Digital Conversion Batch 3

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With the money I made selling off my old gear on eBay I more than was able to pay for my next round of digital conversions. I had about 1,000 photo’s and 35mm slides I got from my parents I wanted to scan. I also had a VHS tape my dad wanted on DVD, and my sisters wedding.

Once I send this batch out (hopefully over the weekend) and get the final product back I can goto my parents place and go through their remaining photos and see what else needs scanning. I think I have the bulk or at least over half of their photos already scanned.  Now all I need is for my mom to help me sort and date allot of this stuff.

I am still a fan of Home Movie Depot. They have been great. I just hope I don’t jinx myself as I am sending in another batch of stuff to be converted! Yes I am superstitious like that.

My Love / Hate Relationship With eBay

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This summer I have been keeping busy cleaning up my apartment and getting rid of or digitizing stuff. Part of that project has been to sell off stuff on eBay. I go through cycles of selling stuff and buying stuff. I am trying to offload stuff that I don’t need, is in good condition, and actually still has resale value.

In the past few weeks I have sold an old iPod Classic 160gb that I haven’t really used since I got an iPhone last year. I finally decided to part with it when I realized that it still has decent resale value. I sold my iPhone 3G when I realized it too could be sold even with all of AT&T & Apple’s limitations on it. I was amazed at how much one could go for. It didn’t pay for the new 3GS I bought at non-new contract price. It did come pretty dam close though. I also finally sold my old Airport extreme base station I had, and an old IP phone I had. I have a few more phones to clean up and sell, plus I am pondering a sale of my netbook since I like the size but the screen makes it hard for me to use it much. I am looking at some slightly larger screened stuff. There is a dell with an 11.6″ screen and some 12″ models are coming down in price. I am not ready to buy yet, since I think I want to wait till Windows 7 comes pre-installed but I am looking.

eBay and Paypal was nice and easy to use. I have used ebay for years, but the shipping of stuff was always a pain. I had previously bought some labels for shipping. After I realized that the USPS will pick up packages and my door man will hold stuff to be picked up my life of selling stuff got a lot easier. I can setup shipping and print out labels right from Paypal. That makes the system great. What really sucks about eBay and Paypal are their rules and all the fee’s. I had an auction that I wasn’t happy with the buyer so I refunded the money and canceled the auction. eBay only refunded me the final value fee. I still had to pay the insertion fee. Granted it was the cheaper fee, but the auction was made null. Why should I have to pay for buyers stupidity? What really got me was when I refunded the payment via Paypal I was charged a fee for returning the money. I could swear that in the past I was able to refund money without any fee’s. Now I have to pay money to return money? Come on. If there was competition I would say fine fee away, but Paypal is owned by eBay. What other payment system works with it like Paypal does? The answer is none. I won’t get started on the inability of sellers to leave negative feedback anymore. That is just stupid.

In the end my only real options on selling stuff is ebay or Craigslist. Both are good for some things, and not so good for others. I haven’t tried Amazon marketplace after they wouldn’t let me sell a mobile phone without a contract, but I should give it a try in the future.

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The Vegetative Weekend

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After 12 days of work, and several late nights I got this weekend off. One of the project’s I was on has a deadline today and we had lots to do. Thankfully I am now about to catch up on sleep for now. There was a few really late nights plus the weekend work. The funny thing is even with all the work I put in over the past two weeks it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I have lived through. I am not trying to jinx myself or anything. I just noticed even with lots to do the management is aware of the toll it takes on people and tries to alleviate the pain when possible. I like that. For reasons I have gone into many times I don’t go into details of my work on this site, but one of the reasons I love my current job is in a lot of ways how people are treated. It isn’t perfect, but it is a far cry from where I was for years at Partsearch for example.

With work over late Friday I took the opportunity to relax and do not much of anything this weekend. Friday night I meet up with Mike, Luke, Stanley and others for a few drinks. Saturday consisted of sleeping late, TV watching, and some apartment cleaning. Today consisted of sleeping late (a theme for the weekend) more TV watching, work on this site, writing, and general lounging around.

Now the weekend is gone all to fast. I am back to work tomorrow, even if it is working from home. I am thinking of taking Friday off to burn off some vacation time. I will see towards the end of the week if that will be possible. Right now I want to finish up some writing and then I am off to bed.

Ying and Yang, WordPress and Typepad

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I have been using WordPress since January and overall generally happy. Initially the ability to customize any aspect of the software was a hindrance since it required time to tinker to get things right. Then over time I got my WordPress site to be in some ways better than my Typepad one. The effort involved wasn’t trivial, but I enjoyed the tinkering. Once the site was right it has become an annoyance to deal with plugin updates, WordPress updates, etc. I know my Typepad subscription is up near the end of the year so I wanted to keep using WordPress to see if I would be comfortable enough to delete my Typepad account when the time came. I mean I hadn’t updated Typepad since January.

A few other annual subscriptions are up around now so I got thinking about what my plans are for everything. I was set to ditch Typepad all together since it would save some cash, but decided to check out their changes while looking at my current WordPress setup. My conclusion was mixed. I think overall I like both systems. They each have their advantages. The deciding factor was for some reason the performance on my hosting site I use was apparently really slow recently. Significantly so that I noticed it affecting page load times. That little thing made me realize why it is worth it to pay for an application suck as Typepad. I don’t host it, i dont’ fix it, I just use it. I like tinkering with the look and feel, but don’t want to deal with performance and stability and updates, etc. In the end I will stick with Typepad. I have used it for almost 5 years now. It just works.

