It is not uncommon to have purchased something from eBay, I’ve had an account for several years and tend to buy something every couple of months.  Most of the items I buy on eBay are low cost and generally hard to find locally.  I’d often thought about selling stuff on eBay but just never got started.. until now.

What started this off was a sweep through some of the gadgets and whatnot that we’ve got cluttering up our home office.  This stuff has to go, and if it has value let’s sell it – otherwise its time to eCycle it.  I initially thought I’d start by selling some N64 games, but the game values (<$5) far outweigh the shipping costs.  So I figured I’d move onto the iPod that was no longer being loved ever since the iTouch arrived.

I used eBay to research what the going price was for an iPod in the condition mine was, and priced it on the lower end as a starting point.  I set a $10 USD flat rate for shipping since if I shipped to California it would be around $8 shipping + $2 for the bubble mailer.  Had someone in Vancouver bought it, I would have lost money on the flat rate shipping (about $4)!  Shipping is the first real hurdle you need to get over as a seller, and I think it is worse for Canadians (both as sellers, and buyers).

Lucky me, as a first time seller my first 5 listings are fee free!  Cool.  Of course, it took nearly 24hrs for my item to appear in any search results (trust me I tried).  No worries, it was a 7 day listing so lots of time for people to find it and bid.

Days passed.  I watched several broken iPod’s get more bidding activity and a higher price than my item.  I could see from the eBay dashboard that after 6 days, only 5 page views of my item had happened (2 which were mine!).  Then on the 6th day, the watchers arrived – 8 watchers tracking my item – there is hope.  The number of views rapidly climbed.

With less than 6 hours to go in the auction the bidding started.  My $30USD start price, jumped up rapidly.  17 bids later it sold for $76USD + $10USD shipping, the winning bid was made in the last minute of the auction from a bidder with no previous bids on my item.

After that it was smooth sailing.  Payment was via PayPal (who take a small percentage).  A quick trip to the post office and the iPod is on its way to the winner.  It has been an interesting experience, one I plan to repeat.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I decided to sign up with twitter.  Aside from Linked-In, I’ve avoided mostly all of the social networking sites (fads?) thus far.  Who knows, maybe I’ll break down and get a Facebook page soon.

Living in North America, and (oh my, I”m actually going to say it..) especially people of my generation don’t tend to use text messages (SMS).  There are a few friends at work and I who do text each other, but I generally use less than a handful a month.   I’d like to change that, and I think twitter may be the catalyst.

There are lots of way to use twitter, but at the moment I see it as a way to get that hallway conversation feeling across the wire.  I’ll likely use it to give mood updates, vent my frustrations and as a place to put my half baked thoughts that I don’t feel are worth a blog posting.  You might laugh, but I tend to spend about an hour or more on each of these blog entries – I’ll probably spend about 30seconds thinking about a tweet.

While a large part of my waking day I’m in front of a computer, there are times when all I have with me is my phone – a Nokia 5310.  Sure I have internet on my phone, but without a data plan it gets expensive fast ($13 for 460kb last month).  SMS is a natural fit for twitter’s short updates, too bad the Canadian cell providers aren’t twitter friendly. [edit: see comment below, seems that Canadians can twitter vis SMS as of very recently.  This makes my plan in the next paragraph basically just a neat idea, I'll likely not do it.]

My plan is to build my own SMS gateway to twitter.  I can use SMS to send an email and there is a way to send a text message via the web to my phone, so I’ve got a two way conduit.  Now I just need a daemon to sit on my server and respond to events.. more on this once I figure out exactly what I’ll do.

Of course, twitter is a lonely place with no friends.  It turns out many of my friends are already out there on twitter (ok, so I’m a late adopter).  What did surprise me was that I started to follow some friends, and then suddenly I had followers!?  Well it turns out [obvious] that by default you get email when someone friends you, so two way connections shouldn’t be a surprise.  What was a little odd was that a few friends found me without me friending them, within hours.  Neat, I feel popular.

