Standard Mischief

Actually, it’s always the sniping season on Ebay. Since I’m busy gathering materials for a future blog post, I’m reminded again about how useful a program called JbidWatcher really is.

“Sniping” or bidding at the last moment on Ebay has a bad reputation, but I’m not entirely sure why. It’s allowed by Ebay rules. It offers protection from confederates, and it neatly sidesteps all those idiots that get “auction fever”.

Many people who might bid on the same auctions as you won’t bid on anything unless there’s already a bid on the auction. I suppose that’s some sense of herd mentality. Other people see your bid as a challenge, and are willing to bid the auction up, a dollar at a time, to find your high bid. Also, do I need to remind anyone that on the Internet, nobody knows you are a confederate? Confederates are people who act as agents for the seller by placing unscrupulous bids on items to drive up the price. That’s against Ebay rules, but intent is hard to prove unless you can show a pattern.

To sidestep these pitfalls, I just place my bid on the item during the last few moments of the auction. That bid represents exactly my top dollar that I’m willing to pay, and because it’s placed so late no other bidder has time to react to my bid. If course I don’t wait around for the auction to end, I have computers to do boring repetitive tasks like that.

Enter JbidWatcher. It’s a Java based program that will run on almost any platform. It was originally written with the intent of scraping Ebay and monitoring the progress of a seller’s auctions. I believe that “sniping” feature is a requested option, and not within the scope of the original purpose. No matter, it works well, and you can’t beat the price.

On SayUncle’s advice, I’m trying out http://www.govtrack.us/. They seem to scrape the awful user interface over at Library of Congress’ Thomas, and provide (hopefully) permalinks, an RSS feed, a better bill search option, full text (no word count though), and major campaign contributers for the bills’ sponsors.

I’ve just started to check it out, and it looks pretty good. It’s apparently a private effort, and the ads that I’m not seeing are served from Google. I like it already, let’s hope it sticks around.

Via ladyada’s rants,

This thingy is by far the most annoying flash anything I have ever clicked on. Oh, let me count the ways.

1. It has the volume already stuck on eleven. When you click on the “volume control, it puts a little red “X” over the speaker picture, but it doesn’t stop the noise, it just tones it down to 3 or so.

2. it’s got an ad for a CD or something “breathing”, continuously in the upper left corner.

3. it’s got this flashing thingy distracting me in the upper right corner.

4. You cannot possibly sweep your pointer over top of anything without having big bubbles pop-up, phrases in red text tumble out, or photographs expanding out at random moments. Constantly.

5. It emits various jingles at random intervals

6. It’s about electronic circuits or something. I really can’t stand all the distractions to figure it all out.

Holy crap! Excuse the swearing, but wow! I have a battery of tools that I’ve installed on my browser (Firefox) to stop stuff like this from happening, but it all doesn’t work in this case, because the text and the ads are integrated into one humongous flash orgasm of motion, light, and sound, I can’t block just part of it, so the whole site becomes an all or nothing thing.

First off, I use the Flashblock extension to stop flash ads in their tracks. Flashblock gives me a button to press when I (rarely) actually want to see the flash object. Most of the time, there are annoying little flash ads on the sidebars that I rarely click on.

Second, I use the Adbock extension combined with Adblock Filterset G Updater to keep it updated automagicly. In the prefs of that last tool, I keep a custom block list designed to target web-bugs, slow counters, and other such annoyances. For instance, I block anything named 1×1.gif.

I use the Customize Google extensions to block them from doing snoopy stuff, and enhance the search experience by putting links directly to other engines on the same page and really cleaning up and improving the image search function, but it does a number of other things like block what really are the least obtrusive ads on the inter-tubes.

If there’s an annoying animated ad that somehow got through all those defenses, Nuke Anything Enhanced allows me to rightclick-kill anything on the spot.

Also, if I’m on a page such as ell-jay, or I’m forced to go to a web forum to harvest some nugget of information, I can either set Firefox by default not to load images or (more likely) Just hit the ESC key when I arrive at the page. The ESC key freezes every animated gif on the page, and that functionality is already built in to Firefox at the factory, no plug-ins needed.

If I’m somehow caught on Myspace, or other extremely poorly formated unreadable page, using the Bookmarklet “Zap Stylesheets” will at least usually make the page readable again.

All theses tricks allow me to speed read, seek and find information faster, and save me bunches of time by not dealing with distractions. If the whole web was a series of awful flash pages, I’d probably go back to a strict hardcopy only policy. Once you start to tune out the web crud, you’ll never go back.

OK, so here you go:

(Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (167 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

So here’s what I did. I took a standard dollar bill that I legally possessed and did some stuff to it. I took a Sharpie? marker and XX-ed out “federal reserve”, and wrote in “NOT FEDERAL NO RESERVES”. Then I added “WORTH ABOUT 18?” and “IN 1968 MONEY” (that year being the year we went off the gold standard.)

