This weekend my DSL account started having problems holding a connection. It isn’t that uncommon for the connection to drop once a week or so, but it was dropping every 15 minutes. I was watching a movie online from Netflix which was grainy anyway because I have the slowest speed of DSL, but then it would just freeze. Sometimes the connection would come back on its own and sometimes I would go and unplug the modem so it would restart (the modem would re-initiate on its own, so really it was the same process either way).
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Sell It on eBay – The Sequel
Last year I bought a 4 GB SD card that it turned out was incompatible with my Palm, so I decided to sell it on eBay and actually wound up making about $10 profit. This year, I bought some new memory for my laptop computer so I had two 1 GB memory boards that I no longer needed. I figured I would try selling them on eBay.
The process was much the same as last year but the price had gone up from 20 cents to 35 cents to post an ad. That’s still less than a stamp. I took a picture and wrote up an ad and decided that a 5-day ad would be appropriate (last year I did a 7-day ad which was probably too long except that I ended up revising my ad a little). That was Wednesday evening, so the 5-day period would cover all of the big Thanksgiving shopping weekend but still give people who shop from work or school a chance to see the ad on Monday before it closed out.
Still, I didn’t get any bids until tonight, when the first bid came in at the minimum of 99 cents. That’s good because that means that at least I will sell it and somebody else will be able to use the memory. Also I am charging $4.60 for shipping and handling like I did last year. I told Mom that if I got a second bid, the price would probably go up pretty quickly to $5 or so because the first bidder probably bid more than the minimum of 99 cents. A few hours later, the price had jumped up to $7.20 when a competing bid was entered. I don’t know how much higher it will go, but it would be great if it would get up to $20 because that’s how much I got the upgraded memory for (after a $40 mail-in rebate, so I’m also out $4.20 in sales tax) and that would pay for itself!
Here’s the listing.
Blu-ray
It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got a Blu-ray DVD player. I was psyched when I first heard about the new high-definition DVD’s that were planned. But then Sony introduced one standard and a competing standard called HD DVD was being developed too. So there was a long format war with studios lining up on different (sometimes both) sides. Buy the wrong technology and you’d be stuck with a dinosaur. That’s ultimately what happened to those early adopters who bought the lower tech, more affordable HD DVD players.
Cheap Gas
I saw gas last night for $1.95 a gallon. When gas was $4 a gallon a couple of months ago, people were rushing to dump their trucks and SUV’s to get more efficient vehicles. So has the opposite happened now that gas is cheap again? Since car shopping in May, I’ve been on a bunch of car dealers’ e-mail lists. I got an e-mail this week from a Toyota dealer saying they are having a Prius Clearance Event, a “blow out” sale on 25 cars, selling them at dealer invoice cost.
Keychain Swiss Army Knife
For years I’ve kept a small Swiss Army knife on my keychain. I use it almost every day, using the scissors probably the most. I lost my favorite which had a pen instead of a toothpick, but recently my backup to that broke (I sent it back under its lifetime warranty, we’ll see what happens). So I hastily bought another one, also without a pen (the stylus for my Palm TX has a pen in it, so usually I have a pen wherever I go). I regretted it almost immediately because I quickly discovered that Victorinox has a huge number of variations on a theme at Amazon. First, you can get all kinds of colors. I got a dark green one, but you can get the standard red, black, blue, purple, white, pink, yellow, or gray. You can get translucent colors which are called ruby, emerald, amethyst (purple), citrine (yellow), and sapphire (blue). You can get several colors of tie-dye (orange, green, purple, and pink) or you can also get a flowered pattern called Edelweiss with background in red, violet, blue, lime green, or pink.
Like I said, my older one had a pen. I found out this is called the Signaturewhereas without that it is called the Classic SD. If you get a Classic and swap the toothpick for a red LED light, it is called the Swisslite. If you want both the light and the pen (losing the toothpick and tweezers), it is called a Signature Lite.
You can also get a bottle opener with a Phillips head screwdriver, which would come in handy at times. You can trade in your scissors for a bottle opener (a bad idea since the scissors are one of the most useful things on there) and that is called a Rally. Alternatively you can just add a bottle opener, in which case you’d have a Rambler. Take the Rambler and put a pen where the toothpick goes, and it becomes a Manager. Take out the tweezers and put a light and now you have a Midnight Manager. By this time it is about twice as thick as the Classic, but the same length. This is what Jeb has, but he says he doesn’t use the light much, making me think the Manager might be ideal.
If you want something really thin, you can get the metal Alox classic which doesn’t have the toothpick or tweezers. It comes in red, black, green, and blue.