Twelve Black Code Monkeys

In a random remembrance moment I had this morning, a couple of food items that I really enjoyed, but only briefly, came back to me. It’s odd that I would remember such ephemera and I can’t think why I would right now except maybe for the added focus on food during the week of Thanksgiving.

Zeus Pasta Chips – Back when I was in college in Boston in the late 80’s, a small Massachusetts snack food company called Smartfood was making some waves, at least locally. Their cheddar popcorn was all the rage, but another snack by them didn’t quite make the big time. I remember buying Zeus Pasta Chips or just “Zeus Chips” a few times at a local convenience store. I was smitten with these chips, which were some kind of pasta that was fried and covered with a similar cheddar powder. They were crispy, but not tough and brittle like raw pasta. Smartfood eventually got bought by Frito-Lay who did not continue the Zeus Chips product, if it was even still being made by that point. A Google provided only one small bit of info about Zeus Chips and some other similar pasta chips by Bill Robert on this page.

Pepsi Kona – Much later than my affaire with Zeuce Chips, I came across this product at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was Pepsi that had been given a slight coffee flavor. Being a big fan of coffee, I was smitten. Unfortunately, as I found out later, I believe from Pepsi itself, it was a product that was being test-marketed in certain areas but apparently had not garnered enough good buzz to warrant an actual release. I would say that I probably had this drink somewhere between 1995 and 1999, but I can’t be any more exact. Ok, some further searching on Wikipedia says that it was released in 1997; however, this Geocities page (watch for popups – no pun intended!) has this to say:

Pepsi Kona was an innovative creation by Pepsi, being a mix of Pepsi and Coffee. In 1994, when this soda came out, Pepsi began to limit production of the lines that were just released; only selling 20oz and 2 liters. Also in the highly caffeinated arena, but in a different era, was Pepsi A.M. A.M. actually stands for what one thinks A.M. should stand for, being the period in the day before noon. In the mid 1980’s, Pepsi came out with A.M. to reach a lot of the coffee-drinking youth. Of all of the failed sodas, Pepsi A.M. was the only soda that I remember a commercial for. The commercial ended with a sunny window and Pepsi : The Taste of a New Generation in horridly bright white letters.

Further searching on the web “uncovered” the fact that I probably knew at one point but had forgotten that the company that bought Smartfood – Frito-Lay – is owned by the company that makes Pepsi, PepsiCo! Hey, there’s a connection!

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After 3 days in St. Michaels for me and my wife’s 1st anniversary, I’m back at grindstone. The inn we stayed at did not have wifi (nor could I find anywhere nearby to leach or even pay), and cell phone reception was almost non-existent throughout much of where we were traveling. Plus of course I wasn’t supposed to be doing anything aside from spending time with my betrothed and remembering the crazy, wonderful weekend one year ago. We did take lots of photos, and I finally got a chance to break in my new digital SLR (Nikon D70), so I’ll be posting links to those once I post them. It’s amazing how much you miss by not reading news for just a few days! I may just have to skim through most of it and pick out really major stuff – as it is I have holding onto some pieces that I’ve wanted to post about for at least a week but which don’t carry an inherent expiration date. In any case, hopefully you will see some actual substantive stuff from me later today. Thanks for being patient.

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First a disclaimer: I’m no audiophile. I’m a gadget geek who can tell the difference between an MP3 Encoded at 196kbs and… 32kbps? Or between a reporter talking over a telephone line and one talking live. I can make out the extra channels in a surround sound system, and other basic things like this. I’m in no way a connoisseur of audio fidelity.

Moving on, I’ve been trying to set something up so that I could listen to music or audio books in my car on my daily commute without a lot of fuss. Years ago I bought a fairly expensive head unit that gave me a CD player, but not long after that it was stolen. That was the last time I bought something after-market. Until a month ago that is.

The car that I owned for the last five years was in a fended bender in the spring that totaled it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s what my insurance company told me. I was lucky in that a friend was selling one of his cars at around the same amount as the check I was getting from my insurance company. I love the car, which is a Honda Civic, but the one thing I grew to hate about it was the stereo, a pioneer CD player with a non-detachable head. This thing was impossible to figure out how to operate. I could change the channel and the volume, but that’s about it. Even turning it on and off was a pain, and so I ended up just lowering and raising the volume instead most of the time. I could never get the clock to change, despite spending probably a total of an hour (spread out on different occasions). This coming from someone who has a fair degree of familiarity and stubbornness when it comes to figuring out functionality of electronics.

