Scaling Down, Moving Day

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Dave031611

Japanese movers are a phenomenon. We have had several experiences with Japanese movers. When Tomoko and I married, Japanese movers packed, wrapped, and shipped everything from her seemingly microscopic apartment to the United States. The tiny apartment yielded forty meticulously wrapped and packed boxes of stuff.

When we went on assignment to Japan (twice) we got to enjoy the services of Japanese movers again in both directions.

Japanese movers are wonderful. They are also really expensive,.

American Moving - Two Guys and a Truck

American Moving – Two Guys and a Truck

About two weeks ago, we were finally ready to move out of our house and into an apartment. For this move, we got to enjoy state-of-the-art American moving services, otherwise known as “Two Guys and a Truck”

We did all the packing ourselves. In fact, we were up until about 2AM the night before packing stuff. The two guys and their truck arrived at 9AM. They moved everything out of both levels of our house and moved stuff to three different places and were done by around 3PM.

Thirty years ago, American moving services were a lot like Japanese moving services. Big companies. Big trucks. Large crews. Special padding and wrapping everywhere. What has happened since then is straight out of the economics textbook.

  1. Technology Innovation – First, someone figured out how to use a heavy-duty pickup truck rather than a tractor trailer rig. That dropped the price of the equipment drastically.
  2. Service Industry Standard Problem – What the guys who moved us told us was almost a direct quote from our lectures on the problems of services business at the University of Texas MBA program:  After a little while, the workers in a service industry figure out what the end customer price is and begin wondering why they need their boss in the picture as a middleman.
  3. Darwinian Economics – With the internet making it almost free to advertise this sort of service and no barriers to entry, the price drops like a rock. Eventually, the scenario evolves to the most economically efficient configuration and that is exactly two very strong, very athletic guys who move very, very quickly and one truck.

Our move, including the service and all materials cost less than $1000. If we had spent more time negotiating bids, (we were in a hurry) we probably could have got the entire thing done for around $700.

The Floorspace Compression Challenge

The Floorspace Compression Challenge

The move was further complicated by the scale-down/compression challenge.

The Austin apartment market is quite tight at the moment. We found a really nice apartment in a really nice complex, but that particular unit will not be available until mid-July. As a result, we were forced to move into a much smaller unit as an interim step. One saving grace is that this complex has garage units that you can rent for $100 per month. We were able to get the garage unit underneath our intended final apartment. That extra garage unit is a life-saver. We were able to use it to temporarily store some of the furniture for the final apartment, furniture that we will eventually move to our office, and most of the almost 100 boxes of stuff that came out of our house. Using this garage as a base, over the next year or so, we will be able to gradually work our way through the excess stuff, sorting, condensing, and discarding stuff to get down to our final target.

Three of Four Color Tags

Three of Four Color Tags

Even with the garage, however, we still had to get rid of a lot of furniture. I made several hundred tags in four colors:

  • Yellow – Moving to our apartment.
  • Green – Staying in the house (after coordination with the buyers)
  • Orange – Moving to our garage unit
  • Pink – Discard or recycle

It was a ton of work, but with the help of the two guys and their truck we got everything to its proper destination in one day.

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged | Leave a comment

Game Day at Asatte Press

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Dave031611

We spent Monday afternoon at Asatte Press playing games with our Spring 2013 interns.

No, we weren’t just goofing off. Asatte Press is now working on its first mobile game/training app for iOS. We have been very lucky to onboard an intern named Alex Hernandez who graduated from Full Sail University with a specialized degree in game software design and he has been working on a more formal design process. The first step in most software game design efforts is to prototype the game with paper and cardboard and test it to see whether it is fun to play or not.

Game Objectives

This game is actually the first of several concepts we are pursuing. All of our games are learning oriented with an eye to assisting the oil industry with its current training challenges.

This cocktail party game focuses on the problem of transferring historical knowledge from an older generation of workers to an incoming younger generation. The oil industry refers to this problem as the “Crew Change”. The game sets up a mildly competitive test in which the younger workers vie to show mastery of historical information in several different subject areas. During testing we actually discovered by accident that the most effective way to play this game is to have the older worker (me in this case) be the moderator and let the younger workers compete against each other. Done properly, this setup allows the older worker to jump in and explain the peculiar background behind some of the seemingly obscure “trivia” questions.

Initial Design of the Game Board

The game board is in the form of a gear with 8 spokes and a trail of colored mini-gears tracing the circumference,

Initial Game Board Design

Since we don’t yet have an adequate base of knowledge for the oil industry, we decided to base our game instead on the knowledge base encapsulated in our Systematic Martini Lifestyle book.

We decided to implement the prototype game as a around-the-board game similar to Monopoly or Parcheesi. We chose a gear motif to match our Systematic Logo. Tomoko created the board using the Inkscape Scalable Graphic Editor and partitioned it into four pieces which we printed on 11″x17″ paper using our large format Epson printer. Cutting and pasting these together, we were able to come up with a reasonably sized playing board.

Initial Rules of Play

The board has five colors of tip cards as well as some plastic figures.

