A Donkey on the Edge

Name the artist :-)

the love we'll never make is the most rare, the most troubling

Right--stop downloading mp3s and get back to work mister

Just got an email which looks like a lot like spam asking me to publish a link to www.growabrain.net which claims to be a blog but looks a lot like like a 'viral' from a California estate agent? Anyway, funny link on 'his' page, a Big Lebowski quote generator...

In case you'd forgotten the masterful milk-drink:

Smokey, this is not Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.

Or even

"How're you gonna keep them down on the farm when they've seen Karl Hungus?"

Anyway, you get the idea (I'd be grateful to hear your opinion on the growbrain thing--is it Microsoft in disguise or just a particularly enterprising salesman).

Right, a few days later and a few items underweight I've got some more feedback...

1. The 'disgruntled' community has a high percentage of members who would probably be disgruntled anyway. You know the type, they spend most of their online life posting complaints to newsgroups about how so-and-so didn't read the faq and use words like "immature" or "unbelievable" when trolling their fellow usenet user... Many are complaining about the listing fees (Ebay charges on a sliding scale according to the value of your item and collects a percentage of your sale if the item goes). I have to say that while the percentages/05/well be a bit on the high side given the numbers (somebody is making a lot of money with this thing and it ain't the listers), the price seems fair as Ebay lets you take the part-used 50¢ Elvis pencil-sharpener you bought on your last trip to the States and instantly put in in front of 200,000 Jananese Elvis fans (say). That has to be worth something, it sure beats trying to sell to the fifty people in an Oxfordshire saleroom...
2. Ebay feels like messy software. It feels like it expanded so quickly, it got a bit out of control and is currently being mended on the go. That said, it is very complete, very feature-rich.
3. The search engine is more than a bit ropey (ok, that's a bit unfair as the system is under huge constraints so compromises have probably been made). You/05/remember my kitchen sink collapsed and I had to instal new everything--as a result, I had a set of brass taps sitting around. I listed them as "Victorian brass kitchen mixer tap set" figuring the system would match "kitchen taps" "brass taps" and so on... Unfortunately, for Ebay's search, a person looking for "brass taps" doesn't want to see a "brass tap" which is a bit crap really...
4. You could bid on my junk
5. No item too sublime, or too humble (dirty socks, really)
6. You can waste a seriously large amount of time with this thing :-)

Finally, re the setting up a seller account, David Fromant writes from Melbourne

re. ebay
just a "me too" i'm afraid. have had exactly the same experience trying to set up a seller account on ebay australia. decided in the end it was far too much hassle and didn't.
my advice: don't give them the chance to make you a disgruntled customer. there are alternatives. vote with your $s (or pounds :)!
:)
david

Well, first the technical--the problem with Ebay's seller registration is to do with pattern matching. Essentially, the sellers address has to match exactly the address on your bank account. This is normal--this check happens everytime you use your cards online (well, not exactly, but you know what I mean). In most cases the match is intelligent enough to manage slight differences (differences that should be ignored like case matching, line-breaks etc), not so the Ebay system.

Secondly, try as I may, I couldn't find another auction site to use. I called around a few including one very professional-looking one that it turns out is run by two guys out of their Brighton bedroom (I telephoned the 'help' line and got a sleepy person), a few that didn't let me sell what or how I wanted to and finally a whole raft of auction sites that are in fact white-label re-badges of Ebay (so same banking system).

If anyone out there has had a positive experience on an independent site, send me the link.

Name the artist--ok, just this once as I'm gonna here all night ;-)

...bakers make bastards
...newpapers are printed
...workers are depressed

Back to work...

Oh yeah--for those of you curious about the last lyric, it's from "Lemon Incest"

On the eight o'clock boat to Calais. Left home at quarter to five and got to Calais fourty-five minutes early grrrr (could have slept more...). Our little clan is heading to Italy for the next two weeks--Nicki is flying with Clemmie and I'm driving the 'support vehicle'. Interesting drive ahead I hope...

Well, GPRS seems to be missing in Germany, so I'll post this whenever I get network.

