(clickable to enlarge)

Above is the recent bid history of the partly-anonymized second highest bidder on an auction I recently bid on. This poor guy has made 463 bids in the last 30-days, yet he only has a feedback level of (7). It’s almost like he’s not trying to win any auctions at all!

The last 15+ bids he’s made were on the merchandise for sale from the same seller. All the bids were placed between 8 and 9 hours before the auction ended. (Can you say bot?)

I’ve reported the suspected shill, but I don’t expect anything to happen. The person offering the auction in this case is a high volume seller that makes a lot of money for Ebay.

So I’m out a small amount due to fraud. If his bid was retracted, I’d get about one dollar back from the seller. This is my first detected shill and I wasn’t burned too bad this time.

I make it a practice to submit one bid, my final bid, at my top price within about 15 seconds of the auction ending. (Thank you jbidwatcher. ) While Ebay “sniping” is 100% allowed by the rules, my top bid going in that late makes it very hard for confederates of the seller to react and nudge the auction price upwards. Not foolproof, but a damn sight better than the “15 minute rule” over at gunbroker.com

Update before publication: Ebay sent me a nice form letter. The meat of the matter: “To protect the privacy of the member that you’re reporting, we can’t tell you exactly what actions were taken. ”

I guess there’s no chance at all for getting my buck back.

The privacy policy is much better than google and there are a number of “!bang” codes that you can use on the command line, like !ebay or !scribd or even !i (google images) for custom searches.

I’ve emailed the creator and actually gotten a response back. The engine seems to be in active development, with a forum and whatnot. It sure looks like something good is brewing. Good enough for a payola free plug, at least.

The other reason I like him is because he’ll take walk-ins, which is handy if you get flunked on you eye test the day before by the Maryland MVA. The last time I went I had a competent substitute doctor. Since there were no customers, I was able to talk directly to the Optometrist, and I asked when she could fit me in. She said right away, so I asked her if she would provide me with my pupillary distance if I paid her in cash (saving her maybe 2-3% in credit card processing fees, though I’m sure as a professional, she paid her share of taxes in any case). She agreed and then started the exam.

She also showed me how she takes it, and she merely had to read the scale right off the phoropter, which is the big, bulky, “try different lenses until you can see the eyechart” tool. My measurement is 59.9 mm, (though 60 mm is close enough when you get around to ordering.) While optical professionals are required by law to give you a copy of your prescription, the pupillary distance number is left off, even though it you’re going to need it at some point. The excuse is that this is the responsibility of the Optician that actually fits your glasses. If so, the last three Optician I had order my glasses did it wrong (although one used a proper measuring tool after I refused to accept the wrong frame size she chose using a scientific wild-ass guess instead of the tools of her trade).

With my prescription and pupillary distance, I then hit up a few web pages to understand how glasses are fitted, and then I placed my order at an online retailer called Zenni Optical. Getting ready to order, I went over my old, broken glasses with a metal ruler with a millimeter scale. That let me get the proper size of the frames themselves, including bridge the width and the bridge sizes.

There’s about six sites online to order glasses from, so feel free to pick your favorite. At Zenni Optical, at least you can tell that they’re not spending any profits on the site itself, because it’s awful. I spent about two hours browsing the frames before I groked what was going on. The very cheapest frames were like $8, but what they don’t tell you is that not all frames fit all heads. Even worse is the fact that you can’t enter in say, the width of your head or your pupillary distance and be shown only the frames in stock that would fit. Eventually I got it right, but I looked at the return policy to be sure the risk/reward ratio was acceptable to me. It was. Including shipping I could have re-ordered glasses online nine times in a row before breaking even with my last pair of “fitted” glasses.

I’ve shown my pair to several people, telling them I bought them online and asking how much they guess it cost me. Everyone was amazed at the price. My first pair cost me about $12 plus maybe a bit for shipping, (I don’t have the receipt handy). Mind you that’s bare-bones with a UV coating only. There are also “memory” flexible frames, eyeglass tinting and line-less bifocals to chose from. Zenni lets you order a frame only for half the cost of the frame + lens price, so I would highly recommend ordering yourself some spare parts at the same time if you are as rough on equipment as I am.