Prototype Board

We used the Systematic Martini Lifestyle tips developed by our Summer 2013 interns as the knowledge base. We divided the tips into five categories:

  1. Red = Wine
  2. Orange = Food
  3. Yellow = Utensils
  4. Green = Liquor
  5. Blue = Clothing

The tip database includes difficulty levels from 1 (easy) to 4 (difficult). However, for the initial test we did not differentiate and instead used all the tips together.

Tomoko went to the hobby store and found some small plastic players to use as avatars during the game.

The initial playing/scoring approach was as follows:

  1. Each player selects a plastic piece.
  2. Each player places his/her plastic piece on the red gear on one of the spokes of the larger gear.
  3. Players take turns rolling a single six-sided die.
  4. Each player moves forward clockwise around the outer path of small gears according to the roll of the die.
  5. When the player lands on a small gear, the color of the gear determines which category of question will be asked. White is a pass (no question).
  6. Each question is multiple choice with four answers, only one of which is correct.
  7. The first player to have one correct answer in all five categories wins.

Results of Play Testing

Score Sheet from 4/28

Score Sheet from 4/28

We actually did two rounds of testing, one on Sunday 4/27 and one on Monday 4/28.

During the initial game on Sunday, we started out with me as one of the players. However, part way through the game, a late guest arrived and we had her take over my position. Before she arrived, we had been taking turns reading the questions to each other. After she arrived, we switched to me being the master of ceremonies as shown in the video clip. We discovered that this arrangement enhanced both the play (making it a little more festive) and the education factor, in that it created natural opportunities to explain the quirky back stories behind the tips.

Another change between day 1 and day 2 is that we switched to from playing for 3 correct in each category to only playing for 1 correct in each category. This change shortened the play time to about 35 minutes for 5 players. It also created an interesting dynamic towards the end of the game in which players had to pass a lot, because they had already finished the color they landed on. This forced passing in turn enabled lagging players to catch up. This game dynamic is not unusual, a lot of games play this way and we have decided for the moment that this dynamic is a positive feature.

What’s Next

We are going to go ahead and implement this game for iOS and probably for Android too. Although the style and game play approach is different from the prototype we used last summer, we will be able to reused the Google App Engine design that our Summer 2012 interns did in Java (on the Google App Engine) and Objective C (on IOS). After we release this as a “Cocktail Party” game for the general public, we will start pursuing opportunities to customize it to specific knowledge domains for the oil industry.

Posted in Education, Entertainment, Starting a Company | Tagged | Leave a comment

Scaling Down, House Goes on the Market

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Dave031611
For Sale Sign Posted

For Sale Sign Posted

Actually, our house has been on the market for a little more than three weeks now. Besides doing the processing to put the house into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) database, the other key initial service of the seller’s agent is to provide a sign. In our case, the positioning of the sign is a bit tricky. The sidewalk in front of our house is actually city property – you can’t place a sign on city property. Directly on the edge of the sidewalk is a rock wall that drops about four feet to our grass. If you put the sign on our grass, no one will see it.

We ended up putting the sign at the end of our driveway. That position is legal. However, the way our lot is laid out, the sign is closest to a piece of greenbelt that we own. The greenbelt is part of our lot and is not buildable. However, the sign position looks a little like it is an advertisement for a vacant lot.

Oh well.

Picture of Electronic Real Estate Lock Box

Electronic Real Estate Lock Box

In any event, the major advertising channel these days is actually the internet. The agent lists the house on MLS. MLS automatically pushes the key information out to publicly visible websites like Zillow.com.

The actual showing procedure is quite interesting and seems to have evolved tremendously in recent years. The first step is that you give your real estate agent a key to the house. The real estate agent places the door key into a wireless electronic lock box like the one shown above. Once the key is loaded into the lock box, the box is locked onto your front door handle.

Picture of Electronic Lock Box in Place

Electronic Lock Box in Place

Now everything proceeds rather automatically.

  1. Potential customers and/or their agents identify your house as one they would like to look at.
  2. The buyer’s agent calls your phone and lets you know when they will be arriving. Usually, they give you a day’s warning. Sometimes, however, it is only 15-20 minutes.
  3. You don’t answer the call. In our case, Vonage records the message from the agent and forwards it to my e-mail. That mechanism is handy because it gives me an electronic record in the form of the e-mail and its attached WAV file.
  4. You have to maintain your house in a state of bizarre artificial cleanliness at all times. No objects on horizontal surfaces. No visible trash cans. No magazines or newspapers. Your house has to look like it is inhabited by a species of sterile Martians that levitate above the floor emitting only oxygen.
  5. Neither you nor your real estate agent is supposed to be present. In other words, if you are at home when the phone rings, you need to frantically remove all evidence of human presence and depart immediately.
  6. When the potential customer arrives with the buyer’s real estate agent, the agent uses a special electronic key fob to open the lock box and retrieve the door key.
  7. The buyer and the buyer’s agent now tour your house and decide whether your house looks like the pictures they have been viewing on Pinterest.
  8. On the way out, the buyer’s agent locks up the house and returns the key to the lock box.