That being said I spent the better part of this afternoon porting posts since January from WordPress back to Typepad. The migration process works, but is not as clean as I would have liked. Tags in WordPress show up as Categories in Typepad. That required some work. Then severing my domain hosting accounts hooks into my Powerz.org domain took some work since they controlled the DNS. After a DNS server migration my mail and blog are now safely working again. Now I have to wait for Google to rebuild my site index. Their goes my page rank’s but it isn’t the first time I have done that. Now lets see if I don’t want to change my mind again in 6 months. The reality is both systems are good, but I am happy where I am, and don’t want to mess with easy upkeep.

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The Vegetative Weekend

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After 12 days of work, and several late nights I got this weekend off. One of the project’s I was on has a deadline today and we had lots to do. Thankfully I am now about to catch up on sleep for now. There was a few really late nights plus the weekend work. The funny thing is even with all the work I put in over the past two weeks it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I have lived through. I am not trying to jinx myself or anything. I just noticed even with lots to do the management is aware of the toll it takes on people and tries to alleviate the pain when possible. I like that. For reasons I have gone into many times I don’t go into details of my work on this site, but one of the reasons I love my current job is in a lot of ways how people are treated. It isn’t perfect, but it is a far cry from where I was for years at Partsearch for example.

With work over late Friday I took the opportunity to relax and do not much of anything this weekend. Friday night I meet up with Mike, Luke, Stanley and others for a few drinks. Saturday consisted of sleeping late, TV watching, and some apartment cleaning. Today consisted of sleeping late (a theme for the weekend) more TV watching, work on this site, writing, and general lounging around.

Now the weekend is gone all to fast. I am back to work tomorrow, even if it is working from home. I am thinking of taking Friday off to burn off some vacation time. I will see towards the end of the week if that will be possible. Right now I want to finish up some writing and then I am off to bed.

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My neighborhood kicks butt. Live music by the water tonight was actually pretty good. Too bad I had to leave for my conf call. Wondering if the concert is still going on now?

Long Travel Day

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Today I went up to see Gretchen, Jayson, and baby Seth. It was a nice, if not short visit. I took the train up in the late morning and everyone met me at the station. We grabbed a quick lunch (including Seth) at a local pub/restaurant. Then we went back to their house to hang out. It was nice so we went into the pool. It was Seth’s first trip in the water. He seemed to like it. We hung out there for a while and then just relaxed at the house. It was a nice leisurely day with friends in the country.

I headed back early to goto a birthday party for my friend Luke. Typically the trip to Poughkeepsie is long enough to warrant staying over, but the last few times I have had plans. This time I should have stayed. I decided to spend the few extra bucks for an Amtrak train to Penn since the party was 2 blocks from Penn. Metro North would have required an additional two subway trains. Well Amtrak decided to not cooperate and the train was an hour and forty minutes late. The bad luck was that I just missed the previous Metro North train so I had to wait another 40 minutes for the next train.

By the time I got into Manhattan it was late and I was on the wrong side of the city. After prodding by Danny & Luke I said to heck with it and just went home. I was tired from the long day and I didn’t really want to trek over to the west side for a little while with people who were obviously drinking a decent amount.

What saved me from going insane was the mobile amtrak site, my iphone and my HP Mini Netbook I used on the train to watch movies.

Thursday / Friday Update

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Not much to report over the past two days, but I wanted to write a bit since I have been neglecting writing for a bit. Worked from home Thursday & Friday. Ended up not going out tonight since it got really nasty out and most of my friends ended up not going anywhere either.

Work was hectic but nothing out of the ordinary went on.

Venting Over

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My last post was a big rant, but I think I articulated my frustration so maybe it isn’t technically a rant? Still really ticked off. I have a bunch of other posts I am working on that I just haven’t updated in July. I just felt compelled to update that last one after I read about it today. Hopefully more updates (and backdating some older posts I started writting two weeks ago) in the next few days.

Apple Are You Kidding Me?

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I have been a huge fan of Apple and the iPhone. I have always had my criticisms of the company. I have also said that I love my iPhone but would love to find another phone to replace it due to the restrictions Apple puts on the iPhone. This latest stunt by Apple may just get me to drop the iPhone and get something (anything) else. GV Mobile is an app I have used since it came out. It is an app that works with Google Voice. Before GV Mobile I used Grand Dialer that did similar things with the old Grand Central before Google turned it into Google Voice. Why then did Apple just decide to pull all apps that work with Google Voice? I paid for this app, now basically it is killed off? Yeah it will still work for a while but if anything in the OS breaks the app it wont work. This is crazy. How is this not big brother that Apple (or AT&T through Apple) just come in and turn off an app? And why, because it mimic’s iPhone features? So what, I choose to use those mimicked features. Thoughts are it is more likely that AT&T doesn’t want to lose revenue by free SMS via these apps. So can someone explain to me how App Stores are better for the consumer if the handset maker and the provider say what can and cannot be put on my phone? I prefer the day when i can find an app, download it and run it on my smart phone. Worked for years with Palm, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. Now everyone has their own app stores. How is this progress for the consumer?

I was tempted to pre-order an Android powered My Touch with T-Mobile today. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that the My Touch doesn’t offer Wifi Calling (no android phone does yet). Apple / AT&T get your act together or you will lose a good customer, and I bet I am not the only one.

On a related note I was kind of pissed about what I consider similar crazy tactics by Amazon regarding the Kindle. At least Amazon apologized about what they did, and it doesn’t look like they will do it again. Apple you should learn something from Amazon!

UPDATE 7-31-2009: Finally the FCC is doing something. Questioning Apple, AT&T & Google about what is going on.