USEDCARSALESMAN

"Surfing" Gas Prices in L.A.

The title of this post mentions "surfing" and "gas prices." So you might think that Usedcarsalesman is implying that one should "surf" from gas station to station in L.A., shopping for the best fuel prices. Nahh... (although, he does occasionally hear that the Costco price for gas is pretty good!). Actually, what Usedcarsalesman means by "surfing" is a bit of a generalization that suggests staying comfortably standing "on-top" and "in-control" while riding a cultural flow in a given direction.

Ok so on with the post. What can you do to Surf Gas Prices in LA, that is to stay comfortably on top of the flow towards higher and higher prices? Answer is, "live without using much gas (duh)!" Here's 5 things that Usedcarsalesman has been doing:

1. GPS - If you are navigation-challenged like me, drive a low-tech, paid-for car (Old Jeep Wrangler, in my case) and go to new places in L.A. on an almost daily basis, then it pays to buy a cheap, hand-held GPS and use it in your car! These navigational units are worth their weight in platinum and Usedcarsalesman doesn't want to talk about how much time, gas and stress it has saved him over the last 2 and a half years in LA.

A few years ago, he pulled in to L.A., Thomas Guide already in hand. Usedcarsalesman drove around to the numerous places he'd need to go to get set up. Thomas Guide was in his lap, he's looking down at the guide or talking on a phone while driving; now, he's not saying that he was a safety hazard or anything, but... After a few days of this, Usedcarsalesman was so fed up with his coffee-stained, deteriorating Thomas Guide that he took immediate, drastic action --  he decided to pay retail for an electronic device! He drove over to the West Marine store in Marina Del Ray and plunked down money for a Garmin GPS V.

Now, Usedcarsalesman had bought a Garmin GPS for his Dad for a Christmas present in 1995; it was one of the connect-the-dots, map-less kind, but the thing worked like a charm. The 7 years newer GPS V was and is a vast improvement over that one and works like a cheap Street Pilot; it comes with North American maps on a CD, you put it on a mount on your dash and lock it up when you park your vehicle. All he can say is that every drive in my old Jeep was and is pure A-to-B, no getting lost, no wasted time, no wasted gas. Usedcarsalesman could mount this GPS unit on a Ford Model T or a Horse and Buggy and it would work just as well; the device simply provides drivers with an economy that most people have yet to realize. Usedcarsalesman paid $500 a few years ago, but you can get one for $200 today!! And you can impress people who will ask you, "how the hell did you get here so fast?"

2. Grocery Delivery Conventional wisdom on this is that you have to be rich or a super-busy professional to make grocery delivery worthwhile. Usedcarsaleman disagrees. Reality is that if you order your items on-line from Vons and are willing to take delivery within a 4 hour window, say 7-11pm on a weeknight, then the charge is only $7.95; and one of their drivers told Usedcarsalesman that they are not allowed to accept tips.

When you order on-line, your grocery purchases are kept in the company's database -- a resource which makes repeat-shopping for your usual stuff fast and easy. Usedcarsalesman can usually place an order for 7 days worth of food in about 15 minutes and there's no lines and shopping cart congestion, no parking lot dings and wrestling for parking spaces, no searching for things, no finding a cart and putting a cart away, no carrying 4 bags in each hand walking up three flights of stairs (Von's drivers wisely use crates, dollies and elevators to move deliveries around). Better still, Von's even has a fairly good selection of deliverable office supplies. Sure Usedcarsalesman is a Trader Joe's guy, too. He knows, He knows.  But TJs needs to cut a deal with Von's to do home delivery for customers.

Sum total of all this is you are not on the road, traffic congestion (admittedly only slightly) and gas expenditures are reduced, and time is saved.

3. On-line Shopping in General - Who doesn't shop on-line? Exactly. Thing about me is that, Usedcasalesman shops for just about every tangible thing that he needs on-line. He generally avoids state tax and he's not doing the shopping cart, traffic congestion, parking lot, line-waiting crap at the local Sav-On, Rite-Aid, Home "Despot."