In theory, the buyer’s agent is supposed to fill out an electronic form giving you feedback about what the potential customer thought. In practice, less than one in ten does so. We have received only two such feedback forms so far, one of which let us know that the utility closet upstairs where our clothes washer and dryer are installed was Pinterest-challenged. Fortunately, as mentioned in a previous post, Tomoko is a master of Zendo (繕道), the Japanese art of small cosmetic repairs. She spent the next several days shuttling back and forth to Home Depot and carefully painting the interior of the washer/dryer utility closet to bring the closet up to Pinterest standards.

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Scaling Down, Hauling Away the Junk

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Dave031611
Picture of Left Over Junk

Left Over Junk

After all the garage sales, sorting, boxing, moving stuff to storage, and giving stuff away was done, there was a remaining pile of stuff which just would not easily go in the garbage can. The crude wooden shelf served faithfully in our garage for twenty-two years holdings soap and towels next to our sink. I built it out of some leftover shelving we purchased in Japan during our first overseas assignment in 1988. There was also the matter of a very useful extension I made for out kitchen table. One layer of plywood and one layer of pink insulation foam, it had a round notch that matched up perfectly with the oak kitchen table and allowed us to seat up to fourteen people for a sushi party.

Picture of the Haul Guys

The Haul Guys to the Rescue

When I was growing up in California, solving problems like this was easy: you just loaded up your pickup truck and headed to the city dump.

It is no longer that simple. The Austin landfill has a complex set of charges for tons of refuse. They clearly are not on a footing of welcoming casual dumping. Fortunately, I checked Angie’s List and identified The Haul Guys. They were great! I called them and got an initial estimate. I sent the an e-mail with the picture of the pile. They arrived, loaded up, then knocked on my door. They even gave me a discount because the amount was smaller than expected. Polite, friendly, quick, effective, very reasonably priced – I would recommend them to anyone who needs a pile of annoying stuff hauled away.

Picture of Hazardous Waste in Car Trunk

Hazardous Waste is Another Matter

One thing that remains a do-it-yourself operation is the disposal of hazardous waste. The Haul Guys will be happy to haul that away as well, but it drives up the price of the job quite a bit because the city of Austin charges commercial haulers high rates for disposing of hazardous waste. I had to separate out all the paint, insecticide, and leftover cleaning fluids and put them in the trunk of my car.

Picture of City of Austin Hazardous Waste Facility

City of Austin Hazardous Waste Facility

Fortunately, as a citizen of Austin, disposing of this sort of quantity of normal household hazardous waste is easy and convenient. The City of Austin Household Hazardous Waste Facility is open two days per week. You simply drive in. They check your address. An employee rolls a cart up to the back of your car and collects all the hazardous waste. The service is free for Austin residents. The entire process takes less than a minute.

Scan of Haul Guys Business Card

Haul Guys Business Card

I have posted a scanned image of the business card of the Haul Guys to the left in case anyone would like to contact them.

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Scaling Down, Repair Small Stuff

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Dave031611

When getting your house ready to sell, it is important to identify small cosmetic repairs that are easy or cheap and get these done.

Pitcure of replacing a wall plate

Replace Wall Plates

For us, one of the first repairs was to replace some of the ugly wall plates for switches and outlets. We did not need to replace all of them. There were two main problems to be remediated:

  1. Paint Splatters – Really careful painters would remove the wall plates before painting, paint under them and then replace them. Unfortunately, the painters we hired over the years were either lowest bidder types or (even cheaper) ourselves and the wall plates got splattered with paint.
  2. Finger Smudges/Wear – Some of the highest traffic switches were simply brushed, rubbed, and smeared so often that the plates looked ugly.

New wall plates cost around a dollar and can be replaced in a few minutes. The effect is subtle, but it makes the room look much smarter.

Picture of Tomoko Touching Up Grout

Tomoko Touches Up Grout

Another sensitive point was the grout in the master bathroom shower. Simple scrubbing did not do much. I went to Home Depot and purchased a special cleaner for removing mildew from grout and another special cleaner for removing lime from glass. The special grout cleaner worked quite well. Just sponge it on and let it sit for a few minutes and then rinse it off. While it did not make the grout gleaming white, it did remove the ugly black stuff quite effectively. The cleaning, however, revealed various cracks in the grout. Fortunately, Tomoko has a 3rd degree black belt in grout patching. (グラウト繕道三段)

The glass lime remover did not do much to remove the slightly cloudy appearance of the shower doors. I suspect the glass has simply been etched over the years. No amount of cleaning will ever make it look perfectly like new.

Picture of Window Sun and Heat Damage

Window Sun and Heat Damage

We also had two windows that simply were not able to stand up to the Texas sun. One of the two narrow windows next to our front door had a permanent cloudy appearance. The glass repair guy explained that the dual pane windows are manufactured with a desiccant embedded in the frame to absorb stray moisture and prevent the glass from fogging between the panes. In normal temperatures, this desiccant works well and lasts a long time. However, a pane of glass subjected to the blazing Texas sun will get hot enough to boil the desiccant itself. Once the desiccant turns into a steam and fills the area between the panes of glass, it will etch the inside surface of the glass panes. Once that happens, no amount of cleaning will remove the cloudiness. We had to have this window replaced.