Even if you’re happy having someone locally to yell at if things go wrong for your primary pair of glasses, I would highly recommend you get yourself a few backup pairs. As a minimum, I’d say that you need a spare pair of eyeglasses in every glove box, every range bag and every Katrina Kit. Nowadays that does not cost a fortune.

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This post was inspired by Linoge’s, though mine is solely based on my real life experiences and is completely payola free. I’m not your healthcare provider and I’m not dispensing medical advice, (and this sentence is a magic incantation meant to ward off a lawsuit).

“Rugged enough” means being able to rack the slide on my pistol one-handed by snagging the rear sight on the edge of the belt. [1]

Sadly, the Rockville store (which seemed always slow) closed. I’ve found a few okay belts local, but never as good as what I used to get there.

I’ve just looked, and Tandy is on-line. Even better is that their 80% finished (no FFL needed) leather belt blanks, (with a slot already cut and snaps installed and ready), are on sale now at 50% off. Even better than that is coupon code 9bret-cr-10 , which will give you $10 off (or almost free standard shipping). I’ve got a few on order as of today. Hopefully the quality will be up to their past high standards.

I hope everyone has something to cut the belt to length. If you don’t have the proper punch for the belt holes, in the past I’ve used a pin punch, using a 2×4 to back the belt up and punching from the finished side first, and then again from the back. Leather dye is also available at Tandy, but I’m going to try the shoe “touch-up” dye I have left over from another project. I got that at Wal*mart.

Normally I’[d wait for the belts to arrive to tell you for sure that they as good as I expect, but the 50% sale says it ends this Tuesday (30june2009).

[1] Only practice this drill with the pistol unloaded. Remember the four rules.

Pikesville Rye is a “Maryland” style rye that used to be made in Pikesville, Maryland. Now it’s made in Kentucky by Heaven Hill. It’s absolutely the very best deal in American Rye Whiskey, and I’m not the only one who feels that way, there are positive reviews all over theses tubes of interwebs.

Until today, I’ve only seen it in 750 ml glass bottles in the $11 to $21 dollar range. Let me assure you that the eleven buck stuff tastes the same as the 21 dollar style sold in the upscale shops.

Today I was out and about and found the 1750 ml size for $22. I almost bought out the stock, as I’m having to go in wider and wider circles to find the stuff, but there’s something about a plastic bottle that screams “rot gut”.

I’m sure that plastic packaging doesn’t affect the taste in any way, but I’m gonna decant mine. Spare me the “winebox is a superior package” comments, plastic is cheap (unless it’s “polymer”).

Pictured also is the coffee scoop to make sure that I only pour myself a single instead of a double by mistake, and a repurposed furikake drinking glass.

Liquor taxes vary considerably from state to state but around here, the cheapest stuff in the whiskey isle goes for $8 per 750 ml and $16 per 1750.

Dave Rock is in. In between showing how to MIG weld and blowing up Ford air-bags, Dave finds time to videotape himself scrapping out air conditioners near the peak of the scrap metal market, and also engaging in the practice of “crushing household articals” (sic). I also enjoyed his cheapest man alive series, parts 1, 2, and 3.

Watch long enough and you will see a self-employed trash-picking millionaire with too many damn cats and a crazy ex-wife who shows off the dirty little feminist secret of “equal rights” in regards to child custody under Crown law. If you learn a thing or two about replacing wheel bearings, you will undoubtedly lose a few IQ points watching the Redneck Rollercoaster.

I use copper scrubbers to clean gasket surfaces on engines and surface rust on steel because they’re softer than the surface I want to clean. Unless of course you buy copper plated steel scrubbies. Yes, I did look, and no, there is not any fine print anywhere on the package that states that these “copper scourers” will both rust and stick to your fridge magnets. Good thing I didn’t ruin anything expensive or irreplaceable.

I’d call that fraud. It also looks like I’ll have to go shopping with a magnet from now on.

Zero replies from an email sent ten days ago shows that http://quickie.com/ cares about how they are perceived in the marketplace.

Update:

http://www.fox8live.com/www/Video/wvuehigh.asx

local streaming TV – FOX 8 (opened okay for me in Kaffiene media player)

“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.

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.