Although I don’t intend to confuse anyone in to thinking this is a virgin dollar bill, I failed to remove or obfuscate ?The United States of America?, I hope that’s not a problem. I think I’ve really added something here, and I’m thinking of selling this piece on Ebay for say $1.50 or so.

I also want to let everyone know that I find Sharpie? markers useful for all kinds of stuff, including enhancing the playback quality of purchased prerecorded music.

I also want to make it clear that I, in no way, shape or form, want to cause any harm to the MD-34 bridge over the Potomac (that being the last piece of infrastructure I think I took a photo of.)

So what do you think? Is this art, or is this terrorism? Or do only the Attorney Jackasses get to decide that?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should probably read this over at SayUncle’s and this here in my own blog.

(Whew, three posts for this day! I’m gonna take the rest of the week off)

Rather, to go with the earlier post, this is a list of the part of my feed list where the feeds are full text, and comments are allowed, and it’s not too much of a pain in the ass to post a comment. I also prefer places that don’t hold every single comment until it’s blessed by the pope. I find crap like that tends to choke the discussion. Anyway, here you go, with the feeds in plain text:

Standard Mischief
http://standardmischief.com/feed/

Of course I keep tabs on my own feed. How else do I tell if something’s broke?

SayUncle
http://www.saysuncle.com/feed/

I probably pump more content into the comments here than in my own blog.

View From The Porch
http://booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Usually something good and/or funny daily

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey
http://jacquelinepassey.blogs.com/blog/atom.xml

There use to be considerable libertarian chatter here, but recently has tended to be more personal and gambling related. Some SpecFic chatter. Recently she has been voted ?most stuck-up bitch in teh blogsphere?. The people who hate her and just have to tell her that are even more amusing. Much more entertaining than non-Libertarian non-Girl.

The Countertop Chronicles
http://countertop-chronicles.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I stuck him here near JMPP just because.

Ravenwood’s Universe
http://www.ravnwood.com/index_20.rdf

Not as prolific as he once was, when he blogs, it’s good.

ladyada’s ranting
http://www.ladyada.net/rant/?feed=atom

If you can’t tell by now, I have a thing for women who can drive a stickshift, shoot straight, speak the truth, have their financial shit together, or own there own handtools.

In this case, among other things, she knows what end of a soldering iron to hold. Not a lot of blog here.

the IDIOT
http://www.saltypig.com/blog/atom.xml

The potty-mouthed poster child for the armed and polite libertopian society we all want. He was actually my first commenter and didn’t really like my ?mutant-libertarian? leanings.

Hmmm, was it something I said or is this another quirk of Blogspot? I notice the Blogspot blogs most of all flip-flop their feeds. Anyway the damn feed is broke now.

sheer potentiality
http://philwelch.net/atom.xml

Phil pumps a lot of insightful comments into JMPP, not so much here. Infrequent blogger, but when he does post it’s about half insightful, and about half personal.

The Gun Blogs - Online community for gun bloggers
http://www.thegunblogs.com/node/feed

SU’s place for everyone who wants to try their own gun blogging, for free.

Dr. StrangeGun, or how I learned to love the odd…
http://drstrangegun.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Not a lot of content, but insightful.

Tinotopia
http://www.tinotopia.com/fulltext.xml

Not a lot of people blogroll him, which is surprising. ?Knee-jerk? libertarian, but he doesn’t exactly splash that all over his banner. He’s had an online presence for forever, so Tino probably already got there firstest with the mostest. Cranky consumer.

Curiouser and Curiouser
http://www.memestreams.net/users/acidus/?type=rss

Whitehat Hacker. Memestreams feeds are annoying because whenever another memstreamer comments on the original post, the feed is updated like it’s a fresh post in my feed aggravator.

Fish Or Man
http://fishorman.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Insightful commenter from SU’s blog. Not a lot of content.

Lean Left
http://leanleft.com/feed/

My attempt at ?balance?. So far it’s pretty good.

the munchkin wrangler.
http://munchkinwrangler.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Not a lot of content, but when this breeder isn’t talking about his kid, it’s always good.

McAdamSandwich’s Quest For Knowledge
http://mcadamsandwich.blogspot.com/atom.xml

not a lot of content, but it’s usually funny or interesting.

PawPaw’s House
http://pawpawshouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Ex-tanker, LEO, Republican. We don’t always see eye to eye but he’s always worth reading. He has a camp follower named Junior, who has a good website or two but needs to blog by himself.

TriggerFinger
http://triggerfinger.org/weblog/servlet/export/rss

Another commenter from SU. Good stuff.

Penn
http://penn.typepad.com/penn/rss.xml

Leah Penn, an interesting commenter from JMPP. The blog is 25% insightful, 75% used as a personal file cabinet. Fairly regular blogger.