My Gameboy Advance auction just finished and I got a total of $162.50, yayness! That’s almost twice what I was going to get by cashing it in at Electronics Boutique, and it’s $70 over my starting price. Very Good indeed. I now offical like eBay.
That’s it, move along, nothing to see here 
I’m sitting here at work and it’s 6:52am. I’m really annoyed. There’s this old guy having a conversation with one of my other colleagues about some semi-religious matter and there are so many holes in his argument that it would put Swiss cheese to shame. The fact that this guy has no idea what he is talking about doesn’t worry me at all. People, I guess, have a right to be stupid… don’t they? 
What does bother me is how many people fail to see the broader picture, preferring instead to see the facts as they want them to be rather than as they are. Like my friend Rob says jokingly, “Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.” I mean, I haven’t been around on this planet for a very long time and it seems perfectly reasonable to expect that people older than myself would probably have better responses to a whole range of life’s questions than I; after all, they’ve certainly had more time to think it through. This, unfortunately, is often not the case.
eBay is great, but things like THIS are not :angry:. I got this email this afternoon thinking it was some kind of account acknowledgment for the submission of my auction yesterday. I must say that it was lucky I’m not tired tonight as if I hadn’t been paying attention I might not have picked up on the fact that this email was a well presented scam trying to weasel my account information and credit card details out of me. Looking at the sight you can see that it looks exactly like the forms on the eBay website, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I realised that eBay and PayPal are not directly linked I would have been filling that thing out and signing my life away.
I probably would have noticed it was a scam when I got to the bit about entering your account pin number, that bit wasn’t too subtle. The impressive thing is how well the person who’s done this has managed to mask their email address and present themselves as eBay. Not too hard to do if you know a thing or two about TELNET and SMTP, though he’ll be caught in the end as you can’t infinitely mask your IP address. You eventually leave a trail back to the source being you. Then you’re screwed. As it is this guy has left a huge trail. In any case I thought it was important that I show you guys this to demonstrate just how careful you have to be on the net these days.
I’ve been avoiding it for a while, but I’ve finally joined the masses of eBay users, but not for buying, instead I’m selling. Tonight I listed my Gameboy Advance on the Australian eBay sight for $90 with games and accessories. I pretty good deal if I do say so myself, I only hope I get some good bidders! I originally purchased the GBA for work as I was doing a heap of night shifts during my first year in my current job and it started to get boring waiting for calls to present in the early hours of the morning. The GBA was supposed to be a good fix for that, it was good for work because I could just pause the game without it affecting anything, and it was better then a book as it was easier to break away from and focus on a call if and when one dropped in. To my disadvantage though some old crone at work got some stupid idea in their head about how they “thought” the thing worked, dobbed on me, and it was deemed a “distraction” and subsequently banned from my workplace ….. luckily I was not. Since then I’ve had no use for the thing and it’s been sitting in my cupboard gathering dust. I think I used it for about a fortnight, if that, before getting “caught”. Funny thing is people could and still do read books and magazines at work and this is considered “OK” on night shift> Go figure … Oh well, it was a good idea at the time. Enter eBay…
I think the reason it’s taken me so long to start using eBay is that I am by no means an impulse buyer. I put a great deal of thought into any purchase I make and don’t go ahead with it unless I know for certain it will be useful in my day to day life. This of course is rather different to the conduct of western society at large. With mass marketing and the overwhelming influx of direct communication through Mobiles, PDAs, the Net, PCs and TV, society is being coaxed into spending habits that out perform their bank balances. Luckily I am “above” this, at least for the moment and on the whole am not left with an accumulation of junk that I don’t use. For this instance though eBay should come in very handy. Here’s hoping!
Listening to: Jars of Clay – I’ll Fly Away
One of the things I missed when moving completely to Linux was Zempt. You might remember I posted about this nifty little program a couple of months ago. The program allows you to publish entries to an :mt: installation without having to login via the web interface. It can all be done through a client program, which is great because it takes about half the time. Anyway, here I was thinking I’d be without this lovely program until the Zempt developers got around to making a linux port. That was, until just now!
When browsing around KDE-Apps.org this evening I came across an almost identical program for Linux called KMT. It’s missing some of the cooler features of Zempt like it’s rich text editor (apparently to be implemented soon), category placement and such, but on the whole it’s pretty good. I’m blogging from it right now actually. The fact that it’s missing some of the rich text features doesn’t really bother me. Firstly because I know html like the back of my hand (for heavens sake, sometimes I even dream in html), and secondly as it should be in the next version. The inability to assign each entry to a particular category is a bit annoying, but as it’s only version 0.2 i’ll be forgiving. So for any Linux using :mt: bloggers out there, this might be the app you’ve been looking for!