Now in terms of a client – there is always the web, but I wanted to play around with some of the twitter specific apps.  On Windows I installed Twitterlicious which has some quirks, but seems to do the job – I may later try twhirl.  On Ubuntu I’ve tried and failed so far to use gTwitter but will persist.  The neatest client I’ve tried so far is DSTwitter, turning my Nintendo DS into a twitter client.

So how do you use twitter?

This year I’ve read a lot of Neal Stephenson’s work – having finally got my hands on the last two books in the Baroque Cycle, I re-read Quicksilver and worked my way through the whole series.  If you haven’t read any Neal Stephenson, start with Snow Crash.  Lots of his more recent work is more of a slog through, and the style won’t suit everyone – I personally enjoy it, but it does take a few hundred pages to get into.  I very recently finished Anathem – again, not for everyone, but I thought it was a great read.

There have also been a few eBooks I’ve read through.  I still really like having a physical book, so the eBooks I’ve read have been free ones – but there are some good free books out there, and its possibly going to get me hooked on eBooks.

• Little Brother – Cory Doctorow
  Very entertaining.  I read Eastern Standard Tribe (physical book) and wasn’t as impressed.
• The Hacker Crackdown – Bruce Sterling
  I may have read this when it came out, but its referenced by Little Brother and a neat companion read.
• OVERCLOCKED – Cory Doctorow
  Some short stories, and like all of Cory Doctorow’s work is available free.  (Yes, you can also buy his books from bookstores)
• Hal Spacejock – Simon Haynes
  This is the first in a series, I’m only part way through it – fun so far.  The rest of the series is non-free.
• Fallen Angels – Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven and Michael Flynn
  I haven’t gotten to this one, but with these authors I’m sure to enjoy it.  This one comes from the Baen Free Library which has many more titles.

I’ve been reading these on my NDS using dslibris.  Using OpenOffice.org to export to xhtml, I did have a problem with the export but found this helpful explaination that lead to the fix.  I did already have a java runtime installed, but OpenOffice.org needed to be configured to know about it.

Books are sort of like software, eBooks more so.  It is interesting to see what has happened to music through the digital revolution (mp3′s), and now we’re starting to see TV and Movies go through the same transformation.   What happens when matter assemblers become available?  Suddenly even physical objects will be trivial to replicate – once the cost gets driven down, what then?  Time to go read some fiction..

Let’s get back to what computers are good at – entertaining us.  If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to check out mirrorsedge2d.com – a pretty neat flash based game that is a 2D take on Mirrors Edge.  It only take about 30mins of toying around to exhaust the content on the beta site right now, but if you enjoy 2d platformer games this will hook you.

The other night my internet connection was down for about 30 minutes.  How annoying will that be once all our data is in the cloud?

I was in Japan last week for business.  While we had been talking about the possibility of going for a while, I found out less than 24hrs before getting on a plane (Jenn was very understanding).  This was my first time across the Pacific Ocean, and with a 14hr leg (single flight) in my trip, I set a new personal record for being stuck on a plance (in economy no less).  The time delta was 14hrs meaning that at 7am in Japan, it was 5pm the previous day at home.

I was staying in Tokyo, near Shinjuku at the Hyatt Regency.  It turns out this was very close to the Park Hyatt that was featured in the movie Lost in Translation (which if you haven’t seen, is a good movie).  The Hyatt was a nice hotel, certainly meeting western standards for space.

Since I was there for business, I was a little concerned about making the right first impression.  I found a few links that helped me not feel like a total idiot.  Generally the Japanese people feel very polite, the bowing really struck me.  The general care they take presenting you with a bill is quite nice, it is done similar to the business card exchange which is very ritualized.

Thankfully, the company we were visiting is a little less traditional and tends to style itself after a Silicon Valley business.  One thing that I would try to do for another trip is make sure I have a few small token gifts from Canada to share with my hosts.

