Nothing funny about feldspar

So 47-and-a-half thousand people are retiring from GM and pseudo-GM. I realize that these people are spread out over the US (and Canada? I’m not sure), but that population is roughly half of the population of the city where I live.

It is three times the population of the city I lived in a dozen years ago.

What happens when you throw out retire a city full of people? Everyone who is concerned about their prospects a few years from now will hunker down — they’ll reconsider every major purchase (like houses and cars), they’ll slow down in their discretionary spending (no more eBay!), they might even stop going to the doctor for seemingly minor illnesses to save on co-pays.

Everyone who sees $30 to $100k as a windfall (i.e. something extra) will probably spend it on that boat they’ve always wanted… and then in a few years they will complain about the quality of their retirement, and the union that screwed them. (It’s seldom the company that screws ‘em — it’s the union and its duly elected leadership that made this awful agreement that forced retirement upon the masses.)

In the interim, skilled people “leave,” but are hired back on a temporary basis. The retiree administration office has to hire dozens of temp workers to process paperwork (and heaven help you if you ask one a question, because they just don’t know the answer). Heck, even the union has to hire more people to process their retiree paperwork.

So in effect, GM has exchanged it’s skilled manufacturing workforce for an unskilled paper-pushing one.

Let’s hope that the old saw “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” is no longer true. We can’t afford it.

I’ve been thinking about pain lately. Mine had more-or-less become intermittent, and after the PT and so on, it was becoming less frequent.

But when I hurt, I hurt pretty badly, and I’ve been hurting more often. I’m thinking it’s because I’m feeling better and so do more than I had been (like carrying laundry, or washing the dishes, or doing more than microwave cookery or even pulling weeds). I went to my back doctor, complaining that while I don’t take strong pain medicine very often, I don’t like how it makes me feel hungover.

So he gave me a scrip for a new med. I am not going to mention it here, because I’m tired of cleaning spam comments out of moderation.

Anyway, I looked it up at NIH, and I was struck by a couple of things. First, the blanket “Don’t take this if you’re allergic to it” statement was expanded to “Don’t take this if you’re allergic to it, or to anything even remotely like it, or corn.” Corn?! I thought wheat allergens were hard to avoid, but eliminating corn allergens must be even more difficult. (No wheat in cola, for instance, but lotsa corn syrup.)

The second thing: “This medicine works by decreasing the body’s sense of pain.” Is it pain if you can’t feel it?

I suppose it depends on what one means by pain. Physiologically, my back is probably still creating the “Pain! Pain!” alarm (I will keep imagining Spock + Horta, won’t I?), but the signal’s been muffled by the med. But if my brain doesn’t hear it, how can it be pain?

Much too philosophical for me at the moment…

Dear oracle of the ætherial communion,
O show me a sign!
Is it in my future to depart from the tried-and-true
To leave the best-in-my-region coverage
For the ability to download my own pictures without the additional sacrifice required by that avaricious provider?

If I do forswear the Big V, to whom will I turn? Which other will give me what I ask?
All I ask is unfettered access by the protocol of the King of Denmark,
And a device which will remain nearly ever-ready, at least for when I leave it in my pouch overnight. Truly I do not mean to starve it, but sometimes I forget.
And an automatic engraver! Oh, yes! A way to show the world that I am just as bad an engraver of portraits as everyone else!

No, I am not willing to pay for each minute! No!
No, I am not willing to pay for each message! No!
No, I am not willing to pay for each image! No!
No, I am not! I am quite a mean consumer, terrible to these encorporates as I decline to line their pockets with my gold.

I pay for my recalcitrance by required supplication to the wisdom of the internet, though there is scant wisdom there — only connections to shady characters with wares to flog.

What shall I do? What shall I do?

Sometimes you don’t really want to read the story, because the headline has imagery enough: Nude worm tempts World Cup fans

I’m trying to sell some books on Amazon — well, to be honest, I’m trying to sell a lot of books. Some belong to me and Plagioclase, some belong to my mom, some belong to Plagioclase’s mother, and some belong to friends.¹

So I have a lot of books. And having paid my monthly subscription fee, I have the right to upload listings in bulk. Amazon provides a simple spreadsheet with the required columns — I just fill in the ISBN or ASIN, my price, the condition, and a few other simple yes/no type questions, save it as a tab-delimited file, then upload that file to Amazon. Sounds pretty easy, and it is if I want to do say, 10 books at a time.

But I do them a box at a time — a box that’s about 1.5 cubic feet (12″ x 12″ x 18″), which usually holds a lot more than 10 books. Especially paperbacks, of which there are a ton². And each book has to have its condition described, because very few books I’m offering are new³.

This is where I slow waaaay down. Some sellers obviously just cut-and-paste from item to item (”May have a remainder mark. May have slight ding. May have come from a smoker’s house. May have some stray marks. May have…” you get the picture), but I can’t do that. I don’t appreciate buying from that kind of description, and since I want to avoid any possibilities of “Hey! You didn’t tell me that the cover was coffee-stained, so give me my money back!!” I’m very careful about noting possible flaws.

That said, I repeat myself alot. “Remainder mark. Ex-library, with usual markings. Owner’s name inside front cover. Age-toning througout.” There is enough variation from book to book, though that I can’t just cut-and-paste, because invariably I’d forget to edit the one listing that had the coffee-stain on the cover.

Given all this, I spent a few hours today trying to find some software to help me create this simple little tab-delimited file for Amazon. I thought I’d try looking through the various Mac-compatible book database programs, since they obviously can connect to Amazon, and several of them use an iSight to do barcode scanning⁴. I’d want the software to be able to track consignor property, and let me put in my own SKU⁵.

Well, here’s what I found.

• Delicious Library does a nice job with scanning the code and finding the product on Amazon. It even has a “sell your book on Amazon” menu item! However, it will only let you sell one item at a time, and didn’t have any apparent way of doing bulk uploads or of tracking consignors.
• Booxter does a reasonable job with scanning the code, but is more sensitive to the available light. It finds the title with little problem, but I find the interface to be quite hard to use. It might make a tab-delimited list, but I couldn’t figure out how to add consignors without adding several fields to the database. Not that that would be hard, but the detail page is already so cluttered I can’t seem to find anything.
• Bookpedia’s code-scanning is about like Booxter’s (I guess they use the same, or a similar, framework to accomplish it). It’s prettier than Booxter, but again, I couldn’t figure out how to export only the data I wanted. It allows four custom fields, so I would have to “repurpose” some of the others. If I wanted to have a catalog of my (non-sale) book collection, I would look again at this program, because, among other things, it will search the LoC based on title.

I wasn’t happy with any of the book-cataloging programs, so now what? I dunno. I suppose I should just bite the bullet and write my own little app⁶. It’s not complicated, and I probably could do it in a couple of hours in Filemaker, but I’m tired of using Filemaker and its proprietary format when I have MySQL installed, as well as SQLite. I could, with more effort, develop an Excel macro form-filler, but I hate trying to develop Excel interfaces.

So instead of doing anything, I’ll just tell you about it, in hopes that inspiration will strike.

Well, it hasn’t yet…

1. This is not an advertisement, by the way, because I’m not linking to my storefront, and you can’t find it by searching for any of the “-clase” names.↩
2. notwithstanding the cheap light paper used to print them, they pack together really efficiently↩
3. or even “like new” which is a fraught term by itself↩
4. so I don’t have to type in ISBNs for those books that have a barcode — fewer errors↩
5. it includes code telling me where the item is stored — handy when it comes for fulfillment↩
6. ”write” in the sense of “use some other program’s functionality to get what I want” not “create something with programming from scratch”↩