I had been toying in the back of my mind about getting a new car stereo installed almost from the day I took possession of the car, but for some reason I didn’t start to seriously consider it until August. I was using the iTrip FM transmitter to transmit the signal from my iPod to the car stereo. While the iTrip is generally viewed as the best FM transmitter for the iPod, it still can be not the most optimal thing to use. I live in the DC area which has lots of stations and reception changes as you drive through different parts of the area. This means that if I set a frequency at home, by the time I get halfway to work, that frequency may start getting a lot of interference. Changing the frequency, while not terribly difficult, does take a little practice, and is not something one can do easily (or more importantly safely) while driving. Aside from this, the sound quality is not spectacular. It’s probably fine most of the time for audio books, but for music, especially softer stuff where quality matters like acoustical performances, classical, etc., you will definitely be able to tell a difference between it and a CD. Comparing it to a radio station, though, one may come away detecting no real difference in quality.

More than anything else, though, I probably just wanted to get the damn Pionieer out of my car. Actually it is still there as I write this, but in the trunk, where it can’t hurt anyone else. So, I started looking for car stereos to replace it in August, as I mentioned. Really I could have cared less about the CD player. I’ve converted all my CD’s to MP3 and they all sit on my iPod, so unless I want to hear a CD that I buy on the way back from the store – and this tends to be something that happens maybe once or twice a year these days – the CD player is pretty much useless to me. I do, however, listen to the radio fairly often. Seeing as all car stereo head units that I knew of at least had a radio, this wasn’t really an issue. But, as I found out, one can’t buy a unit with ONLY a radio. Sure, maybe they exist somewhere, but not at any major chain store. Next I decided to look for one with a radio-cassette combination, since I thought it would be cheaper than a radio-CD player. But it looks like the cassette really has been completely and utterly crushed by the CD. I was able to find maybe one or at most two cassette players being sold, compared to what, maybe 30 or 40 different CD players?

What I was really looking for, though, was a unit that an “Aux In” or “Auxiliary In” which is just a fancy/audiophile term for a input port in the stereo unit into which you can plug external devices and then hear them through the car stereo. Really, this means any device which has a headphone jack can be plugged in, even including, say, a cell phone. Anyway, what I found was that this “Aux In” feature is not as popular as one would guess, or at least the manufacturers of these stereo units don’t believe so. It also doesn’t seem as it would be the most expensive part of the unit, as it seems it might just be a little more pricey to set up the laser and all the other components in a CD player than what amounts to some metal and wires. Yet, almost all of the units that sported this feature were at least $300, and this in a category where at least half of the units were under this price. Luckily, one manufacturer seems to have bucked the trend, AIWA. This is so even though AIWA is owned by Sony who, as most others, don’t sell anything with Aux In for under $300. The AIWA CDC-X144, their lowest end radio-CD head unit, does have this input. It was being sold by a local Circuit City for the low cost of $100. The reviews on Circuit City’s web page were not stunning, but I thought for $100, how can you go wrong? Plus, anything could be better than the Pioneer that was causing me daily frustration, right?

Right. The actual cost came to around $180 with installation and tax, so it may not be as dirt cheap as I initially made it out, but it still won’t break the bank for most people, especially considering that iPods go for $300-400, and not too long ago up to $500. I’m sure getting your BMW or Volkswagon iPodized or whatever the term is, isn’t cheap either. Anyway, I now simply plug stuff (mainly my iPod) into the Aux In and get sound as if I’m listening with headphones, or listening to a CD for that matter. I don’t have to deal with the sub-par FM reception or sound quality, nor do I have to deal with how the stereo on my old car would cause my cassette adapters (I tried a few) to start to click after things got too hot, which was maybe an hour in Winter, but about 30 seconds during summer.

I don’t know why I waited so long to buy this, but I’m sure glad I did, and I hope this provides people in the same boat some insight that might help them to make the jump sooner rather than later if indeed it makes sense for them to do so.

