Fated to End Sometime

So I was pleased to snag an MSI Wind U123 for my birthday, one of the last red ones no less.  It's small, has the performance I want, plenty of storage capacity and is really lightweight and portable to the max.  The screen is sharp and bright, and the wireless signal is strong.  I can run both Windows XP and Ubuntu on it without any problems.

Less than a month of use in and I start hearing this weird grinding sound emanating from the cooling fan.  At first I figured it was just because I had left it running all night.  Then it started returning at various intervals, with no rhyme or reason to it.  A bit of research revealed this is a common issue with netbooks featuring Intel Atom motherboards.

The issue is relatively easy to correct - a drop of sewing machine oil in the fan.  The problem - MSI covered one of the screwholes with a warranty void if tampered sticker.  I was now facing shipping the laptop off for 4-6 weeks to deal with a noisy fan, or else voiding the warranty to correct the problem.  And to be clear - I'm generally a fairly tolerant person - but this noise was not of a level that any sane person could possibly tolerate for long.  I was already starting to tap on the side of the casing or turning it upside down to try to get it to stop - sometimes successfully, although it would never stay silent for very long.

Alright, so Congress can't figure out how to overhaul healthcare for some reason.  The best we keep hearing is to make it easier for everyone to get healthcare insurance.  In my opinion they are ignoring the main problem about healthcare in the United States.

It doesn't work.

Sure, if you need to go to the ER because you had an accident with a power tool, and they need to stitch you up so you won't bleed to death, that's one thing.

But cancer, diabetes, thyroid problems, heart disease, etc...

Do you see many of the friends and family members you know with these conditions making full 100% recoveries?

So this weekend Willow asked me to install Darkstone on her computer, because she's lately been pretty keen on all things related to Lord of the Rings, however indirectly.  So I obliged, and then she asked for help getting connected with Autumn over the network so they could play together, which I haven't done with the game in a long time.

Turns out this would take a bit of doing.  Everyone runs either Windows XP or Ubuntu in this house (or both), and what I did not initially expect was to have to add an exception to the Windows XP firewall on each machine in order to get the games to communicate with each other.

 We just received this message from eBay today:

We're contacting you about the following item:
WOMENS CUSTOM CLOTHING LOT PERSONAL SHOPPER SERVICE

This listing didn't follow the guidelines in our policy. We haven't removed it, but we wanted to let you know about the problem because future violations could result in listing removal and limits to your selling privileges. Please use the information below to edit your listings so they follow our policy: 

Listings that offer a choice of different items aren't allowed on eBay. Sellers can offer a choice of sizes, colors and configurations of a particular item within a listing, but the listing can't offer buyers a choice of completely different items.

Sellers are generally permitted to offer a choice of sizes, colors and configurations of a particular item within a listing. However, a listing may not offer buyers a choice of completely different items. This is considered a form of fee circumvention.

Using systems and techniques to circumvent, or avoid, eBay fees isn't allowed. Fee avoidance, or "circumvention," is damaging to the online marketplace, puts sellers who pay their fees at a disadvantage, and damages members' trust. 

For more information on this eBay policy, please visit: 

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-circumventing.html

We're sorry for the inconvenience, but our policies help keep eBay safer for everyone. Thanks for your understanding.

Sincerely,
eBay Trust and Safety Team

So effectively our last two remaining eBay auction listings are considered in violation of eBay terms.  To be more specific, we were running two "personal shopper" auction listings on eBay.  In each listing you could choose your size and also how many clothing items & jewelry you would like to receive, with different price ranges for each "lot".  The buyer would send us their payment, we would then go shopping for them (as a SERVICE), photograph what we purchased for their review, go shopping again if necessary, then package and ship their clothing directly to them.

Because there were variations within each listing, eBay apparently determined that we were selling "different" types of product in one listing and therefore attempting "fee avoidance".  Strangely, they did not cancel the listings, so apparently this message was intended to be some kind of warning.  To me that makes things really unclear - because according to this message from eBay we were in violation of eBay policies, but it was still okay to keep the listings up.  My interpretation is that eBay knows that we were not in violation of their terms, but they decided to bully us into splitting these two auctions up into ten separate listings so they would receive more revenue from insertion fees.

 It's been a tough past few months.  We tried to start our own work-from-home eBay based business selling women's clothing, and thanks to a worsening economy and non-stop sales all throughout the entire holiday season at the mall and on eBay itself, our sales have been pretty much nonexistent for the past several weeks.

Thankfully the grandparents have all sent gifts for the girls this year, which means that there won't be a completely empty space beneath the Christmas tree.  I also wanted to do something special for them, and being a bit of a computer geek and having a bit of a hoard of this and that in computer components and whatnot, I decided to put together a Mame system.

One of the nice things about the internet is the relative ease someone can have at obtaining a new identity. Of course, the trick is then to transfer your existing identity over to the new one (if that is what you desire, of course).

I have been planning on leaving behind my previous virtual identity of "Yaddoshi" for a while - it served me well for several years but no longer seems to fully explain my actual personality - in fact it tends to be more confusing than helpful, if that makes any sense.