there are more.
The tables will not self-collapse. What? Okay, suppose you create a table with 100 cells. This takes up several inches of display space. Then you try to copy it and past a smaller table. Oops, the other cells are still there, they are blank, and they will not delete. Now the bottom of your listing is off the bottom of the display. I pity the egghead who thinks he will just cut and paste each cell, that is many times more work than the tubes are worth. True, anybody like myself who read the HTML book in 1996 will be able to fix this, but from what I’ve seen, most people on eBay have not read that or any other book in quite some time.
This is taking a chance, as I have no input about any reaction from eBay. It’s a question of brain-power and I doubt there is anyone at eBay who would spot this unless given a reason. Even then, would they care? I held back on a few features I would have liked, since I don’t really want anybody over there figuring out their code is being probed. I emphasize the tables are already prepared before they are displayed and this is a huge factor in my favor. I can change the tables easily. For example, one thing they cannot see is that all the current tubes listed are those which wholesale for the lowest price fof $3.
There is no other practical way to list these tubes for sale and there is still plenty of work involved. Best case scenario—that these tables are so superior to what else is out there that the top fifty purchasing outfits learn to check our listings first. I reviewed the seller that has the drop down list and concluded that must be one bitch of a system to update. I’ve used that system before and I hated it. My tables avoid the need to be on-line to edit the sales.
By noon I have 800 of the tubes listed. Compare with 239 listings in the previous six months. Mind you, those were individual listings with photos. These are bulk listings with no photos. The driver is that we can have up to 250 listings without paying eBay their ransom. The plan is I will systematically go through the existing links. The 50 or 60 most expensive tubes will retain their private listings. This leaves approximately 180 other listings available. The invisible part is that I know which are the most common tubes from other sources like the antique radio clubs.
Those 180 listings will have the tubes most sought. When anyone does a successful search and lands on one of those tubes, he is also presented with a table of all other tubes of that brand and a list of links to tubes of any other brand we have listed. My testing shows using these easy-to-read tables are many times faster to scan than using the ponderous eBay search function. This is major encouragement for anyone searching to “look here first”, then bother with the others only if we don’t have it. This system is not perfect, but so what? By end of this week, some 2,000 tubes will be listed. This buries a lot of the small operators but that, folks, is how capitalism works.
Port Harris, Chile.
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This afternoon, you get two pictures that tell a tale from the trailer court that is roughly fifty years old. You know I lament not being able to take shop classes when I was in high school. It meant for all my highest marks, I still had to start at the bottom as an unskilled laborer every summer. I can report today, it did not do my health any good. The connection is Mitch, few people know directly how that situation, job-wise, cut me off at the knees. These are photos he sent of a fence and a deck he built by himself.
What’s this noise on-line, something about Trump again? Video of him standing there. I crank the sound as he’s talking about gifts he’s received from the family that Walz guy, during which he sarcastically refers to him as Vice-President, as if. There you have it, the desperate Democrats have clipped and released the video under the caption Trump is already admitting defeat. Them Democrats have really got a panic happening.
Since there was nothing else to miss out on (there, I finally said it), I grabbed my scribbler and went to both the Legion and downtown. A little Karaoke and a look around. Nothing. Five people at the Legion and a host of strangers elsewhere. Ran into a lot of people not seen in a while. Put on a great show to a small crowd. Wisely, I took along that scribbler. Instead of wasting the evening, I did some hard thinking about those eBay tables.
The impetus is to have one large table where buyers can look up anything. The existed tables are not in that format. But they can be made into that format as long as one blurs the line between flat file and relational [databases]. That is, the table that works as far as we know, which is a list of tubes regardless of brand, is the best match. I’m thinking.
I then zipped over to the old club to check on Wilford. If the guy could only pick one or two things and focus, but who am I to talk? I need him to get me that acoustic bass. Cathy & U did our locally-acclaimed version of “Jackson”. The whole evening cost me just $14, as I have a fan club. I just can’t stick around as much as I used to. Take a mini-break and gander at this photo of the Mitch fence. He painted that and it looks better than the fence I made in Tennessee. As for the shadow, I said he took shop, not photography.
My purpose for getting out tonight was to do some thinking on the tables. Where else to do some clear plotting than a crowded noisy night club. You know how that works? I grew up developing and incredible ability to tune out that brand of environment. So in that space, if I want to think, I am forced to blot out the riff-raff, and that should make sense put that way. Conclusion. The sorting by brand name was not the best way to inventory the tubes. Buyers rarely look for brand names first. What to do?
First, we will look at how others with multi-tube listings dealt with this. Mostly, they failed, but it is how they failed that I’m after. Other trials here show that buyers look for the tube, then the price, and then maybe the brand. My tables cannot be changed to that format and still sort properly, along with other considerations. Ah, but take heart. I’m reminded of the class quip by Hilaire Beloc, “No matter what happens, we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not.” I’ll connect that to what I’m doing. It’s logistics that I actually have. The Maxim gun is just my example.
Yes, the gun can do a lot of damage, BUT. They often don’t tell you the rest. The gun is only really effective when it is properly placed in advance, with a trained crew of five men. You need several guns to create crossed fields of fire, since the Maxim can only swivel an arc on its tripod. Two men are needed to carry the apparatus and another two hauling the belts of ammo. When situated, they must take up positions on either side with rifles to pick off any outflankers and the firing must be timed so several guns don’t stop to change belts or barrels at the same time. The field of fire must be clear and visible out to 500 yards.
Where I’m going is that it is not the possession of a superior entity, but how that is used and that is logistics. I need better database logistics. The Maxim gun was used against opponents who lacked any modern sophistication. So, is the answer that I become more sophisticated than the current eBay competition? Give me the weekend to polish that idea. I’m very aware of how often that four of the five men on a Maxim were killed, but the last guy, as long as he could hold that trigger, still held the field.
Food. Tomorrow we are have rice & ribs for brunch. That fulfils the blog food-mention quota and did I just make up a word? “Outflankers.”