Picture of glass guy replacing upstairs window

Upstairs Window Repair

We had a similar problem with the window in our master bathroom. The Texas sun heated the window to such an extent that the seal around the top simply melted and oozed down the glass. There was no choice but to replace this window as well. Even worse, it was quite a ways up. The glass repair guy had to get a special extra-long ladder to reach it and have an assistant help pull the window out from inside the house. I really do not like working on something two-and-one-half stories up a ladder; I was delighted to pay him for his services in replacing this window.

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Scaling Down, Valuables

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Dave031611

When getting ready to show your house, it is important to remove all items of value.

  • Kleptomaniacs – Small items of value may be pockets by people with compulsive kleptomania.
  • Methodical Thieves – Although the problem is not common, you might get a professional thief who tours your house on the pretense of being interested in buying it, but who actually uses the tour as a convenient way to assess the harvest potential of the larger items in the house.

As for small items, we don’t have many and they were easily collected and moved to storage.

Picture of Imari Plate in Shipping Box

Boxing Up the Imari Plate

In terms of larger items, my ragged and unfashionable clothing doesn’t have much value, but we have some beautiful items from Japan. In particular, we treasure a certain large, antique Imari serving plate that we received as a wedding present. This beautiful plate was one of the nicest wedding presents we received and we have used it over and over for serving sushi to guests. The plate has moved all over the world with us and early on I made a special plywood shipping case for it. We retrieved the shipping case from the attic, packed up the plate and took it to storage.

The other category of valuables involved Tomoko’s Kimonos and all the accessories that go with them.

People unfamiliar with the intricacies of a Kimono will look at one and thing: “How nice. It’s a dress.” …and those people will be wildly underestimating the sophistication and complexity of the garment. There are two main pieces of the Kimono:

  1. Kimono – First there is the Kimono itself, a piece of the finest imaginable silk approximately the size of a single bed sheet, intricately hand-dyed with exquisite patterns. “Cheapo, fake import” versions start in the high hundreds of dollars. A nice normal, Kimono will be several thousand dollars. A high-end Kimono for a master of Tea Ceremony can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
  2. Obi – The sash that binds the Kimono at the waist is a necktie on steroids. It is perhaps twenty inches wide and fifteen feet long. Again, it is a dense, multi-layer, assembly of the finest, hand-dyed silk, covered with elaborate embroidery. The Obi should match and complement the Kimomo, both in pattern and design, and also in quality level. The budget for an Obi will be about equal to the Kimono it matches.

OK, so we have a budget for a respectable “entry-level” Kimono/Obi starting around five thousand dollars and the budget of the Kimono/Obi for a national Tea Ceremony master running into many ten thousands of dollars. Phew! That was expensive!

Opps! We’re not done yet! Did we forget to mention that the Kimono requires an astounding variety of special purpose accessories?

  1. Zori – the special slippers. Better budget a few hundred dollars for these.
  2. Tabi – the socks aren’t too bad. Perhaps fifty dollars.
  3. Undergament – you don’t just toss on your Jockey boxer briefs. The slip for a Kimono is custom fitted from another several layers of special silk. Add several hundred more dollars.
  4. Ropes – the Kimono has no snaps, zippers, or buttons. Instead, it is tied in position…with a special silk rope. Add another few hundred dollars for an adequate set of silk ropes.
  5. Purse – you won’t want to show up with a reusable grocery bag from Whole Foods. A special Kimono purse is required…several hundred dollars up to the-sky-is-the-limit…

And so on. On and on. The Kimono is a clothing system designed to stress the wallet of even the wealthiest geisha sponsor.

Picture of Tomoko's Special Kimono Box

Putting Away the Kimonos


Before we got married, I encouraged Tomoko to invest in a few Kimonos and the requisite accessories. Tomoko had just profited handsomely from a hot tip on the Tokyo Stock Market. Buying these was quite an entertaining project – I learned a lot from the process. We also purchased a special Kimono storage chest made from Japanese Paulownia wood [Japanese: kiri (桐)]. This wood is light and strong and the Japanese say that this wood will swell under humidity (or in the case of water being poured on a house to put out a fire) and protect the Kimono inside. Traditionally in Japan, fathers planted a Paulowina tree when a daughter was born so that the wood would be available to make her Kimono chest by the time she was ready to marry.

