Rubénerd!

Having just risen with a hot cup of coffee and the chirping of birds, I heard the postie coming and rushed outside in my fluffy slippers to see what it was. For the first time I got something from eBay that I didn't order, or at least I don't remember ordering!

My fluffy slippers are purple

Upon arriving at the aformentioned letterbox, I opened it up to find an envelope addressed to a "Ruben Schade". Given this person had the same name as me, I decided it was appropriate for me to take ownership of it, and to open it.

I was expecting a Marian Call poster, or a new anime figure from a good friend of mine in Japan, or some academic records, or perhaps even a bill, but it wasn't. Well, I knew it couldn't have been a poster or anime figure, unless they'd folded it or steamrolled it, respectivelt.

The envelope bore no markings of whom it was from. The return address was a non descript post office box in Melbourne, a city south of Sydney and Canberra with no discernible landmarks of any international importance.

So what was inside? Huh? HUH?

Inside was a pamphlet from eBay Australia:

Posting your eBay items is now easier than ever

Shipping matters, and we want you to succeed. Which is why we're shipping you this 500g flat-rate satchel. It's specially designed to make selling on eBay cheaper, simpler and, best of all, trackable.

So login to clickandsend.com.au and discover how simple selling on eBay can be.

Sure enough, wrapped around it was an Australia Post satchel thingy, those bags made out of that stretcy, non-biodegradable plastic stuff.

I'm flattered that they'd send me a freebie like this but... why? Did they send these to every eBay Australia seller, or to a select few? I do sell things, but certainly nothing exciting in either value or volume, and most of it was in Singapore which has nothing to do with Australian eBay other than in name and parent company. I suspect I could find out if I went to the eBay Australia website, but its already late and I want to sleep.

Wait, hold on!

I figured it out! I know why they sent it to me: so that I would be a schmuck and talk about it! Online advertising for the cost of a satchel... touché eBay. Wow, that rhymed so well! Here, let me try to make that into a song:

Touché...
eBay...
You send sachel my way...
Touché...
eBay...
Hey hey hey hey hey HEY!

And that -- ladies, gentleman and everyone else -- is why I'm not a musician.

Just won an Arty-ZIF to Compact Flash adaptor card on eBay, and was quoted this interesting table from the seller showing the percentage statistical liklihood of my item arriving depending on what part of the world I'm residing in.

	5-10	11-15	16-20	21-25	26-30	40
US	5.20	50.00	29.70	10.40	4.70	refund
UK	9.90	63.20	19.10	3.40	4.40	refund
Canada	2.00	45.10	31.40	17.60	3.90	refund
Australia	21.40	52.10	14.30	7.20	4.00	refund
Germany	11.10	22.20	30.30	20.90	15.50	refund
Brazil/Russian	0.50	8.60	43.80	28.10	15.00	refund
Pluto	Undeliverable, no longer a planet					refund
Rigel 7	Now we're just being silly					refund

According to this hard data, I'll most likely have my new adaptor in 11 to 15 business days, because I'm not a Brazillian Russian.

In our efforts to clean out our apartment here, we decided to put a bunch of old home entertainment equipment up on eBay. I'd forgotten just how maddeningly frustrating it could be!

I've been using eBay to buy things for many years and have only had a small number of negative experiences, but assuming the role of a seller is another thing entirely. For people who make their livelihoods off the service and have thousands of items for sale, I'm sure its just fine but for the person looking to only put a few items up it's a quick trip to the loony bin.

My biggest gripe isn't even the ridiculous little charges they impose on everything from the gallery images to the way text is presented, or the slow and crappy 1999-era interface to enter item details, it just doesn't work.

Steps can be found on staircases

1. Upon painstakingly entering in all the details for our first item, I was informed I wasn't allowed to sell in Singapore because I have an Aussie eBay account. I don't know what they hope to accomplish with such a restriction, but I played along and used my dad's eBay account instead.

2. Upon painstakingly re-entering in all the details for our first item, I was informed I would need to convert my dad's account to a seller.

3. I re-entered the login credentials and was asked whether I wanted to pay the fees with PayPal, a credit card or a bank account. I opted to go with PayPal seeing as my dad has used it many, many times on eBay before and clearly had it linked up already. Before going any further, we got a terse error message.

4. After trying this a dozen more times on Windows, Mac and FreeBSD machines around the house, we gave up attempting to use PayPal for the fees. Upon painstakingly re-entering in all the details for our first item (again) we chose credit card instead. It worked, and we became a seller.

5. We clicked the List This Item button and were given another error message claiming we needed to be verified before listing the item. The only way to do this? With a PayPal account. If it had worked we would have used PayPal, but we had to use a credit card instead! And this despite the account already being linked to a verified PayPal account.

So far I haven't got any comments back from my support emails, but they could surprise my any minute now ;).

Unfortunately with Digital Restriction Management systems that's simply not true.