Sometimes, the prices are ludicrously good. Usedcarsalesman bought a Samsung "extended life" battery for 19.95 and 3 bucks shipping; his local Sprint store wanted $40 and tax for a "standard life" battery (then throw in my aforementioned refrain about "parking lots).  He wouldn't be surprised if an increase in on-line shopping is directly tied to an increase in energy costs.

So, Usedcarsalesman ordered the electronics and other items on-line and then has them delivered to a mail box store. Once a week he goes to the store and pick up anything that he ordered. The people running the mail box center sign for everything for him so there is never the "you weren't here, you can pick up your package at our convenient Tuscon location," that kind of thing. Fact is that Usedcarsalesman gets what he needs and he doesn't waste time or gas and also saves money!

*4. Netflix et al- Look, video entertainment, for the most part, is not something you should be driving around for. Mailing stuff back and forth is a little 1970s chain-letter-ish (sic), but we'll let that slide. Don't drive to Blockbuster video store (see my gas and parking lot refrain). Yes, order Neflix and get it delivered in the mail; yes, they will be providing Hi Def DVDs next year, too. Better yet, do pay-per-view by Satellite or Digital cable or use Starz Online hooked to by S-VHS or Optical to your TV monitor. Usedcarsalesman does these things and it keeps his heavy-drinking Old Jeep off the road!

5. Teleconference - Hey, even locally, it is an excellent way to see your friends and coworkers, not to mention if you are doing it nationally or internationally. The quality on some services -- like Yahoo IM -- is fairly solid, 30 frames per second (but, yes does have somewhat imperfect audio). This keeps Usedcarsalesman off the road in a lot of cases and its a more complete communication that a telephone call. He knows you are thinking that teleconferencing is like having the family Thanksgiving dinner by video with your Uncle who's on "Death Row" at the "Super-Max" :). But it's actually a lot of fun and you don't even have to bathe to see people or do business! Big future in teleconferencing sales, BTW. And, did Usedcarsalesman mention that it keeps you off the road and away from Airports.

Ok Usedcarsalesman will admit that the aforementioned 5 things are not for everybody and he knows he is probably missing a ton of other things you can do such as commute or take the bus. Also, there are people who are going to want Bio-diesel-Hybrid autos (including me) and have a fetish for playing Roy Rogers on the 50 cent plastic horse rides at the grocery stores (no comment :). But, for Usedcarsalesman, the bottom line is that if he gets in a car outside of going to work or to a class, it is generally to have fun, ie. restaurants, clubs, parties, sporting events, etc). He doesn't think any of those are a waste of time or gas -- regardless of price.  And, even then, his time on the road is minimal.

            

* Update, June 23, 2007 - Receivng your DVDs or HD-DVDS or Blu-Ray discs in the mail is ok.  Usedcarsalesman mentioned www.Starzonline.com as another option. File-sharing sites like Napster, old and new versions also exist as do various legal and illegal, download sites.  The one site that has really caught Usedcarsalesman's attention is www.tv-links.co.uk.  On this site, there are no downloads to your PC or Mac.  Video files -- films, TV -- are accessed remotely by the user when he or she hits one of the long list of links on the site.  Usedcarsalesman knows of people who have essentially stopped watching cable and satellite television, HDTV or not, after using the tv-links site.  Yeah, the resolution sucks, but it lets people Usedcarsalesman knows watch an entire 3 seasons of The Office, every major movie missed in the last 3 years, or every missed episode of the original Star Trek series, when regular TV offers just "next weeks episode" or whatever the Tivo caught (ho hum). 

Bullish on Biodiesel

Usedcarsalesman does not exhibit a great deal of editorial discipline and prefers to hopscotch across all sorts of subjects, rather than focus on one thing (say for example, "cars", what most people think this blog is about).  Frankly, Usedcarsalesman likes to think his writing is on technology and media, but the reality is that technology and media are not a big enough "town" for him. So, he has to write about other things too.

            

Anyway, the subject of Usedcarsalesman's love, today, really is kind of about "cars," or at least their fuels. Namely, it's about Biodiesel fuel -- the fuel you've been hearing about made of fryer grease, soybean or alternate vegetable oil which can power a converted Diesel automobile.

Biodiesel interests Usedcarsalesman for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it can power some autombiles -- he's long paid attention to the impact of the automobile on people's lives. Usedcarsalesman was born in 1971 and his early formative years around Washington D.C. were affected by the Arab oil-embargo, the "gas-crunch," and Jimmy Carter years in the 1970s.               

                     

Then, Usedcarsalesman saw the gas-lines, heard the ideas about new electric cars or solar power, about human-powered vehicles that people were experimenting with.  All of that was going on at the time and made him say, "why not, what's the hold-up, why don't Americans buy this clean-power, new-fuel stuff?"

            
The Reagan 80s rolled around, pump prices fell in real dollars and supplies apparently resumed to pre-gas crunch levels. A younger Usedcarsalesma saw the "environmental stuff" politically take a backseat in the United States, not just in D.C. metro area, but seemingly everywhere in the U.S. outside of maybe, Oregon or the San Francisco Bay area.  It seemed that the general U.S. consensus about the 70s "enviro"-transportation stuff was that it was "bad business," that is was associated with "political weakness" or something to that effect.   As for Usedcarsalesman, he, in 1980, discovered Car and Driver and started worshiping their "-The 10 Best Issue-" and that was that. He kind of stayed on that hot-rod, fast gas-powered sedan course through the 1990s with the automobile.

Then the new millennium rolled around and pump prices took a jump again -- most likely the oil companies hedging . Sure, Usedcarsalesman was (and still is) taken with the modern hybrid car that came on the market in 1999 in the United States in the form of the Honda Insight.  Usedcarsalesman had first seen a drawing of a hybrid auto in 1985 in a print issue of Popular Mechanics; it looked like it had two power plants alright (but nothing was mentioned about regenerative braking or the complementary performance of the engines upon one-another). So, in 1985, Usedcarsalesman saw the idea of two different kinds of engines under the same hood like he saw the film, Godzilla vs Mothra, not something to be taken seriously. But today, the value and operation of hybrids is fairly well known and Usedcarsalesman suspects that these systems might also work well with a Biodiesel powered Diesel engine, to some extent. Which is where Usedcarsalesman get in to Biodiesel fuel.

Now the thing about Biodiesel is that, though he had been reading car magazines for 25 or so years, Usedcarsalesan never new that you could use vegetable oil to power a Diesel automobile. He just didn't know about it; it never crossed his mind. What's even more interesting is that running a Diesel engine on vegetable oil is nothing new -- the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolph Diesel, was able to run his engine entirely on peanut oil at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. He even suggested, in 1911, that "(the diesel engine) would help considerably in the development of agriculture in the countries that used it." Understandably, in that time period, most people were continuing to run away from the countryside to cities, not vice-versa. So, Diesel's vegetable-oil-as-fuel idea probably wasn't able to capitalize on any latent urban dweller nostalgia for farm-life.
                  
But, nowadays, it's a different story. Not nostalgia for farm-life, but you know, Biodiesel fuel, or vegetable oil for fuel. We are in the midst of a second gas-crunch, so-to-speak; and, citizens also want to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and they also wouldn't mind a reduction in the pollutants that cloud urban skies. Biodiesel provides those things.

               

In fact, Usecarsalesman personally, eagerly awaits the chance to run Biodiesel in his hypothetical, Diesel-powered car. Whether he's rich or poor, were 15 years younger or 15 years older, or whether petrol-gas was priced at 45 cents a gallon or $4.50 a gallon, Biodiesel sounds like a great, clean, domestically-produced idea to Usedcarsalesman. Which is why he thinks that reasonable investment in the production of Biodiesel is a great idea. It looks like a huge-growth area. It looks like Ben and Jerry's meets Exxon! 

                  

Usedcarsalesman sees a number of areas of investment regarding Biodiesel. You have the current and future stocks of Biodiesel processors and Biodiesel vehicle-conversion companies and perhaps specialized Biodiesel retailers. Then you have commodity investments, such as soybean futures; when was the last time somebody thought about the Chicago Commodities Exchange as an individual investor unless you were a farmer seeking to hedge your investment in the crop you just planted? You also have real-estate development: a lot of money could suddenly start flowing to the U.S. farm-states, home to farmers who were formerly reliant on Federal subsidies.  Their new money may draw new people, entrepreneurs to farming areas and those people are going to need places to live and commercial structures, too (and, of course, that developed property will increase in value as more people move to said areas).

Because Biodiesel fuel -- essentially vegetable oil -- can be made wherever its vegetable of origin can be grown, you may see areas such as Africa or arable parts of Russia become enriched by growing and providing vegetable-based fuel to highly populated markets such as China and India, not to mention to the "West." Furthermore, China and India present their own opportunities for investment and development in the Biodiesel arena -- transportation, vehicle-conversion and retail fuel sales.

So, in sum, Usedcarsalesman sees many reasons to be unapologetically bullish on Biodiesel investment!

Microsoft "Longhorn:" RSS-use on Steroids

Right now 2% of web users are employing some kind of RSS news reader software, whether web based or PC or Mac-based. These RSS-reader programs aggregate headlines and article summaries from all RSS-providing online sources which a user selects. Said "on-line sources" have to employ an RSS feed creation program of some kind to produce their regular "feeds." These users employing an RSS Reader can essentially "corner," on a regular basis, most every bit of published information that pertains to a respective subject.

Usedcarsalesman, too, has wanted to incorporate RSS or "Really Simple Syndication" in to his blog. He figured that he sometimes discuses topics that has to do with media, technology and too many other issues that a few people might be interested in getting a regular "feed" on. Thus, began his still on-going quest to piece together the business of RSS feeds -- their creation, transmission, storage and consumption.

Early on Usedcarsalesman realized that Blogger provided Atom-type syndication built in with their free blogging service. And he has happily employed it (of course, there are still a few grey areas regarding its operation that he needs to fill in). But, of course, that was not good enough for him; he wanted to be like the larger, "grown-up" sites out their like BlogMaverick.com or WilWheaton.net, that make skillful use of RSS.

      

So, Usedcarsalesman went ahead and picked up "Feed-For-All" software which was basically another feed-creation platform; however, this presented another series of seemingly undefined grey areas for which he needed appropriate definition. But, on he persevered, using chat rooms, discussion boards, tips from other bloggers more experienced than himself to sort out the deals with RSS.

So, why does Usedcarsalesman bother, why does he care bout RSS? Because, he kind of believes that there is going to be growth in the numbers of people using RSS to get their information. This is not a new belief; analysts have been suggesting that RSS is "the new email" for the last 2-3 years. Right now it's used by 2% of web users -- this statistic kind of reminds him of the limited number of people on the web in the early and mid-90s; but, this figure could very well grow to 50-60%+, just as grew the number of web users and broadband users over the last 10-15 years.

One of the main reasons for the growth of RSS could be Microsoft's new operating system, Code-Named "Longhorn" (edit: now sold in 2007 as Vista). Mr. Bill Gates has apparently been thinking, "if people are going to read RSS Feeds, then they better be doing it using a Microsoft product." Just as when Gates began incorporating a Web-browser, Explorer, in to his operating systems, starting with Windows 95, his company now plans to incorporate an RSS feed reader in to his "Longhorn" system.

             

This "free" RSS news reader could, however, interrupt any flow of money to software companies making stand-alone RSS News Readers (such as the one Usedcarsalesman just purchased!). It's all very similar to how Microsoft's Internet Explorer took the Browser market from Netscape Navigator in the 1990s by packaging it together with new Microsoft PC Operating Systems.
         
The good news about Longhorn -- though perhaps not for the stand-alone RSS News Reader software providers -- is for the people providing RSS content to other people. Not too long after Longhorn hits the market, you will probably see the number of web users reading RSS News Feeds climb from 2% to 20%, a 10-fold increase. Usedcarsalesman speculates that this will happen because Microsoft's Longhorn (Vista) will put the matter of RSS front-and-center before a vast number of new computer or OS buyers. And as old computers (and their operating systems) are gradually traded for new, you could see the aforementioned number, as he said, climb to half or more of all web-users before too long.

So, again, this is good news for content producers. It means there will be more people who will be seeking regular information and articles in an RSS-format and who will read what you write. Now if only Usedcarsalesman can get his RSS feeds and programs organized in the mean time...

A Brush With "Reality"

Voice Mail From Reality Show

(The aforementioned is an edited voice mail message that Usedcarsalesman received and he is simply using it to kick-off this post).

Usedcarsalesman gets a call from "X-woman" from the Blind Date show. Apparently, they are starting to shoot something called Julie Gets Married, which he was told was supposed to be like The Bachelorette.

          

How did this happen?  Usedcarsalesman had been using one of these on-line dating services and apparently a woman who is the female protagonist in the show used the profiles listed in the service to select he and a few others to round out her "harem" of potential suitors.  Well, little did they know they were dealing with a guy (Usedcarsalesman) who has never, ever watched Reality Television since it has been on for the last, what, 6 or 7 years.

                     

Now, this is not because Usedcarsalesman is some kind of elitist dude who doesn't like reality television. It's that, other than maybe the Larry Sanders show from the 1990s and a few of the more recent HBO shows and some of the shows on History and Discovery channels and maybe ESPN, he didn't really watch a Television monitor, save to catch a DVD. In fact, Usedcarsalesman wouldn't even know about this Reality TV business except that it had caught so much news and there are so many people apparently running around pitching Reality concepts.

So, after Usedcarsalesman gets this call, he decides to go ahead and investigate what this new show is all about. Julie Gets Married obviously isn't airing yet, so he decide to look at some of the producer's other work that is on: namely, Blind Date. He checks his local TV listings and he sees that Blind Date is on at 1AM (Prime-time! :) on LA's KCOP.

      

Usedcarsalesman stays up to watch and sure enough, 1AM rolls around and here came the Blind Date show. And, at first glance, Usedcarsalesman thought it was probably the most horrendous bit of television that he had ever watched!

In the early-morning episode he was watching, they matched up some poor schmo with an ex-Playmate and "pressed record." Wasn't pretty. But, after a few minutes, Usedcarsalesman did start to laugh his ass off. And he'll admit, he did suddenly develop respect for reality television and its entertainment value. It was kind of "twisted" like that kid who's interested in using a magnifying glass to smoke ants with the sun's rays.

So, did Usedcarsalesman ever interview for that show? Hey, he digs watching train wrecks too, but it doesn't mean he'd want to be in one :)

Wanted: Onset of a Modern "Sputnik Syndrome"

If you go to www.spaceentrepreneur.com, you'll see that it redirects back to that "hive of villainy," usedcarsalesman.com. Yes, as you might surmise by the "spaceentrepreneur" URL, Usedcarsalesman has and still does "dig" outer space and aerospace.  And he's eager to support those people, rich and poor, who are looking to make advances in that arena.
   
Story has it that when he was but a wee lad of only 1-and-a-half years old, Usedcarsalesman's folks took him to see the launch of the Apollo 17 Saturn V rocket in the early hours of a Florida morning. This was the last of the Apollo Moon launches, so obviously it was very important that Usedcarsalesman stay awake and watch Von Braun's giant lift off.

Allegedly Usedcarsalesman stayed awake right until the last minute or so before the launch.  Then he was seen to fall in to a slumber readily announced by his numerous "Snores and ZZZZZZs." 

Perhaps missing the launch as a small child (and numerous reminders of his missing said launch) subconsciously or consciously led an adult Usedcarsalesman to stay alert and somehow private space industry.  Or maybe Usedcarsalesman just digs freeze-dried ice cream.
   
Seriously though, where does today's new commercial space industry -- the industry that's supposed to put private persons in space -- stand today?

We have SpaceAdventures, a company which has done the important and highly novel work of brokering trips aboard Russian Spacecraft to the International Space Station. And we have the new, ambitiously-named Mojave "Spaceport" only 100 miles or so from Los Angeles. There you'll find long-established companies such as Scaled Composites (of SpaceShipOne fame) amongst other younger, space-related start-ups. We also have Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Virgin's joint venture with Scaled Composites, The Spaceship Company.
   
All of these commercial enterprises make for interesting news and they have the green-light from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and its Office of Commercial Space Transportation .   So, why is it that the aformentioned companies strike Usedcarsalesman as relatively "small-potatoes?"   

Usedcarsalesman would suggest that the new commercial space industry is still missing an important that something is still missing to stimulate growth in their arena: perhaps a war or a foreign government creating a highly permissive space-launch regulatory environment that puts the U.S. on the defensive and essentially forces a channeling of capital to its new domestic space enterprise.

 

Sputnik and U.S. fear of it termed so-called Sputnik Syndrome did wonders for the aerospace business in the U.S.   aybe the new U.S. commercial space industry needs a new version of the  "Sputnik Syndrome." As with 1957s Soviet Sputnik launch and the correspondingly large U.S. political reaction, only once some other nation or alliance and their respective aerospace enterprises has shown evidence of being ahead of the U.S and its aerospace enterprises will "shifts" -- big capital flow to new aerospace ventures -- occur.  At least, this is what Usedcarsalesman sees reason to believe.

Oh, So This Is What Home Theater Supposed To Look Like?!

Usedcarsalesman met up with a small group of people to celebrate a friend's birthday at the Cat and Fiddle on Sunset Blvd. His friend having the birthday plays lead guitar in a band (with several very "download-able" singles) named "Gualberto," which is the name of its lead singer and lyricist. When the birthday dinner thing was done, he tagged along with his friend and his band-mates to a warehouse which has been converted to loft apartments near downtown LA.

We arrived at one of the apartments currently occupied by one of the friends of the band and his girlfriend. The apartment is one of these places with ceilings that are about 20 feet high and the only apparent room, apart from the main area serving as bedroom, living room and kitchen, is a bathroom. Very trendy, artsy, cool place.

Anyway, it's a Friday night and people including me are sitting around in the main area doing whatever. The band's friend hits a switch on one of the concrete pillars that supports the high ceiling. Down from one of the walls slowly unrolls this gigantic Projection screen, a screen which seemed like it was about 20 feet across diagonally. Usedcarsalesman was impressed with the size of the screen; it seemed like it was about twice the size of any roll-type projection screen that he'd ever seen, say in elementary school, that kind of thing.

But as he thought about the last time he'd seen a roll-down-type projection screen (like he said, elementary school), Usedcarsalesman was made to recall the dirty, grainy films he'd have to watch on them. These were not particularly appealing.

Sure, Usedcarsalesman saw projection-TV screens in bars that were showing sporting events, etc. And, the video resolution on those was OK, or at least better than the aforementioned elementary school fare. But, still nothing that made Usedcarsalesman think, "...AM SEEING STATE OF THE ART...MUST FIND A WAY TO BUY, EVEN IF HAVE TO SELL EITHER SOUL OR FIRST BORN(!)" like he did when he saw this one.

The owner popped a DVD in to a player connected to the video projector, a projector which was about 25 or so feet from the screen. The room darkened and then the video hit the screen. As emphasized before, Usedcarsalesman couldn't take his eyes off the screen! It had resolution better than any big-screen multiplex movie theater he'd ever paid 30 bucks to take a date to, whether digital projector, 70mm film, whatever -- Literally a 20 foot diagonal window in to another world!

Usedcarsalesman's respect for video projectors had instantaneously spiked upward like the Washington Monument! The crazy thing was, he didn't even think this projector was one of the expensive, $30,000 Runco projectors he'd vaguely heard of. He thought that what he was looking at was a garden-variety product from a nice, big-name Japanese company.

Needless to say, Usedcarsalesman was awestruck by this 20-foot-screen and the glorious resolution of the video displayed upon it. At the night's end, he sincerely felt that he owed the screen's owner $11.50 for the time spent viewing.

So, Usedcarsalesman is a definite new devotee of the modern video projector; if you have the living space, you can definitely use one of these projectors to literally own your own movie theater.

Collecting Pop-Culture Items Before and After eBay

When Usedcarsalesman was a kid in the 1970s and the early-to-mid 1980s, he collected all manner of toys, comic books, posters and assorted other items related to the Star Wars-franchise the way some kids collected baseball cards or Pez dispensers. Today, his collections still exist and currently reside 3000 miles away in a concrete bunker in an undisclosed location -- actually an above-ground house.

The good news is that most of those collected Star Wars items have appreciated in value, substantially. But recently, Usedcarsalesman considered that when he factored in the square-footage of residential storage space that old Star Wars items like his took up in a house -- especially one in a area with a booming real estate market -- that any appreciation which those collected items achieved was largely negated.  Even though the items went up by "10-1000+"-times their original price, the business equation of which they were a part ultimately amounted to zero dollars after Usedcarsalesman tallied the value of the storage area that the items occupied over the years.

Today it seems to Usedcarsalesman that he collected things at a young age due to his interest in the wisdom of "buying low and sell high." Great.  It's just that his execution of the storage of those items was a little off -- he'd buy the items and hide them away, kind of in the old Citizen-Kane-style.  Guess you could say he wasn't a full-on nerd who wanted to show the items off, he was just somebody who reasonably presumed the items would increase in value down the road.

But, some, wiser guys -- definitely mostly males -- who really love the stuff they collected in the past and present actually display their "collections" in their own residences as one might display art or paintings or sculpture. They literally have rooms filled wall-to-wall with Star Trek or Star Wars items or old Washington Senators memorabilia and that makes a lot of sense. I guess you could say that it adds to your living arrangement rather than simply subtracting from your residential square footage. And, that's probably the most logical way to hold such items over time: you have interesting items that provide value by giving you and your guests something to look at and which also appreciate enough to offset any costs in their use of space.

As we all know, speculative collecting of pop-culture items has turned in to big business over the last decade. Companies such as eBay have basically aggregated a million collections and small retail hobby enterprises and turned what was once a mom and pop thing in to a gigantic, fluid secondary market for toys and kitsch. As such, If Usedcarsalesman were to take all the original Star Wars items he collected and put it in a room at his place, it'd look like he went on eBay -- circa 2005 -- and spent $30,000 on rare 70s and 80s era pop-culture merchandise.

Anybody with a Visa card could do that nowadays; so it kind of undercuts the fun, treasure-hunting and work which was inherent in the whole business of "collecting" when Usedcarsalesman was a kid.  But in its favor, eBay does offer people the advantage of being able to buy items which may increase in value and which will also appeal to the collector's overall aesthetic tastes, too.

That was tough to do thirty years ago as a kid who had to do the best he could with the limited selection available to him locally. Back then, Usedcarsalesman could generally collect stuff locally that would increase in value, but he just wanted to "put it under a mattress" so to speak. Nowadays, he can have the best of both worlds: collect for speculation and aesthetic appeal thanks to eBay.

Note: Usedcarsalesman is not ticked-off that the whole baseball card, comic-book, toy, garage-sale thing has gone mass-market on eBay. If anything, it's made it easier for young people and adults to get started collecting, speculating or otherwise trading in custom-tailored items that were once the preserve of the hardcore collector or treasure-hunter. And, the people who did the old-fashioned legwork of collecting stuff like baseball cards or Star Wars toys locally as kids (with no eBay) often end up using that experience as a spring board for commodity speculation as adults, say in real estate or automobiles or fine-art.