Although these beautiful garments have been a pleasure to own, they have actually been less than practical. In twenty-seven years, Tomoko has only been able to wear the Kimonos a handful of times. Somehow, Kimonos just aren’t very practical for attending rodeos and rattle-snake roundups here in Texas…

Posted in Entertainment, Scaling Down | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Scaling Down, De-Cluttering

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Dave031611

“De-Cluttering” is one of the key steps to getting your house ready to sell. “De-Cluttering” is basically the processes of engaging with the emotional, non-linear, and irrational house-buying public. The reasoning (such as it is) goes something like this:

  1. You need to create “light” and “air-i-ness”
  2. You want to create the illusion of huge space – in terms of the potential buyer perceiving that “There is lots of space to put my stuff”
  3. You want to create the illusion of small, comfy space – in terms of: “This isn’t a frightening “huge space” place. It is a small comfy space that I will feel warm and secure in”
  4. Having the house “occupied” is much better than having the house “vacant”
  5. Except that the general public expects “occupied” to mean “occupied by a family of aliens from a distant planet that somehow live in a 3,129 square foot (291 square meter) house but also somehow only have 3 shirts, 2 pair of pants and 1 pair of shoes – and absolutely no other personal artifacts.
  6. That is, you have to have enough furniture in the house so that the imagination-challenged buyer can visualize a furnished house, without having so much furniture that your life interrupts the buyer’s attempts to visualize their own life.
  7. Books are bad. Apparently, most of the house-buying American public is severely allergic to books. Books bring back images of failed exams. Upset teachers. Smart people making remarks that they couldn’t follow.
  8. Walls have to be empty. Pictures of your life conflict with the imagination-challenged buyer’s ability to visualize their own life.
  9. Oh and by the way, the United States litigation culture means that you can’t actually discuss anything you think about the house – good or bad – because your remarks might be the subject of a lawsuit later.

Wonderful.

Picture of artwor removed from walls

Everything Off the Walls

So… let’s get to work. First step: everything off the walls.

Wow! I had now idea how many dozens of things we had managed to hang on the walls of our house in twenty-two years. Phew! Just taking things down off the wall and cataloging them to go to storage went on and on and on and on…. We must have almost 100 things in frames. It just wouldn’t stop.

We have diplomas from all over the world for three generations of family members. Among them is a diploma from the Massachusetts Institute Technology for an ancestor who crawled out of the slums of Philadelphia, served in the Air Force as an aerial photographer during the Korean War, and somehow made it through MIT on the GI Bill while supporting a wife and three children off of a Christian Science Monitor paper route. We have exotic Polish art purchased by a certain wild, world-traveling, young Japan Airlines employee. We have Swedish weaving diplomas. We have childhood treasures that won local art competitions and ended up framed for posterity.

These things definitely had to come off the wall and head to storage – we need a nice blank wall for the buyers to project their dreams on.

Picture of Dave Patching Holes in the Walls

Patching Holes in the Walls

Opps… Oh my. Yes, those previous things? They needed hangers. The hangers were attached to the walls. Take down the things and you are left with ugly hangers. Take down the hangers and you are left with ugly holes. We did a lot of patching and paint touch-up in the last few weeks.

Next Problem: Books.

We *LOVE* Books. We like picking them up. We like flipping through them. We like reading them. We like discussing them. We like thinking about the messages the author worked to formulate.

Thirty or Forty years ago, books were cool. Leading fashion magazines posed men with an elegant blazer and a pipe, reclining in front of a shelf of books. I love books and I loved those images.

My general life pattern, however, is to be “The last guy to get the memo” I certainly missed it about books. Books are no longer cool. What is cool is Twitter. Oh, and yes: Cats Eating Cheeseburgers”  The fashion magazines are posing emaciated young men leaping over invisible fountains while wearing pin-striped pantyhose and a girl’s trainer brassiere cleverly embellished to resemble a men’s coat. Books are definitely out.

Picture of The One-Cent Book Phenomenon

The One-Cent Book Phenomenon

So, we needed to get rid of most of our books. iPad to the rescue! We were amazed to find several different iPhone scanner apps with incredibly effective scanning functions. Just pick up the iPad and aim it at the barcode on the rear of the book. Within seconds, the free iPhone app recognizes the barcode, decodes it, jumps on the internet, and brings back the lowest market price for the book out there in the internet cloud.

The result was stunning and depressing at the same time: all the really “great” books that we had purchased and enjoyed over the last twenty years or so had a market value of…exactly: $0.01. This information was quite a shock, but it was also not quite what it appeared at first glance.

  • Does the $0.01 price mean that there is no market for the book?

No. That would be too shallow of an understanding. If you click and purchase the book, you will pay $0.01 for the book and $3.99 for shipping and handling. The seller will pay about $3.52 for postage. That leaves the seller working to figure out how to package and label your book for $0.48. In most cases, this business is a break-even proposition for the sellers. However, they get benefits by increasing the number of recorded sales, positive evaluations, and so on. There are a lot of big operations out there willing to engage in the One-Cent book trade.

Looking at this another way, the market dynamic for printed books has changed fundamentally. Thirty years ago, people had the David-Hetherington-Style-Archiac affectionate attachment to their books. Current consumers – especially young students – look at books as something more like toilet paper with information printed on it. As soon as they are done consuming the information, the toilet paper gets discarded. This change in the attitude towards books, changes the arithmetic of the market for paper books.

Previously:

  • If there were 100,000 people interested in you book…
  • …you sold 100,000 books.

