I know a lot of people think this is corny, but it makes me happy, so I’m posting it. If you haven’t seen the original one, it’s here.
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Now where’s Matt
Book triage
With most of the loose paper now in electronic form, I’ve been starting to make slow progress in scanning some of the books. In practice however, I’m not scanning my entire library, and I’m not scanning it right away. As I go through the books, I find they fall into several categories:
Give away
I was surprised by the number of books, when faced with a decision, that were not worth selling because they would fetch too little, and not worth the time to scan. These include a lot of large-publication novels and the like. Somehow, a lot of “beach reads” survived beyond the beach. It also includes some odd copies that, like this one have already been scanned by Google and are available for download.
Sell on Amazon
When I moved from Buffalo to New York, I sold a couple of boxes of books to lighten the load a bit, so I had a rough idea of what sort of things sell well. Generally, these are books that have a timelessness to them, started out expensive, and have a rabid fan base of some sort. Both Code Complete and Mythical Man Month sold within hours of my listing them, for example.
There are a lot of hidden costs to selling books on Amazon. Of course, there is the cost of shipping (which may or may not line up with the shipping fee), and the commission Amazon pulls from the sale. There are also packing supplies needed to make sure that your book gets there in one piece. But the biggest expense is time. Listing the books, packing them up, and carting them off to the post office takes a lot of time. If you have a small bookstore, and already have sunk labor costs in the form of a part-timer from the local high school, packaging up books and prepping them for shipping is no big deal. But particularly when selling one or two books, it’s just not worth it unless they are fairly big-ticket items. At least the trips to the post office scale a bit when you are bringing 8 or 10 books at a time, but it is still a large amount of time, for little financial reward.
In the first week of listing, I’ve sold about three dozen books. If experience is a guide, things tend to sell quickly or not at all. I have a number of books still for sale, and will be adding to this list a little. Generally, I probably will only be adding books that I think I can price at over $10, since the $5 mark just doesn’t make sense for the time I’m spending packaging and such. Those books will either be left down in the lobby of my apartment building for others or scanned.
Destructive Scanning
The majority of books probably fall into this category: those that will be ripped from their spines and run through the page-fed scanner. Generally, these are books that I don’t plan to curl up and read again cover-to-cover, but that I keep around for the sake of reference or inspiration. I actually do not mind reading on the screen, and my hope is that I will be able to eventually read these on an eBook reader (Kindle-kin) at some point, though there are hurdles still before that can happen. By OCRing these books, I have a way of doing an index search across my library, which may prove useful. So far, I’ve only scanned a few dozen books; it’s taking longer than I predicted.
Non-Destructive Scanning
There are a number of books that I am not ready to tear apart, for various reasons. Some of them, for example, contain images that need special scanning attention. Some were gifts or otherwise have sentimental value. A number Some (very few) are “grandfathered” because of their age. Some are too big to scan using the current setup. Some are kids books, and story-time just isn’t the same in front of the monitor. A lot of the poetry and fiction will remain bound for the same reasons.
The Amazon sales have already paid for my duplex, sheet-fed scanner. Putting together a scanner that can handle bound materials is going to take a lot longer and cost a lot more.
The disadvantages of an elite education
I’ve been reading an excellent essay in the American Scholar, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, by William Deresiewicz. Go there and read it. Despite the implied Obama critique, I think he has hit several nails on their heads.
Many of the people whom I have met who have benefited from an education at an elite school are bright but uninteresting. And they seem to believe that they are brighter and more accomplished than they actually manage to be. As long as I am painting with a stereotypical brush, I’ll note that in my experience, this is particularly true of graduates of Harvard and Yale, and least true of graduates of Princeton and Cornell. The funny thing is that these expectations are often born out.
I didn’t really think much about the Ivy League until I came to Quinnipiac. I attended state schools, and my impression is that there is a lot in common in terms of coursework between a large public school like the University of Indiana, and a large private, like Harvard. But the attitudes that Quinnipiac students hold toward Yalies, and the reverse, has brought into sharp focus the cultural capital held by Yale.