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Well, after driving me and countless other Sidekick users away due to their idiotic and anti-customer policy of not offering a product that had already been developed, T-Mobile has finally decided to offer Outlook Synch for this device. Unfortunately it is just too late for many of us, and really a slap in the face to those who fought so hard to get this capability only to be told that it wouldn’t happen.

For those few who are unfamiliar with this debacle, Danger, the company that designed the Sidekick, promised the capability for users to synchronize (or “synch”) their phone’s information (contacts, to-do’s, appointments, etc.) with popular personal information management software like Microsoft’s Outlook. Back in August of 2002, right before the first black and white Sidekick was released, Danger said that synch would be available “soon.” Rumors and unofficial responses from the company for the next year or so promised that synch was just around the corner. Finally, in the Spring of this year, it was learned that at least one mobile provider outside of the U.S. was already offering this capability. In other words, it had been developed and implemented elsewhere, but T-Mobile, for some reason, was refusing to offer it to their customers. Neither Danger nor T-Mobile would comment on when synch would come out or why it wasn’t currently being offered. I myself decided to make this issue a bit more public and so I initiated an online petition to get T-Mobile to offer Synch. This finally garnered the first official comment from T-Mobile: “Sidekick was chosen for its appeal to consumers who want one integrated, standalone communication solution at an unparalleled value. We are aware of the petition and continue to evaluate new Sidekick offerings, but at this time, do not have plans to launch PIM synch.”

Of course, this comment made it clear to many, including myself, that T-Mobile could not be relied on to EVER offer synch. Maybe they would, but there was no guarantee, and since it had been years since first promised and months since it had been offered through other carriers, the possibility seemed remote at best.

Because of this, when a friend offered me his Treo 600 (the Palm platform has offered synch since it’s first models from almost 10 years ago) for a much discounted price, I jumped at the chance. I wrote a review of how the Treo 600 compares to the Sidekick, and at least for me, the Treo won the battle.

Now the Sidekick II has been released, and with it this synch software. While this is finally a big step in the right direction, it does seem like a slap in the face to previously loyal Sidekick users who clamored for this functionality for years only to be told coldly that there were no plans to offer it despite it having already been developed and implemented on other carriers’ services. The Sidekick II promises to be a much better device than it’s predecessors even aside from the synch issue, but the Sidekick platform as offered by T-Mobile has some inherent problems that just aren’t seen with the Treo, or for that matter any Palm or PocketPC-based phones.

The main issue here is competition. Most phone manufacturers provide their devices to multiple carriers. Danger, on the other hand, was too small to go it alone and received heavy funding from one company – T-Mobile. Because of this T-Mobile is still the only Carrier to provide the phone in the U.S. (at least in markets that it competes in). T-Mobile has basically been able to hold the Sidekick hostage. It makes the decisions of what to offer when, and in too many cases this means deciding not to offer something for unknown or blatently selfish reasons. Other than synch, the example that comes to mind is the ability that was developed almost a year ago in an operating system update that would have allowed users to use any sound file as a “ringtone.” One could have recorded various people or oneself saying “John is calling,” send it as an email attachment, and then use it as a ringtone for when John called. But T-Mobile didn’t want this, they wanted to sell customers ringtones at $1-2 or more a pop, and giving users the ability to do this might have allowed them to actually record songs they owned and transfer them to their Sidekick, oh my! So the capability was hastily deleted before the update was released to the general customer base.

The other big problem around the Sidekick and T-Mobile’s domination of the device has been application development. The “catalog” was initiated almost a year ago. It was supposed to be a way for Danger to provide additional functionality to the device without going through what has become very long and drawn out process of updating the operating system. But despite setting up a big development site and many developers creating new applications for the Sidekick, the new applications came out in a pathetic trickle – perhaps one every couple of months. Many of them were games or ringtones that did not really enhance the capabilities of the device. If one signed up to be a developer, one could not only see but download some of the applications that T-Mobile was not offering, despite their obvious maturity and usefulness. Many developers ended up throwing countless hours of work away and leaving the effort because so many hoops had to be jumped through even to get consideration for their work to be considered. Compare this to the wide open development environment of the Treo (or any Palm or PocketPC device for that matter), and this situation becomes laughable, if it wasn’t so sad. The Treo 600 is not only my phone and internet device, but I also use it to run a GPS for my car, and listen to audio books, among many other things. The Sidekick may be more slick looking, but at this point in my life I would much rather choose function over form, especially when there is such an immense gulf in that area between the two devices.