Now:

  • What matters is not the absolute number of people interested in your book…
  • ..but rather the “Reading Capacity” for your book.
  • If each reader of your book holds on to a copy for 60 days…
  • ….and there are a total of 1000 new people per month who want to read your book…
  • The market for your book is 2 months * 1000 people or 2,000 copies.

Once the 2001st copy of your book enters circulation, the market price drops instantly to $0.01. That is, even if over a ten-year period a total of 120,000 people want to read your book, you will only ever sell 2,000 print copies. These will get circulated more or less endlessly with each new reader paying $3.99 shipping and handling plus $0.01 to get the book from the previous reader.

Amazon has inadvertently created a giant, world-wide, virtual, fee-based, lending library.

Fortunately, this mathematics only applies to mass-market “Best Seller” books. We happen to love quirky, unique, unpopular books and these tend to retain their value.

Picture of Unnaturally Neat Book Shelf

Unnaturally Neat Book Shelf

So, we proceeded to sell off as many of the unique not-one-cent books as possible. We also took a lot of the great-quality, appalling-that-it-is-one-cent books to a local used book store. They were happy to have them. Such a store can sell the book for $2.00 and still beat Amazon.com in terms of shipping cost.

Picture of Large Book Shelf

We Had to Get Rid of A Lot of Books

We also gave away a lot of Japanese books to friends in the local Austin Japanese community.

The process went on and on. Multiple trips to the used book store. Anything that seemed to have value was moved to Asatte Press. With tons if effort, we managed to get rid of a bit more than half of our inventory.

Next we had to wipe down the shelves. We are normally not big on obsessive dusting and the shelves were pretty dusty. We arranged all the books neatly according to size. Stacking the books by size to look neat on the shelf led to a totally bizarre scramble of categories, but the shelves ended up looking very neat and clean.

Even with all of this effort, the real estate agents were not very enthusiastic of the presence of books in the house. Apparently much of the American public is subconsciously allergic to books. They must bring back unpleasant memories of having to read and study.

Picture of Pile of Dave's Clothing

One-Third of Dave’s Closet Goes to Donation

The closets were the final problem. As I went to clean out my closet, I discovered that an enormous amount of stuff simply needed to be donated to the Goodwill. I had multiple University of Texas folding umbrellas, plaid shirts that were hopelessly out of fashion, shorts I never wear [As a public service, I refrain from wearing them], event T-shirts from long-ago forgotten events, and worn-out running shoes. All of it went into a huge pile.

Picture of Boxes of Clothing to Storage

The Rest of Dave’s Closet Goes to Storage

Most of the rest of the contents of the closet got tossed into large cardboard boxes to go to storage. The effect was like one of these circus acts in which a small mini-car drives into the ring and twenty different clowns crawl out of the mini-car. It was absolutely amazing how much stuff came out of storage.

Picture of Dave's Unrealistically Neat Closet

Dave’s Unrealistically Neat Closet

The final result was a wildly unrealistic, ultra-neat closet. Just a few shirts hanging neatly in a row. Nothing crammed into the corners. Nothing spilling out the door. The kind of closet some sort of Martian might have.

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Scaling Down, the Pantry Doorpost

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Dave031611
Picture of The Pantry Doorpost

The Pantry Doorpost

We are cleaning up our house in preparation for putting it on the market. We are uncovering memories constantly. We just can’t believe that we have been here for 22-1/2 years – it seems like we just got here yesterday.

For most of the items, we can seal them in a plastic bag, catalog them, and drop them in a banker’s box to go to storage. However, there is one item in the house which embodies a rich and critical memory for our family that we simply are not going to be able to take with us. That is the left doorpost of the pantry.

This doorpost is the written record of the growth of our children. Periodically, we would line them up against it, put a carpenter’s square against the post and slide it down until it gently touched the child’s head. We would then carefully mark and label the child’s height with a pencil. Mom and dad got measured too.

Picture of the marks for Ryan and Tye 1992-1994

Ryan and Tye 1992-1994

There was a theory at the time that a child’s height at age two would be exactly one-half of the child’s final adult height. The theory sounded really good but did not actually work in the case of our family.

  • Tye was about 34″ on his second birthday and is just around 6 feet tall (72″) today.
  • Ryan was about 36″ on his second birthday, but is only about 69-70″ today.

Interestingly enough, I continued to grow slowly as an adult. As a university student, I was only 5′ 6″ tall and I am just about 5′ 8″ tall today.

Tomoko has been pretty consistent at 5′ 2″ tall. However, placed next to her rather large sons, she presents the appearance of shrinking.

Picture of Erika's Measurements

Erika Matches Mom’s Height in 1998

Looking closely at this photo, we can see that Erika and Ryan both passed their mom (Labeled “Kaachan” in the photo) at age 11 or the end of 5th grade.

It was a really fun time. We had a lot of fun making and tracking these measurements. I briefly considered somehow disassembling the door and taking it with us, but decided that we would probably end up destroying the frame getting it out from its surrounding. In the end, nothing is permanent. The best I could do was make these photos for future memories.

