Morning Thread For 2012/08/14 ...
 

Good morning.

It's a very quiet day here for me which is good. Just an exterminator coming over to look at a nest of wasps in our second story eavestrough and a quick trip to pick up my friend up at the hospital. That means work on the agenda for me!

Have a great day! |thumb

Another sizzling and sticky one here.

I've really gotten behind in work. Yesterday Christy’s boss sent his daughter over to me with her crashed Macbook Pro. Nothing physically wrong with it but she ignored the "The Disk Needs To Be Repaired" messages for months until the machine would no longer boot. Naturally she had never backed up anything. Spent hours getting all of her user data off of it and then erased the hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Then restored her user data. She didn't loose anything except Microsoft Office which she didn't have the installer or serial number for. Guess I can't complain as I got paid for four hours of consulting work. She mostly seemed really happy that her desktop picture, music, contacts and photos were all restored.

Just a day spent in the A/C trying to get caught up in work planned for today.

Good Tuesday Peoples |waves|

Strange day on the intertubes for me - I assume there's a router acting up someplace, as some sites are loading really slow for me, yet the couple of people I asked have no problem getting them to load.

Just a normal day of work for me, followed by the financial guy coming over tonight. After a lot of thought, The Bitch & I decided to take money out of our retirement & pay off the house & the home equity loan. It may fuck us years down the road, but it'll sure make life easier now, knowing that all we have to put away is money for the property/school taxes and the home owners insurance.

Cleo - If I may ask, what do you charge per hour for your consulting?

$60 per hour these days which is a lot less than what I charged back in the days when I did this full time.

Worked late, got a very early phone call, and decided to just start the day.

Starting to get the urge to take a nap, but, have a bit of stuff I need to get done.

I've been playing on ebay - want to buy some stuff for my bike, but, good grief, there are people bidding items up beyond what you can buy the item new. I put a bid in, had it for probably 4 hours and at the last minute, it was bid to $142.50. You can buy it from a bike shop for $125 shipped.

So, I tried another one, waited until about a minute before the auction ended, put in a reasonable bid - $20 more than the current bid ($75), and it skyrocketed to $113 about a minute before the end.

So, I started to wonder what the reason behind this was. All of the auctions seem legitimate, but, why would you snipe an auction and pay almost retail for something that needed a parts kit or overhaul? Or, why would you pay $20 more than retail + shipping?

I understand the long term account twinking with prepaid cards. Someone sells a bunch of prepaid cards, gets a bunch of ratings, then gets a good rating so they can later scam. Oh well. I'll probably just order the parts online somewhere.

Hope everyone has a good Tuesday - what's left of it.

@cd34 If you're losing the auction at the last moment consider HammerSnipe.com.

Thanks for that. I'm really just trying to buy something used to save a few $$, but, even with sniping, people are bidding outrageous prices for items. I would tend to think it was auction fever, but, with proxy bidding and the fact most of these are snipes (except one yesterday), I can't figure out why you would pay $142 for a used item missing a few screws and an o-ring, when you can buy the same item new for $125 shipped. The screws probably aren't necessary based on the shoes you use (auction was for clipless pedals) and the o-ring comes in a $10 kit. So, that person paid $160 (including the o-ring kit without shipping that needs to be purchased separately, plus shipping of the auction) for an item that could have been purchased brand new for $125 shipped from performancebike.com.

At this point, I'm probably just going to order it from performancebike and go to a local shop to buy shoes.