That all being said, we are trying to get hold of a Sidekick II for my wife, who inherited my old Sidekick. I promised to eventually compare the Sidekick II and the next Treo (the Treo 650) when they were out. The Treo 650 isn’t out yet and I’m not sure if it will be in my budget for a while, but maybe I can find some way to get a loaner so that I can review it side-by-side with the Sidekick II, as I did with the last versions of these phones.

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Last weekend, I couldn’t get to a bulletin board which I’ve spend ridiculous amounts of time over the last 4 years. It’s the official Protein Power Bulletin Board, linked to the official Protein Power website. Protein Power is the “diet” that I’ve been on for four years running, the longest I’ve ever eaten according to more or less the same configuration.

It is, as many of you know, one of those dreaded “low-carb” plans. But while it shares many things with the much-maligned Atkins Diet, as well as others with that brash startup South Beach, it first was published about 9 years ago. How I wish I had read it then, but that was still at the peak of the low-fat movement and reading something going so much against the grain (no pun intended) at the time, would have been unthinkable. I was not about nutritional rebelliousness quite yet. As I’ve probably written here and elsewhere on numerous occasions, Protein Power, or “PP” as the aficionados call it, is a rational, scientifically based set of guidelines for eating the most optimally nutritious diet, one that promotes improvement in critical areas of health. Weight loss, although a part of this, is not the end-all and be all. The authors explain the science in a fair degree of depth compared to any other diet book out there that I know of. They even go so far as to say that they don’t have all the answers, something you will never hear from the “diet docs” who scream and yell both in their books and on tv or radio talk shows.

But one of the key reasons I think I have stayed with the plan so long is that the Eades (the doctors who wrote Protein Power) where nice enough to provide a bulletin board for those wanting to talk about the plan and anything related. They don’t really participate themselves except on a few rare occasions, but a nurse that assisted them in their practice does show up from time to time and also does regular chat sessions. Aside from her, an extremely knowledgeable microbiologist is an administrator and there are many folks on the boards with a great deal of knowledge concerning nutrition, health, fitness, you name it. Going between this board and other diet-related boards is like going from night to day. Instead of the incessant banter, bickering and useless “me to!” messages with gazillions of unicorn pictures, animated smileys and other detritus, most threads are gems of information and perspective, well thought-out and well-written. Discussions are simply on another level. Sure there are debates, but even when people disagree, they do it in such a mature and reasonable manner, it’s like a breath of fresh air compared to the constant flame wars that make up, sadly, much of the history of internet discussions.

I am actually one of the moderators on one of the Protein Power boards and when I tried accessing them last weekend I was bet with a page not available error. Occasionally technical glitches happened, so I did not think much of this. When I tried on Monday I found the same thing. Last year there was actually concern about losing the board and so we set up a “backup” Yahoo! Group to handle situations like this. Soon there were messages from others that they were also worried. I contacted the administrator who was able to get in touch with one of the authors, Dr. Mary Dan Eades, who allayed fears that the board was going away. It turned out that it was the hurricanes in Florida, where the server is hosted on which the boards exist. Now going to the main website one is greeted with the following message:

“Due to power outages and downed communication lines
caused by Hurricane Frances, eatprotein.com is temporarily off-line.
Technicians are working to restore connectivity as soon as possible.”

Hopefully this will not last that much longer, as many people get support and a great deal of useful information from these boards, and simply enjoy chatting with our friends that we have developed over years of discourse.

While this hurricane season has been devastating to much of Florida (and now Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi), it has also at least indirectly affected others not only around the U.S., but in other parts of the world.

One of the other members of that board has a blog but hasn’t commented yet on the board going down. I’ve gotten emails from other members and I would just say that any members reading this post a comment and say hi. At least maybe we can keep somewhat of a conversation going while the boards are down.