Crossed the Rhine on a small bridge north of Strasbourg. I had forgotten exactly how huge it is, that is one major waterway. It's kind of funny, I moved to France before the common market happened and it still gives me a strange feeling to go driving across borders with no check. Particularly bridges on the Rhine.

Tomorrow morning off to Italy, but for now I have two very large and not particularly nice sausages to digest along with two pints of warm pilsener...

Drove through France today, even with air-con I had to stop for air every 30 minutes, at one point the dial read 107 Fahrenheit!

Hopefully, there'll be water in the pool and no forest fires when I get to Tuscany

So I was happily listening to a worthy program on Inter on the way through France the day before yesterday and was surprised to hear the following comment:

I wouldn't throw Anne Frank's diary in the Seine--it's illegal to chuck garbage in the river

Now, I personally think that giving racists, bigots, maniacs and idiots the same airtime as left-of-centre moderates is important to guarantee a number of our key freedoms, but this stuck in my throat.

The program was a classic NPR, Radio 4 type human-interest piece about the 'bouquinistes'--the people who man those quirky little bookstalls along the banks of the Seine. We had just heard the story of a woman who had done this for twenty-odd years, working her way up from a miserable plot right at the end of the 'quais' where business was tough, eventually landing herself a prime spot in front of Notre-Dame. It's a good story: hard work, early mornings trawling the 'puces' in search of rare finds to fill her stalls and many tales of the eccentrics that make the work interesting.

And then, in the middle of all this mister let's - put - the - jews - back - on - the - trains rears his ugly head. I'm shocked that the producer didn't edit it out. I'm not suggesting auto censure--this really isn't political correctness--the comment was totally unconnected to both story itself and to any specific context within it. The editor could have cut it the same way he might have cut a poorly recorded passage, if anything it would have improved the program...

So now I'm trawling the franceinter.fr website looking for the duty officer's email. I just can't believe--it I mean did they sit down and talk it through? Was it left in for a reason? I want an explanation.

Finally got here this morning. The girls fly in to Pisa tomorrow--am off to pick them up so might have a look at the tower first :-)

Orange can't figure out why my gprs connection isn't working so am posting via old-style (expensive) gsm. Looking forward to sleeping in a proper bed (just had two nights in the Jeep) and not waking up with little Italian kids looking in the window, watching the drool on my cheek...

Most excellent shortcut to the pool through the guarded truffle-picking field. Unexpected 4WD fun actually, a very steep hill with tight s-bends on loose shingle and clumpy (is that a word) earth. I haven't had to use high ratio yet but the car actually stalled in first. Had to roll back down in reverse while switching to hi--fun. And at the end of it you come out of the woods at an old farmhouse with a gorgeous pool--am liking this :-)

Right, just off to Pisa to pick up the girls so I think I'll stop posting for a couple weeks.

Just had to say that I changed Clemmie's nappy this afternoon on a bleacher in the Piazza del Campo in Siena with pre-Palio mud on my shoes. The Palio is this crazy horse race they have here, and the central square where it is run is covered in earth and watered three times a day in preparation for the hooves...

Interesting thought by Tim over at stealthisbrand. He ponders what would happen if corporates were subject to the same restrictions as governments in dealing with their customers (CRM--discrimination by another name?).

Which kinda got me thinking, in the years since companies started spending large amounts of money on CRM products (my finger - in - the - air estimate reckons it started getting harder to get a human response or indeed any response to a customer service query about ten to fifteen years ago), quality of service to the end-user has consistently gotten worse.

Now seeing as this hasn't resulted in said companies going out of business due to loss of customers, and seeing as I'm not getting good service from anyone, this must mean I am being discriminated against--I must be a bad customer, the 20 to the 80, a time waster, a troublemaker.

Right, so time to burn my bra and chop up my Tesco ClubCard--or better still, time to ask Tesco for a transcript of all the data they hold on me under the data protection act;-)

3.0.1d bug

Have just completed tax returns going back to April 1998.

Which was nice ;-)