Archives for February 2009

Ebay for dummies, a seller guide.

Jesus...... I've been selling stuff on ebay, mostly worthless old junk. Old Hard Drives. Boken Laptop bits, a Z88. Yeah that old.

Here's a summary of some of the questions, messages and emails that have resutled from the bits I've been selling.

One chap "Will you ship (the completly derrelict and battered remains of a laptop sans harddisk that didn't work at all) with this courier to Spain for 20 quid" errr i supose so, why you'd want ot pay £20 to ship skip padding to Spain is behond me.

"Will you put XP on it" refering to a harddisk. errr "No" it doesn't work that way, several emails related to whther the drive was compatible with his laptop (in which he sent me the wrong model for anyway), an explanation of windows xp install process and a discussion on windows vista partitioning. Then he didn't bid.

"Can you put a buy it now price and how much" errr, no, its an auction, I don't know what its worth, just bid like it says.

The aforementioned laptop, was advatised with a complete list of failings, missing parts and symptoms, a good description of the physical failings of it down to missing screws. Despite this carefull description the question added was:

"HOW IS IT BROKEN"

No need to shout, and read the advert it says clearly concicely and acurately what I did and did not know about it. Jesus.....

To balance this out somewhat I sold a wifi card to a bloke, being a helpfull told him if he needed help to gimmy a shout. Turns out he inteneds to use it to make his Amiga 1200 do WiFi. I had to admit at that point I wasn't going to be much help. Its tempting to make references to the amount of time he must have on his hands to go around retrofitting internet and wifi to a 15year 6502 based computer. But in all honesty his hobby sounds much better than answering questions on ebay to the chancers, nutters and optimists on ebay.

I always thought the long ranty disclaimers you got on ebay auctions were silly. Now I'm beginning to realise what the big sellers are getting at. Man are there some insane requests. Some use the system sencibly and reasonalby, one fellow asked whether it would go through his letterbox (the Amiga man) which is fair enough.

I'm now living in fear of what will come next. "Can you paint it Pink for me", "can you isntall Windows vista on the Z88" - I would no longer find this kind of request bizzare at this point.

Its been said there are no stupid questions, err, yes there are.

Care to Comment?

I think this random website now has a commenting engine. It took a long time to write and its probably got some bugs. But it does appear to work. Don't tell Kieran but its being run on a fairly trusting basis.

I have the capacity to impose moderation on comments before they appear, and to require registrations email confimations etc. I've not turned that on. I'm assuming I won't need it.

Dear Great unwashed

So if I incense any of you, hairy, ugly smelly and frankly worse than Jeffery Archer* cretins out there you can make coments.

How do I do it? 

The options for commenting appear below. Posts like this one comments and links apear below the posts, or at the bottom of the page on content and photo gallery pages.

You can either comment annoyimously by answering a fatuious question and proving to the sites satisfaction that your not an evil russian spam bot or register login and stand up for your beliefs.

I'm afraid that you can't comment on photos at present, I'm a victim of  my own cleverness. Going to have to work out how to add it to lightbox.

Statement of intent:

I'll do my best not to delete comments  unless absolutly necessary. But I jsut might, it try and refute them with another comment rather than delete them. Obviously abusive, raceist or similar posts or spam will be imedialty deleted and I'll take steps to ensure your never able to post again.  Please don't make me do that. So don't swear (I know I do, its a case of do as I F**king say, not as  I do). And don't mis behave, posting stupid things like how good Vigin Bloody-Usless media as will be ridiculed.....

Oh and if you do find any bugs, email me using the link left. If the google adds anoy you just at the line: "127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com" to your hosts file, C:\WINDOWS \SYTEM32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows or /etc/hosts linux/BSD/unix. And google adds will never bother you again.

*I may have gone too far that time.