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My wife, who has my old Sidekick, got an email from T-Mobile last night that the Sidekick II $100-off upgrade offer for current Sidekick owners is on hold. Apparently there was such a huge demand from these owners that they had to shut things down while they make plans to get more in stock. I just wonder whether models will be selling to the general public while those trying to get upgrades are waiting for some arbitrary additional surplus to build up so that they can take advantage of the offer again? Who knows, but somehow I doubt T-Mobile will be asking potential new customers to wait while they give their entire inventory to previous owners. That seems like too much of a 180-degree about-face from their previous “let’s worship the new guy at the expense of the loyal customer” attitude. No word on exactly how long this new wait will be. One would think that with Sharp as the new manufacturers for the device, they would be able to churn out new units pretty damn fast!

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Got this out a day late, so I apologize. I thought it appropriate to reflect on September 11, not only due to its inherent significance to me, the U.S., and really the world, but also because it seems to be what pushed blogging into the forefront as a real media outlet.

I’ve never actually written about 9-11 mostly because I only really started blogging about 16 months ago, and I generally don’t blog about major current events or politics, etc. I thought I’d just put down for the record how I remember the event.

I was not in New York, but I was not too terribly far from the Pentagon – about 7 miles to be precise. I woke up that morning and was getting ready to leave for work when my mother called. She still lives in New York City (Manhattan), and is both an early-riser and a news addict. She said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Still not quite awake, I turned on the TV and CNN was showing live footage of the north tower in flames. My mom mentioned something about terrorists, but I just thought it was a small plane and didn’t think it would amount to much. I was in denial. I said I had to go, hung up, and made my way to work as normal. I don’t remember if I put on the news on the way, or just listened to an audio book.

My drive to where I worked at the time was pretty short – maybe fifteen minutes at most. I came in the back way and knocked on the locked door for one of my coworkers to let me in since my hands were full and didn’t have my keys handy. No one came to the door even though by that time normally at least a couple of folks would be there. I head a phone ringing inside and after a minute or so of knocking and hearing the phone ring with no end, I finally fumbled around for my keys.

When I came into the office, all the lights were on, the phone was still ringing, and not one person was around. That was a little unnerving! I picked up the phone to hear the wife of a coworker. She asked if her husband was there and I said no. She said she’d been trying to get hold of him. I don’t think we talked about the plane.

After a while I realized there was the sound of a TV in the distance. I didn’t realize where this was coming from as I’d forgotten there was a TV in the conference room one floor above us. I finally made my way upstairs to find two other coworkers sitting and watching. At this point I think the other plane had already hit the tower and another plane had hit the pentagon. One of my coworkers said in his drive to the office he saw a plane flying very low in the direction of the Pentagon, and he was sure that was the plane that crashed, although he didn’t actually see it.

The rest of that day, we were all just glued to the TV, Work essentially stopped. After a while when all the false alarms started coming in about other planes or bombs going off in or around DC, we started getting nervous, despite not being that close to DC or any other national symbols, buildings, etc. We all started calling friends and family who were in the DC or New York areas, or even across the country. I was having a hard time getting through to my family in New York due to the cell phone traffic, but eventually found out that my brother in law, William, who sometimes worked around Wall Street but lately had been working across the river in Brooklyn, had walked across the bridge and along the river up to where my mom lives in the east 30’s. Everyone was ok, thank goodness, or at least everyone we knew. Later I learned that a woman that I had gone to study abroad in Russia with had been evacuated from her office building which was only nine blocks from the towers. Thankfully I don’t know anyone who died in the towers that day, and about the closest I came to knowing a victim was that my current roommate’s coworker’s brother was killed at the Pentagon.

Because of all the bomb scares, DC was shut down and it was very hard to get in and out. People had to walk out of the city to find a friend in Virginia to stay with or to drive them home. Luckily most of my friends at the time had email accounts and through email and some phone conversations we were able to make sure everyone we knew was ok.

We came to work for the rest of the week, but no work was done. We just listened to the radio or watched TV the whole week. Flags and impromptu memorials popped up everywhere. There was a profound sense no matter where you went that something BIG had happened and that things had changed in a big way, even though in the DC area only one small area was directly affected by the crash – whereas in Manhattan the dust from the towers falling was everywhere for weeks and of course the biggest reference point to the city that could be seen from a large percentage of it was now missing.