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged | Leave a comment

Scaling Down, The Garage Sale

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Dave031611

What an experience!

Planning and Advertising

My memory of garage sales from my childhood is of very relaxed events. They lasted one or two days. Neighbors arrived and milled around chatting. Thinks sold gradually.

Tomoko’s impression was similar. As such, we setup our garage sale for two days:

  • Saturday from 9AM to 4PM
  • Sunday from 9AM to 2PM

We were aware that some people make a living out of garage sales. These people will come early. If you let them, they will arrive at 7AM or earlier.  We took a cue from other Craigslist.com advertisements and advertised “No early birds please”.

The Night Before

We were up until 1AM cleaning our garage and getting things ready. Some shelves had not been moved since we moved into the house in October 1990.  There was quite a bit of sweeping and dusting to do. We also had to move some stuff from the garage into the house that we wanted to move to our offsite storage unit.

Picture of garage with stuff prepared at 1AM

Ready-to-Go Around 1AM

We had some rigid pink foam insulation board leftover from previous projects. I went to Home Depot and purchased six garden stakes. I then cut the foam board into six pieces 14″ wide and 11″ tall. I used a power driver to attach these to the stakes. At our office, I used the laser printer to prepare six 8.5″ x 11″ signs:

  • Moving Sale…hours.. (2 copies)
  • Free – Everything in this area is free. If you can carry it away, it is yours.
  • $1 – Everything in this area is $1
  • $5 – Everything in this area is $5
  • $10 – Everything in this area is $10

Our original plan was to hammer these into the dirt next to our driveway (which is long and curved) and distribute things into areas as appropriate. However, the forecast Friday evening indicated rain, so we ended up just leaning the signs against the wall.

We put some of the bulkier free items out on the driveway overnight. These items included a very beat-up and paint-splattered ladder, several rusty shovels, a few rusty rakes, and some worn-out brooms. We bunched the rest of the free stuff at the front of the garage.

At 1AM I went to the end of the driveway, pounded one of the “Sale” signs into the dirt on each side, and strung a yellow rope across the driveway to prevent people from coming down the driveway until we were ready.

The First 45 Minutes

The next morning, at 8:53AM we raised the garage door. There was already a long line of parked cars and a crowd waiting at the end of driveway.

Picture of horde of people pawing through our for sale items

The Horde Attacks at 8:57 AM

As soon as we opened the garage door, they tore down the yellow rope themselves and rushed down the driveway to our garage.

The next 30 minutes were absolute chaos. All of the broken-down tools, paint-splattered ladders, rusty rakes, unsorted bins of nails, leftover sprinkler odds and ends, and anything else remotely useful for construction work was gone within 15 minutes.

Within 5 minutes, there was a small crowd of people demanding to know where the CDs and DVDs were. During the last several weeks, we had been checking prices on Amazon and had planned to put some of the stuff that was too cheap to bother shipping on Amazon out on a table with the similarly low-value books. I told them to wait until the chaos cleared.

About 20 minutes in, I found a you man using his smartphone to scan our books. I told him: “Uhmm. I can save you the trouble. We have a smartphone with a scanner too. The only books here are the ones that you won’t be able to sell at a high price on Amazon” He looked very embarrassed and irritated. He responded: “Whatever dude!” and stomped off.

About 35 minutes in, Tomoko managed to go back inside the house and gather up perhaps 20 DVDs and 15 CDs that she had identified. She brought them out on put them on the table. One of the buyers who had been waiting announced loudly: “I was here first!” and began rapidly flipping through the DVDs. The other two or three buyers grudgingly got in line. The first guy purchased about half of the DVDs and half of the CDs. By the time the other two were finished 5 minutes later, we were down to 3 DVDs and 2 CDs.

About 40 minutes in, the chaos began to subside. Several more patient customers were carefully sifting through a bin of old cans of paint and motor oil that we had put out on the driveway to one side intending to take them to the City of Austin hazardous waste facility. One very persistent older gentleman from Iran was walking around, picking up items one at a time, and trying to see if he could convince us to lower prices from $1 to $0.50

The Rest of the Day

Picture of Drinking Tea with Friends at 11:30AM

Drinking Tea with Friends at 11:30AM

By the time our friends arrived around 10:30AM, there was almost no one there. About 60% of our stock had already been sold out. As promised, the day was cold and wet. We made a nice pot of Oolong tea and sat around and socialized. For the rest of the day, isolated customers arrived at 20-30 minute intervals. These customers continued to look over what we had left and purchase individual items. We sold another 20% of our stock in this manner.

Around 3PM, Tomoko got back on Craigslist.com and cancelled the Sunday sale.

Our last customer arrived at 3:52 PM, took a look around, chatted pleasantly, but did not buy anything.

At 4PM, we loaded the rest of the stuff into the minivan and took it to the Goodwill.

We netted $597 for the day as well as fun and interesting experience.