Since the employees of the company were Japanese, we were using a translator.  While some of them did speak English, there was a varying level of abilty with the language.  Since I don’t speak any Japanese the translator was a huge help.  Anyone who has head me speak knows how quickly I can go – this won’t work with a translator.  It took some getting used to, breaking ideas down into short snippets that could be translated without losing any of the technical content (just because they don’t speak the same language, doesn’t make them simpletons).

On day 3 I noticed that the translator was fixing my errors in naming folk by adding -san,  and I was honoured to hear Andrew-san a number of times.  I’ll go out on a limb a little here as I don’t know, but it also seemed to take a little time to break down some of the trust barriers - this may be a cultural issue, or just the standard technical problem of everyone is an idiot until proven otherwise.  By the afternoon of the 3rd day we were all jamming at the whiteboard discussing issues, and it was clear that there was understanding (both ways) even without translation.

We had dinners out as a group (without the translator) and there were enough folks with both English and Japanese on both the customer and IBM side to help things go smoothly enough, they were also especially helpful in instructing us how to eat dinner as many of the dishes were unfamiliar.  We ate in restaurants with low tables but with a cut-out below for your legs, we also removed our shoes before entering the eating area.  While the food was unfamiliar, it was all good. My best guess after the fact is that the meal was ichijū-sansai style.  The soup was cooked at the table and I couldn’t help but compare it to a DIY meal such as fajitas (which I always want a discount on as I’m doing part of the worK).

It was cool to see that Bunnie was in Japan at the same time, and blogging about both food and some of the neat things to see in Japan.  Unfortunately I didn’t have time to explore some of the things he talked about, but it did help me get my head around the culture a little more.  In the little time I did have free, I did a little souvenier shopping – while I could navigate the subway and the stores, the language barrier was significant. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to find a 100 yen shop (dollar store), but did explore a few of the 10+ story department stores.  I ended up buying a few things at a shop on the 45th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices  which gives an amazing view of the city.  In the elevator ride down it was a pretty tight right with about 8 other people, but none of them were above the level of my shoulder – Japan isn’t built for people who are 6 feet tall.

I had been told that McDonald’s was “the same, but not the same – you have to try it”.  The menu certainly had some unfamiliar selections on it such as Ebi Filet-O (shrimp burgers).  When I got to the airport the food selection was pretty limited but there was a McDonald’s so I figured why not?  The double Big-Mac and fries, tasted the same (or possibly better) than the ones I’m used to.  I did also eat out of one of the ubiquitous vending machines, the ice cream was very good.

While I was there the weather was mostly overcast, but around 10C to 15C.  During the day I’d forego having a jacket which made me stand out in crowds.  Generally the Japanese were bundled up in jackets as it was considered “cold”, but as I was primarily in the office (24C), subways and stores I found it hot if I had a jacket on.  It did cool off in the evenings, and many of the commuters had very long trips (1hr+) which might have required more variation in clothing.  In the evenings I did wear a jacket, I’m Canadian – not crazy.

It was a good trip, but I’m really glad to not be on a plane and staying close to home for a while.

For the geek crowd, it should probably be renamed to fanatic compulsion.  Today I saw that two of my coworkers had just recently come across it (one of them with a physics background no less!) – they were both clearly trapped by this meme-like game.  Consider this posting a warning – it is a huge time suck.

The game allows users to save their contraptions, and share them with others via a link – so a little internet searching will find you solutions to view if you need hints.  As well, once you complete a level, you can see the solutions others have saved.  Pretty neat how 5 simple elements can be combined to create so many solutions.

Astute readers may notice that I’ve posted a Google Chrome screen capture.  This was actually taken running on Ubuntu using Wine.  Instructions came via LifeHacker, but be warned lots of things don’t work (like any https:// connections).  There is of course also CrossOver Chromium, but this is basically Wine linked to Chrome – so it suffers the same shortfalls.  I used Chrome here because for whatever reason, the flash engine included with the Wine setup is much faster than the one embedded in my Firefox (same machine).  I have more opinions on Chrome, but will save them for a future discussion.