I tried to give blood that week, but hearing that the red cross was overwhelmed, I signed up on their website so someone could contact me as to where to go. I never heard from them. I wish now I had gone home to my family in Manhattan at the time, but things were still so uncertain then and attempting a trip might have met with a 15-hour drive only to be denied access into the city. Plus, after the initial day, I knew that everyone was safe.

I didn’t end up going until two or three weeks later. Even then they weren’t letting people go below maybe Canal Street unless they could prove they lived there. I had no big wish to see ground zero at the time. It was enough to see it on TV! Plus one of the morgs the city was using for 9-11 victims was right next to where my mom lives, and seeing all the police presence and our neighborhood kind of taken over for this purpose was quite enough as well. Walking through the streets and seeing the home-made flyers people had printed up asking people if they had seen a son, a wife, a cousin, were heart-breaking. The police were everywhere.

The weekend after 9-11 there was a planned party at my friend Kit’s to celebrate his girlfriend moving in. While we were in no mood to celebrate, we all agreed it was important to get together as a group of friends, to talk about what had just happened, and just to be with each other in such a disturbing time. At this party, talking with many of my friends and friends of friends, I came across a woman I had talked to before at these parties, but this time we ended up talking for two hours. She worked fairly close to the White House, which, as is now known, was one of the targets that day but was spared either because the plane that eventually hit the Pentagon couldn’t get a good approach, or because the third plane was commandeered by its passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, thus sparing many more lives on the ground. We didn’t just talk about 9-11 that night, of course, but that served many as a moment in our history where we were able to share our experiences, even emotions with perfect strangers. As for this woman, she is now my wife.

That is one good that came out of the attacks, that at least for a while we were a cohesive people and not two (or more) warring camps. Unfortunately, we’ve backtracked quite a bit since. Things are still different now, but not in any immediately obvious way. Sure security checkpoints in general are more beefed up, but in my day-to-day travels, I don’t see any big difference between now and say three and a half years ago. The flags and other emblems on people’s cars have largely disappeared. While 9-11 is still vivid in many people’s memories, for most days of the year it fades into the background. Not that I think we need to be mourning this moment every day of the year, but I do think making this the only real national holiday dedicated to a tragedy may allow some people the room to reflect on the time when as a country we were without politics, where strangers comforted each other even in New York City, where Jews stood guard over mosques for fear of hate crimes. Yes, there were hate crimes as well, but they were isolated and condemned by almost everyone immediately, despite what was an immediate, easy, and obvious target for the anger and pain that was inflicted on the nation.

While 9-11 will always be a wound in the soul of the nation, and a source for pain, we can actually use it for the good. We use it for good by not exploiting it for political purposes, or purposes of condemning an enormous percentage of the planet. While innocent people need to be defended from becoming the victims of hateful groups, governments, or individuals everywhere, supporting or even turning a blind eye to such victims because they are far away, are culturally, racially, or linguistically different from us, or because their attackers provide some small strategic or economic advantage for us, really is inexcusable.

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Well, as nice as vacations are, when you’re not a terribly organized person to begin with they tend to throw you hopelessly behind. We just got back from a trip to North Carolina on Sunday night. This week at work I’ve been in training and last night I was at a Bare Naked Ladies concert, so I haven’t had a huge amount of time to blogging. I have a lot to write, too, as well as pictures to share, etc. I guess they will have to wait just a little longer. Hopefully I can get back on track by the weekend!

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Well, it appears Wil Wheaton’s birthday is the day before mine, although he’s also four years younger. I will be turning 36 on Friday, and while I haven’t really enjoyed getting older since turning 25 or so, now that I have a wife and a house and more of a life, well, I at least don’t feel like my life is “running out.” Sure, no kids yet, but that will come eventually.

Wil also seems to do some mobile blogging. Since buying my Treo 600 from my friend Rich I have started looking into various applications, getting one to work ok, but it seemed pretty basic. I couldn’t see how to embed links, although I think you could imbed images.