Barely had I finished that previous whimsical post about DOS nostalgia than something arrived in the mail that I just have to ramble on about here now too! I'll pretend it was intentional. Yeah, that works :).

In 1994 or 1995 after we'd had our original DOS machine for a while, my dad invested a small fortune upgrading it with a Creative Hex Speed CD-ROM drive and SoundBlaster card. By that point we'd long since upgraded from Windows 3.0 MME to Windows 3.1 which meant we could now finally run some of the Microsoft Home multimedia titles we'd been using at school and at my grandfather's place.

Since then I've long since moved over to the Mac and FreeBSD and don't run Windows any more, but I've been really impressed by how DOSBox has been able to cope under the stress of running Windows 3.1, then running these old CD-ROM titles! So far we have:

• Dangerous Creatures
• Dinosaurs
• Explorapedia: The World of People
• Explorapedia: The World of Nature
• Musical Instruments
• Oceans

It's surprising the company responsible for the tacky and clumsy Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Office 2007 interfaces were able to come up with such polished, cool software before. While the idea of the multimedia CD-ROM has long since been eclipsed by the web, these were fantastic products when they came out.

Anyway I can now add Dinosaurs to our collection (well look at that, I already did!) having picked it up on eBay for $8 including shipping!

Three nonsense posts in a row? That's pushing it a bit isn't it? Well to be fair if this were printed in paper this would be of greater concern given paper is a physical product that's made from trees, whereas electrons are generated from trees which are decomposed, compressed and put into furnaces to drive turbines several million years later. See the difference?

Anyway logging into eBay this evening to do my daily check to make sure nobody was selling my soul in a jar or my image on a grilled cheese sandwich or an image of my soul in a jar on a grilled cheese sandwich, I was informed by the super intelligent eBay data mining service that the above list of products were tailored "just for [me]".

Now to be fair, the coffee machine is a reasonable guess, but what they didn't take into account is I already have one and it barely gets used because I spend my life studying and doing work in coffee shops.

Quite frankly, I'm not going to comment on the other items. Then again Nurie did say I look androgynous enough to cosplay as a female character. I think it's something to do with the hair. Good thing I'm getting it mostly cut off tomorrow.

I like to think one of the things I inherited from my beautiful late mum was her absurd, ridiculous sense of humour! Mmm, grilled cheese sandwiches.

With this in mind, last week I noticed someone on eBay in Germany was selling a set of those "Intel Inside" Xeon processor computer stickers for a couple of Euros. For those of you who don't know, the Xeons are Intel's server class CPUs that are found in the Mac Pro and other high end desktop and server hardware.

My first reaction was to snap them up without question, with the intention of affixing them to... my 600MHz Pentium 3 Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook! Genius right?

Well they just arrived in the mail this morning complete with stamps from Germany! My father is from Hesse and he was quite the stamp collector in his youth so I imagine I inherited part of his fascination with them.

As for the stickers themselves, if you know you're shameless Intel advertising these stickers here are the second generation logos using the new Intel logo, before they moved over to those new crystal or landscape-oriented holographic ones. Wikipedia has a photo comparing the the styles. I reckon the ones I got are the classiest.

I'll wait until I have some more of that foaming computer cleaning product so I can give the case on the notebook a quick once-over before putting the Xeon sticker on. I don't know why I find the prospect of putting a Xeon sticker on such old hardware so hilarious, but it just is!

The Jack Tramiel Commodore 64 anniversary episode!

ACT ONE: Too much stuff and not enough time, evil overcast-ness, shipping eBay goods overseas, Synclair ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s, five times at the Singapore Post centre, duty is a bum, Asian obsession with cool gadgets, efficiency escaping snail mail, Bureau of Oversight.

ACT TWO: Using the Griffin iMic and the LAME encoder, hope it makes the show sound better :)

ACT THREE: Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, old video clip from the Computer Chronicles, wanting to meet Jack Tramiel and Woz, boardroom stupidity, Schade family IBM machines, Gary Kildall.

ACT FOUR: Smart Singaporean bus stops, tracking buses with GPS, big brother-ism, live twitter posts from Dave Wares, Dave Winer, Leo Laporte and Robert J. Berger.

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 34:41, 19.1MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

My third auction selling... this time I parted with a copy of JavaScript for Dummies:

I bought this book while I was working for Peter at Veritas DGC in Singapore, but in the last few months all the effects on my website I've been able to accomplish using Perl/CGI and some basic CSS, which I think is more accessible than JavaScript. JavaScript has a place in more complex or important projects, but not in a funny webpage like mine ;).

Winning bid: AU $10.50
Ended 24-Feb-06 22:40:49 AEDST
Start time: 21-Feb-06 22:40:49 AEDST
History: 3 bids (AU $2.00 starting bid)
Winning bidder: rc1wom ( 4 )

So far I've been pleased with my eBay auctions, I've been cleaning out my stuff while at the same time making a few quid too, I think it's so far been a worthwhile exercise.