The Wikipedia Game.

Grats to Dave, last week's winner, who will receive his marshmallows approximately never.

This week, you are to link from The Pirates of Penzance to the Inverse Ninja Law. You cannot use date or year links, or more than one of the links used in the Six Degrees tool's path (i.e. Animaniacs, Original Trilogy (Star Wars), R2-D2). The magic number is 4.

This one is really easy.

Statshot
A look at the numbers that shape your world.

Why there was no Statshot yesterday.

Don't you wish you were here?

I took this a couple weeks ago with my cell phone:
I wish I'd had a camera when it said -2. We had 22 consecutive days under freezing. Lately it's been pretty warm, 30-35. When the cold snap broke it was a balmy 42, which felt great. I was out one night when the wind chill was around -30. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. It's a nice change of pace from the Land of the Eternal Humidifier.

Plus, there's a nice little shop just down the street from me that sells all kinds of delicious things, such as:Flavors shown here include White Chocolate, Hazelnut, "Happy Cows" (mix of milk & white chocolates), Yogurt, Dark Chocolate, Crispy Cereals, Caramel, and Strawberry Yogurt. Those are just the standard-sized bars. They have some non-Milka chocolate too, including a bar I've been working on for a while that is 90% cocoa, i.e. very dark. Not for beginners.

Best turn down the volume....

In the past, we've had trouble shipping stuff in a timely manner. This may be why.

Selling on Ebay: The Work from Home Scam

I constantly read articles and hear from friends that they are or know people who are successful ebay sellers, and that the majority of these sellers are stay-at-home moms who simply post an item a day and make a full-time income. So I decided to try it out, and after a brief experiment, I can safely say that those who spread the ebay work-at-home myth are all big fat liars. BECAUSE:

I am a new ebay seller... ...and I suck!

But it is *so* much fun.

Selling on ebay can be just as addictive as buying--so much so that I lost money by dropping the price on my first item just so it would sell and still got a thrilling rush when it sold. The item in question is a pre-1906 copy of Essays by Ralph Waldo Emmerson. It cost me about $2 when everything was said and done to list it, and someone bought it for 99 cents. I decreased the shipping from $5 to $4, and it should only cost about $3 to ship, but the box itself to ship it in should be about $2, so I made a total of NEGATIVE $2 on this one. BUT IT SOLD!

Yesterday Thomas and I went garagesaling. (Yes, that is a verb when used as I just did.) We bought a bunch of books, baby clothes, antique salt and pepper shakers, and odd dishes. The good news is that of the $4.50 I spent on odd dishes, they are cummulatively worth about $185, and you can sell them one dish at a time, so that’s cool. The only problem is, there only seem to be about a handful of people buying these exotic antique dishes with the makers’ stamps on the bottom. The good news is that since I only have $1 at stake for each lot, I can afford to sell them cheaper than the competition.

Oh, and I have to add an aside--I LOVE looking up the different marks on antique china. It’s fascinating to learn about the makers and how much each brand is worth. (Hint: if you ever see ANYTHING--I don’t care if it is a doll piture from a doll china set--marked "Noritake," buy it for a quarter and send it my way! I will split the profit with you.) It was quite funny last night to look up "Bukigawa" and "Dukigawa" on ebay to return no results, and then have the highly intelligent Google ask, "Did you mean Fukigawa?" At that point I blessed the founders of Google. I could not for the life of me figure out what that first calligraphic letter was on that mark on my hand-painted china--though I DID note with hilarity that someone listed their hand-painted Bukigawa cups on ebay, and laughed that they could be so ignorant.

The coolest thing I have up for sale appears to be an antique vintage salt and pepper shaker in the shape of a telephone. The first shaker is the phone itself, which lifts off the base, and the base is the second shaker. It had a bid up the first hour and has three watches already. Maybe it’s a real gem, we’ll see.

It'll probably be a gem that sells for 99 cents again, at which point I will be out 75 cents. But it's hard to sell anything for more than a dollar. If you don’t take any of the bells and whistles, it costs about about a dollar per item just to list your stuff on ebay. What I have found is there is a TON of competition in any ebay market, so you either have to underlist your items and buff up the shipping, or...don’t sell.

As for all of these mythical stay-at-home moms who work from home and make a full-time income selling on ebay and still take their kids to soccer practice...well, I would like to know what they’re selling and how they spend time with their children too. I have spent 50% of my existence over the last two days out hunting for "treasure" and the other 50% writing it up on ebay.

They must be selling prescription drugs under the code name of "Baby Gap."

The Wikipedia Game.

Grats to Mom B., winner of last week's contest.

This week you are to connect Sun Tzu to Zerg rush (y'know, because he invented it; Actually, I'll bet Sun Tzu woulda been hella good a StarCraft).

You cannot use date or year articles or links in the "External Links" section of the articles. The magic number is 4. And no cheatin'. Don't think I won't know if you did. It won't help you either, since it'll give you a 5-step path.

Science vs. Faith.

More flow chart goodness in response to the flow chart idiocy propagated by another website.



An Idiot of the Day/Week/Month award goes to the operator of that website. And an honorary Idiot award goes to Brian Briggs of BBspot for linking to it. Every time I get the urge to go back to BBspot to see what I've been missing, I'm reminded why I stopped going.

Statshot.
A look at the numbers that shape your world.

How Joe spends his time in WoW.

W.W.D.N.C.D? This was in response to some treasonous Visio diagram that misrepresents the President's war policy. Some people are lucky to live in a time where liberty is held higher than life.