It’s 9:11am and I’m at work. It’s only been a little over an hour since I started. Already I feel like I’ve worked an 8 hour shift, and if it were not for the fact that still have 6 hours and 40 minutes left everything would be ok. Already this morning I’ve dealt with the loud, the obnoxious, and the self-entitled, and that’s just the “people” I work with. I don’t think work would have half the frustration if the people I worked with had some manners. You see, in the world I grew up in people usually developed these attributes by the age of 50!!! It’s a backwards world where a 23 year old has to teach the “supposedly wise and mature” chronologically challenged a thing or two about decency. Oh well, maybe they’re just having a bad day ………. probably forgot their walking frame.
On the customer front though it’s not too bad! Roughly 50 precent of the calls so far this morning have been prank calls from kids at pay phones. One thing though is that it’s very rare that you actually get a kid that has anything really funny to say. You do get the occasional directory request for names such as “Ben Dover”, “Penny Tration”, “Incontentia Buttocks” and the like, and while I’m sure the young at heart are probably chuckling, hearing these same attempts over and over for the past two years has really taken the the shine off their humorous impact.
I’ve been really slack this past week or so, and haven’t gotten around to blogging. I have many excuses for this, but I can’t be bothered going into great detail here. The short version of this past weeks events would list things like Easter family gatherings, visiting friends, and my recent subscription to Transgaming’s WineX package. The latter has given me access to all my Windoze games in Linux, something I’ve been after for some time. Bye bye windoze, no reason to boot you anymore So far I’ve managed to get Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, and Counter-Strike working perfectly. These are the only PC games I play anyway, so it works out rather well.
Anyhoo, that’s all for now.
For those of you who read the sites I’ve linked to such as Melly’s, Dan’s and Rob’s you will have noticed that they have been down for a day or so. This is one of the downfalls of having a free hosting server, but is also something not unfamiliar to myself who has paid a significant amount of money to have my site hosted. Either way, it sucks.
I was chatting to Rob tonight and we were both scared that the site had gone down for good, like the last site Rob was with. Fortunately this wasn’t the case, because at around 1am they came back online, and i’ve been doing full site backups of Melly’s, Dan’s, and Rob’s (which includes Fiona’s) ever since. There’s nothing so crap (digitally) as finding out that all the work you’ve put into a website has been lost because some ignoramus sysadmin wasn’t nice enough to let you know they were having server issues. Anyways, now I can rest assured that my favourite blogs arn’t going to disappear into thin air. Well, at least the ones for which I know the logins.
In other news, my pc is fully operational! That’s right, ALL my hardware is now working in Linux, and there’s absolutely no reason to go into windows. This makes me very happy. After fiddling around with my kernel for the better part of 4 hours I finally got my webcam working, and then about an hour later, as if on a roll, I got my printer working too. Happy, happy, joy, joy Did I ever tell you I love linux?? 
I was throughly fed up with the amount of stupidity capable of being elicited from the telephone-illiterate that on one of my breaks today I took an escape out the back to sit on a ledge in the afternoon sun. I love just sitting silently watching the world fly by around you, observing things as they happen without having to be a part of the rush.
The call centre I work in backs onto an alley street that holds one of Toowoomba’s business post offices. For a dead end street it gets quite a bit of traffic and so there’s plenty to observe. The ledge I sit on is around the side of the building, so with my back to the wall I get an unobstructed view looking one way down the street. It also gives me direct line of site to the post office, not that the post office in itself is of any interest. Normally I just sit there and watch people as they walk by and try to imagine what they might be thinking, or what it is like living their life. You can tell a lot simply by watching a person for a matter of seconds. This afternoon though I wasn’t interested in observation, at least not of this kind….
Whilst sitting there on the ledge I rested back against the wall with my head tilted towards the sky. I closed my eyes and watched my world transition from blue to orange as my eyelids raptured me from the visual to the sensorial. I just love the color you see as you look at the insides of your eyelids with the sun beaming down on them. That soft autumn orange instills a homely sense of peace, like a mug of hot chocolate on a cold rainy day. There was a gentle breeze tumbling down the street which occasionally ventured down the side of the building to brush past my face. If I concentrated hard enough I could feel my eyelashes waving in the wind as I took a couple of deep breaths to release some tension. After basking in the sun for about 10 minutes or so my time was up, I was due back in there. As I placed my hand on the ledge to rise I felt the contrast of the cool concrete on my warm finger tips. I opened my eyes to see a flurry or people darting about back and forth towards the post office. As I walked back inside to continue my shift I marveled at the obscurity of finding such serenity in this cluttered little street.