Standard Mischief

Violent Acres is out. While I throughly enjoyed stories like Drastic Measures to Reduce Debt, quality has slipped, and she has admitted to selling out (I hope she got a good price). While it may be true that she’s still writing at least some of the content, somehow the magic isn’t there.

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.

Lest you think I’ve started splogging, let me assure you that is not the case. This is a “cranky consumer” post.

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.

… I mean, Hurricane Gustav just roared through, but when you google yourself up a New Orleans radio station’s website, and up in the “masthead” it’s got a logo that says “24/7 Internet Broadcast”, you would figure that when you click on that logo you somehow get a little closer to that stations streaming radio feed instead of getting referred back to that station’s home page.

Update:

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

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

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.