Alas other things have preocuppied my time lately to where I had to put that aside for the moment. For one, me and my wife are going to NC next week to do some sightseeing as well as participate in a digital photography course that will hopefully get me really moving with my new D70 (although they use Fuji S2′s for the classes). So I’ve been doing lots of reading and also trying to get this new GPS system working efficiently that uses my Treo (I’ll try to write about this in a future entry). Oh yes, and there are all the bills and other paperwork that have been piling up for months while we tried to unpack and get the house into some kind of shape. I still want to take a month off and just catch up with all this stuff, but somehow I don’t think my boss will let me do this, even though it is my birtday in a couple of days!

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Me and my wife were at the mall this weekend and stopped by the Apple Store as she needed a case for the iPod Mini that I had bought for her in April but which didn’t actually arrive until last week! While there I saw the the new 4G iPods and wouldn’t you know it, I somehow convinced myself I should get one! So now my old 3G 30GB iPod is up on eBay as well as a 256MB SD card.

I first used eBay back in probably 1998, after my sister told me about it. My first experience was not the greatest. I sold my VCR to some guy in Texas who sent me a check. I didn’t send the VCR right away, but kept waiting and looking at my bank account. Finally, after a few days, the amount was added to my account, so I went ahead and sent it out. Several days after that, or maybe a week, I got a notice from my bank that the check had bounced and my account had been charged $5. So I email the guy who is initially nice and says to redeposit it as he was in the process of moving and getting a different account but had put money back in. Reluctantly I redeposited it and got the same result. So at this point I asked for a money order for the original amount plus the $10 additional he owed for the bank charges. I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, so sent another letter, then another, getting increasingly less friendly, although I never resorted to threats, name-calling, or anything like that. The only threat I made was that I would have to give him a negative rating and contact eBay’s fraud department if he didn’t respond. Finally after a month or so he did respond, saying he’d been out of the country. Furthermore, he said, it was “my fault” because I was the one who sent the VCR before the money was actually cleared. Nevertheless, he told me, he still intended to send the money. I waited a few more weeks and never got anything despite his claims to have sent payment. Finally, I went ahead and gave him a negative, and then he returned the favor, so this is my only negative on eBay. This guy isn’t even a registered user of eBay, at least not under his old account. I kept my eBay account intact despite this, but it took me a while to venture back after this first bad experience.

Most of what I’ve done on eBay is selling. I actually found a place in the town I now live that was selling used DVD’s as well as some highly-discounted new ones for very cheap – $5-$15. You can now get these prices at any large retailer, but back then it wasn’t as easy. I probably sold a couple hundred of these over the course of a couple of years before finally deciding it was too much work for the effort. My average take after shipping charges, eBay’s fees, etc., came to about $5 per DVD. That might not sound bad, but when you are selling an average of 3 or 4 a week, that’s only $15 or $20 for what amounts to a couple of hours of work if you included driving to the post office a couple of times and mailing the things, spending a half hour looking through used DVD’s at the store, posting the auctions and emailing with the customers, etc. Not much better than minimum wage, and after a while not a whole lot of fun!

I still use eBay on occasion to sell things, but generally have not used it to buy a lot, at least nothing big. Part of the reason is because you are taking more of a risk. You’re often not dealing with a real business that you can call up the BBB or the local news. Getting one’s money back is generally a very difficult task unless you use third party escrow services, which I suppose I would demand if I were buying something more expensive than a few hundred dollars.

I did have a couple of instances on eBay where I got way more than expected. There were a couple of guys who decided to bid up the price of a used DVD I bought for $10 to a whopping $41! You could go online and buy this same DVD for $25! At least back in the late 90’s when this was all pretty new, people would get carried away and decided they had to have some item that they had thought they won because they had been the winning bidder for several days. This of course doesn’t work with more expensive items as the people who are bidding are probably not doing it as a “whim” – I tried unsuccessfully a few times to sell my mom’s baby grand piano. A number of people actually came to her house to look at it. The problem with a piano, though, is that the moving cost can be prohibitive! So despite it’s being worth $3,000 or so, the highest bid we got for it I believe was around $1,500.

I occasionally get spam that talks about creating businesses to sell stuff on eBay, but this just reminds me of my pseudo business with the used DVD’s. Somehow selling stuff online is just not all that interesting! I’m sure there are pleanty of folks that can make a decent living selling all kinds of things online, but to me it just seems like a whole lot of detail and you’re not actually using your mind in a creative way or actually helping people in any significant way – other than getting them some gadget or toy or something that they want.

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