Reflection

Of course it is nice to be able to recoup a little cash from the stuff one acquired over the years. However, for Tomoko and me, the big pleasure is that all these things ended up finding new owners rather than ending up in the landfill. The “pickers” were a little pushy, but not terribly so and it was even kind of fun to barter with them. Tomoko kept telling the older gentleman from Iran: “No. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” He finally ended up buying about $18 of stuff and Tomoko relented and gave him a few $1 items for free.

The “hot” items are:

  1. Tools
  2. DVDs
  3. CDs

I was surprised out just how eager the construction workers were to have my old tools. My hypothesis is that construction workers must go through tools like normal consumers go through kleenex. That is, as a consumer, I had used my hand-held rotary saw for perhaps a total of 10 hours in 20 years. A construction worker would use it that much the first day. Constantly having to replace tools is probably a significant expense for these guys. It must be worth it for them to spend the time to scavenge tools from garage sales.

The DVDs and CDs were interesting as well. We pre-screened them to make sure we were not putting out anything with a value on Amazon.com greater than $1. We charged $1 each. We explained this process to the buyers. They were not deterred. They quickly snapped up our $1 DVDs and CDs anyway. We suspect that somewhere there is an operation somewhere that is re-shrink-wrapping these things and exporting them to the 3rd world. This hypothesis is somewhat supported by our recent discovery that Amazon.com now has a “trade-in program” will buy DVDs in bulk for around $0.50 each and pay the shipping to their remote facility that processes them. It seems odd that Amazon would be willing to pay $0.50 for a DVD that has a market value of $0.01 in the Amazon Marketplace unless they had some other channel they could sell them in.

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Scaling Down, Clean the Yard

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Dave031611
Image of Books Ordered on Amazon

We ordered a Lot of Books on Amazon

So we went wild on Amazon and ordered a whole bunch of books on selling your own home…

(We order so much stuff from Amazon.com that we have our own line-item on Amazon’s revenue statement in their annual report)

After speed-reading the books…

(speed reading was one of the most important life skills I picked up during my excellent undergraduate education at the University of California San Diego)

…we understood that a thorough cleanup of the exterior of our house was the first order of business. That is, no-one is going to buy your house or even call you to ask about it without first furtively driving by in their car while wearing dark sunglasses and looking it over from the outside. This aspect of the selling process is referred to by professionals in the business as “curb appeal”.

Picture of Tomoko Cleaning the Stone Walls

Tomoko Cleaning the Stone Walls

Most aspiring home sellers rush down to their local home gardening center and buy some freshly blooming flowers to quickly plant in their front yard.

Our situation is slightly different. We live on a greenbelt. That greenbelt has been a source of joy, excitement and memories. There was the raccoon that took up residence in our garage. Another time I got to explain to Tomoko that the small black animal with white racing stripes down its side and tail that was having an argument with a cat right in front of the glass door to our kitchen was a remarkable creature known as a “SKUNK” and that these probably did not exist in Japan and that No, it was not a good idea to go outside and try to help the cat.

The greenbelt and its citizens pretty much freed us from our interest in formal gardening within a few years of our arrival in Austin. Trying to maintain a pretty little, orderly, English-style garden in Texas next to a greenbelt is an exercise in futility. Instead, we learned to appreciate the native flora and fauna. That is to say, we encouraged the nicer looking weeds to displace the less attractive weeds.

A lot of those nicer looking weeds were particularly fond of the limestone rock walls on our property. The crevices in these walls were ideal spots to take root, sprout and flower. Lantana was one of the best. Native. Hardy. Almost indestructible. It would plug itself into the cracks in the wall and flower  effusively for most of the year. We eventually quit fighting it and let it take over as much of the walls as it wanted to.

Very smart. Except that we are trying to sell our house in the middle of winter and the Lantana is not blooming. Nor are the other various attractive weeds we allowed to grow and thrive on our estate. So, the first step in cleaning the outside was to clean up the dead weeds. See the picture above.

We also needed to clean up one of our last futile attempts to plant something. Around 2010, we decided to try to replant the hedge along our driveway.  We carefully fertilized, planted and constructed little pyramids out of garden stakes, bird net, and nylon cable-ties. Our timing was impeccable. We did all the work and got everything ready just in time for the arrival of the worst drought in fifty years.

Picture of Dave throwing garden stake into greenbelt

Dave, Javelin Throw

The remains of the ill-fated hedge project needed to be cleaned up too. One of the nice things about living on the greenbelt is that the greenbelt will happily devour almost anything that is biodegradable. Christmas tree disposal? Not a problem. Just toss it over the cliff. Within hours the deer will strip the pine needles. After that, various bacteria and worms take over. Six months later, there will be nothing left.

The problem we faced in the remediation of the remains of the failed hedge project was that we did not want anything that looked like garbage to be visible to curious potential home-buyers who might be walking by with their dark sunglasses on. Clearly, the tent stakes would need to be tossed over the forward line of trees into the canyon below. I had always wanted to try my hand at the Javelin throw. It was a wonderful opportunity.

Coming Next: The Massive Garage Sale.

(This weekend. Saturday 2/9/2013 from 9AM to 4PM and Sunday 2/10/2013 9AM to 2PM – Everything must go!)

 

Posted in Scaling Down | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment