The eBay sales deadline for Donna’s pumper has come and gone and there were no bids at all.  What a surprise, eh?  Keeping a $3,500 reserve on a piece of junk wasn’t really a wise decision.  I can’t imagine anybody even going to the time and expense of picking it up for free.  Even a scrap dealer wouldn’t get enough brass off of it to make it pay.  With this loon you can’t begin to guess what he’ll be doing next with it.

Keep your eyes open, folks.  If you see this junker driving through your neighborhood looking for a parking place, call the cops and clue them in.

*  *  *

My phono/tape-to-CD recorder was delivered yesterday afternoon.  That was pretty fast service.  I ordered it during the holiday weekend (It was on Friday night, to be exact), so I didn’t expect any action on it right away.  But Tuesday morning when everybody came back to work, they processed the order and shipped it out.  And yesterday, Wednesday, the Fed-Ex truck left it on my porch.  Good ol’ Fed-Ex.

I was surprised to find that this machine is bigger than it looks in the pictures.  It’s 19 inches wide, 13 in. deep and 12 in. tall.  The cabinet is solid wood and the whole thing weighs 35 lbs.  I definitely have to find some dedicated space for this thing.

Last night I looked through the instruction manual and got another pleasant surprise…..it’s all in one language. 

Something that I learned while reading through it, is that my blank computer CD’s won’t work.  Nuts.  And I’ve got plenty of those, too.  You have to use discs that have the phrase “digital audio” printed under the CD logo.  They’re similar to the blank DVD’s that have to be initialized and then finalized after you’re finished recording on them.  So I’ve got an unplanned trip to Best Buy today to pick up a pack of those.

Another interesting feature is the way you can separate the tunes onto separate tracks.  A cassette tape is continuous and one song runs into the next without any separation other than a pause in the audio.  But when you are recording onto a CD, there is a button on the machine, and the remote control unit, that you can press and it will create a separate track on the disc.  So at the end of a song, and before the next one begins, you just give a quick press and a new, individual track is created on the CD.

If you cannot sit around while the recording session is going on, then you can set it to an automatic mode and it will make the track separations itself whenever there is an audio gap of 2 seconds or more.  That’ll be fine when doing the old LP’s, but I don’t think my home-made cassettes have that big a time gap between tunes.

This is going to be interesting, but I have to get out and buy some blank CD’s and a couple of extra phonograph needles.  First, though, we have to get this equipment checked out.  And I’ll go start the coffee.

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