Every couple years, Yale’s student paper publishes a sort of “safari” piece on Quinnipiac students that always manages to set a colonial tone. (The most recent is awed by the fact that in their native habitat, Quinnipiac students seem to spend–gasp!–a great deal of time studying.) I have the feeling that for most Yale students, the experience of Quinnipiac students is utterly beyond their grasp. The gap here is not between the working class and the elite. Quinnipiac students generally come from “new money,” it seems to me: their parents are almost prototypical members of the bourgeoisie, sons and daughters of successful entrepreneurs, lawyers, and stockbrokers. That Yalies consider Quinnipiac students to be heavy partiers suggests they have never visited ASU or SDSU, but there is definitely a difference in what is considered an expected workload. Some of our best students rival the abilities of some of their best students, but our average student seems unsure of why he is in college, and unsure of what he wants to do afterward. (This is new for me: ambition seems more common both among children of the working poor in Buffalo and in a different way, among children of the aristocracy.) I chafe a bit at our emphasis of professional skills, but it seems likely that Yale graduates will be working with Quinnipiac graduates, and our students will probably teaching their students the nuts and bolts of professional practice. That Yale and Quinnipiac students can find so little common ground is an indictment of both institutions.
I think the article overplays this as endemic to the Ivy League. Students at almost every university seem to feel entitled to a high-paying job upon graduation, regardless of what they actually accomplish in school, and grade inflation in our own program rivals Yale’s. But he may be right that the graduate of an Ivy League school has been told so often that he is a member of the elite that he believes this as part of his being. Unfortunately, at least until mellowed a bit after graduation, this makes many students at Ivy League schools fairly insufferable to talk to.
Of course, there are exceptions. Many of my friends are survivors of Ivy League programs, and I don’t hold it against them in the least. Some of them even deign to read my blog ;). But unfortunately, since the Ivies tend to set the cadence for “aspirant” institutions, the problems outlined in this article seem to trickle down. When this is compounded with the fact that our political leaders are disproportionately products of these schools, it seems clear that an adjustment is needed.
MyGallons? Maybe.
I certainly like the idea of MyGallons, which is that you are able to pre-purchase future fill-ups of gasoline at today’s prices (though this is not a “future,” the company is at pains to tell you). I presume it means that they are buying futures, however. While betting on the fact that gasoline will be going down might be a good way of providing a downward pressure on prices, by hedging future increases, this contributes, in some small way, to the speculation that is driving gasoline prices up.
So, what are the problems? Well: it’s a start-up. Leaving aside the possibility of fraud, it might just end up being mismanaged, and given that they are in a position to deal with a lot of cash flow right out of the gate, this is a problem. Nowhere on the site does it indicate precisely the process by which they are buying fuel. If they get the balance wrong, and don’t hedge fuel prices correctly, there is always the possibility of a graceless exit, leaving consumers holding worthless IOUs.
Also, they determine your purchase price by where you live. I live in Manhattan, but have only purchased fuel here once or twice over the last several years. The closest station is charging $4.33 a gallon for regular, and as you go downtown, the price creeps up toward $4.75. I don’t know if they average by zip or by region, but either way, the price they assess for me is likely to be silly. Across the bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, regular gasoline is going for $3.95. I usually fill up somewhere in Connecticut, which is between the two in terms of cost. The problem is that if I buy gasoline at Manhattan prices, I’m already paying more of a premium than I would otherwise.
Secondly, while my car is not as much of a fuel hog as some (and yes, I considered a Prius, and it looks like it would have been a wise decision), it does require premium gasoline. The agreement says that they tag on 30 cents a gallon for premium, but it’s not yet clear whether you buy premium gallons, or they make the adjustment when you purchase gas. They apparently make a lot of adjustments when you purchase, according to the type of gas, the locale in which it is purchased, changes in taxes, etc. As a result, it’s difficult to predict exactly what you will be paying for gasoline. If it were a simple matter of five gallons purchased now results in five gallons of gas in six months, that would be great. As it is, there appears to be a lot of wiggle room on their end.
Finally, they are launching at an advantageous time for them. Historically, fuel prices peak around August and then tend to depress through the end of the year. Hard to say, in this overblown market, whether that will have any effect at all.
All that said, it seems unlikely that we will see a long-term drop in gasoline prices. The US has long enjoyed ridiculously low fuel prices, and I suspect that $5 a gallon fuel (or more) is not only inevitable, but here to stay. And I am locked into a six-hundred-mile-a-week (at least) commute. So, all the above caveats aside, I figure I’ll give them a try, and report back here how things go. I won’t see my fuel card from them for several weeks, and I probably will not make my first fuel purchase until September or October, when prices may have dipped a bit.
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