Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is really interesting, and it’s pushing new ground in a lot of ways – including being the first plug-in for Firefox that I’ve ever seen crash:
I guess I should feel thankful that Microsoft even released a Firefox plug-in. 😉
This Wired article has the details about the changes at eBay – and beyond the changes in fee structure, which seem to be both good and bad depending on how you look at it, the biggest change is that sellers will no longer be able to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers. This is great news, because vengeful sellers are the bane of eBay because they know even if the buyer leaves negative feedback, the seller will usually have enough volume to bury the negative feedback in a matter of days or weeks. Buyers, on the other hand, tend not to be as high-volume, so negative feedback sticks around in a much more obvious way.
I’ve been on eBay for nine years next month, and in my 281 buying and selling transactions, I’ve had six negative feedback points. Three of those were from sellers whom I had a fairly negative transaction with (like Majeeda Haaq), and when I left neutral feedback to express my dissatisfaction they left negative. The other two negative feedback points were from an eBay seller in New York who bought some software off me and left negative feedback as a way of ensuring I’d give him a refund – which I would have done anyway. I’ve only had one genuine negative feedback point from a buyer, who happened to be in Italy and was angry he had to pay duty/customs import fees – and all because he insisted I put the full retail value of the item on the shipment when I suggested putting a lower value.
So, as a seller on eBay I’m not too happy to hear about the higher fees, but as a buyer, I’m thrilled to hear that unethical sellers won’t be able to leave punitive feedback for buyers. I’m a bit surprised they’re stopping neutral feedback as well, although as someone pointed out to me last year, if a buyer pays within a reasonable time frame, that’s pretty much the end of the buyer’s responsibility.
Oh yeah, and their CEO Meg Whitman is getting the boot, largely because of eBay’s disastrous purchase of Skype (who the hell was advising her that sellers and buyers actually wanted to talk to each other?).
Some of the regular readers of this blog have been very helpful in giving me suggestions and feedback on my post about us shopping for a new car when we drove a Nissan Altima Coup
and really liked it. One of the comments was from a fellow who goes by the name of Cold Flame and he suggested I look into buying out the lease on Ashley’s Mini Cooper and selling it privately. That had never occurred to me, because prior to financing then buying the Mazda Protégé 5, my previous two cars were leased Chevy Cavaliers – which of course have very poor re-sale value, so I always gave them back to the dealership. I was surprised to learn that our buy-out on Ashley’s Mini Cooper is only $14K, and a quick search of the online Auto Trader tells me that 2004 Mini Coopers with more mileage than hers are selling for $20K to $22K! So this might be a way to make a quick $5-6K, which makes that $37K Nissan Altima Coup a more affordable $31K. I love learning new things, so thanks Cold Flame
I find myself going through cycles with my Xbox 360: when I got Halo 3, I played it every morning for an hour or two until a few weeks later, I had beaten the game (and I still get trashed in online play – go figure). Then I didn’t touch my Xbox for a while, until firing up Mass Effect not too long ago. But just as I was starting to get into Mass Effect, I downloaded, played, and immediately purchased an incredibly fun Xbox Live arcade game: Arkadian Warriors.
The game is immensely fun to play, reminding me a bit of a cross between a Zelda Game and Diablo. It’s fast to get up and running with, easy to learn, and doesn’t bore you with complexities. The RPG element is very “light”, with three choices for characters, and fixed skills that unlock at certain levels. It’s great for local co-op play, with two players sharing the screen at the same time (we need more games like that), and I imagine it’s equally fun over Xbox Live co-op play. Definitely one of the best 800 point purchases I’ve ever made on Xbox Live! <does the Google> Ah, I see that the developer of this game is the same company (Wanako Games) that created my other favourite Xbox Live Arcade game, Assault Heroes. No wonder I like it so much. 🙂
I rarely talk about anything as mundane as the weather on this blog, but it’s so cold right now in Calgary I thought it was worth mentioning. Almost everyone in the city is trying to figure out how they can avoid leaving their house! The screen shot to the left there shows the current temperature at 6:00 am: -31 degrees Celsius for my American readers is -23.8 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s supposed to go down to -37 degrees Celsius today, which is -34.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s not the worse of it: when you factor in the wind chill from the 18 km/h wind, it’s effectively -45 degrees Celsius (-49 degrees Fahrenheit). I don’t tend to mind cooler weather, but this is just ridiculous…we’re even colder than Winnipeg (affectionately called Winterpig by some) today! At least it’s a dry cold. 😉
I saw this commercial for the first time tonight, and my friends and I were laughing hysterically – we watched it twice and laughed harder each time. I just watched it again now, laughing until I had tears in my eyes, and Ashley just looked at me strangely and only laughed at how hard I was laughing. I guess this speaks to my sense of humour. 😉
It’s getting close to April, when Ashley’s lease on the Mini Cooper will be up, so we’ve started the process of looking for a new vehicle. Because I received so many helpful comments the last time I posted about shopping for a new car (really not a subject I cover much), I thought I’d try again. This past Saturday we spent a few hours at a local Calgary Nissan dealership, and a local Mitsubishi dealership. We test drove three cars: a 2008 Nissan Altima 3.5 SE Coupe, a 2008 Mitsubishi Eclipse GT-P, and a 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer GTS.
We test drove the Eclipse first (pictured above), and it was an interesting experience – I’d never driven a sports car (or a sports-like car for those of you who might not consider the Eclipse a true sports car) before, so I wasn’t used to being to low to the ground and feeling so far back. The car had a good amount of power, and it handled well – I had a hard time adapting to the lack of rear/side visibility. They didn’t have an automatic transmission Eclipse on the lot, so we test drove the Spyder (the convertible) which of course had reduced rear-view window visibility. The interior felt cramped, which is pretty much what I was expecting.
Next we test drove the Lancer, and I was disappointed by it. Although the engine and handling was what I expected for a car at that price point, the interior felt and looked cheaper than I was expecting – fully loaded, it’s in the same price realm as a fully-loaded Mazda 3, so I was expecting something similar. It was taken off the list pretty quickly, which is really unfortunate. I might not have given it a fair shake though – one thing I disliked about all three test drives we did was that the salesperson came with us. In my previous car-shopping experiences, I’ve never had that happen – I’ve given them my driver’s license to copy, I think once a credit card, and they handed me the keys. Having a salesperson in the back of the car makes me feel like Ashley and I can’t talk honestly about what we think of the car. Both salespeople were certainly very nice and easy to talk to, so this is no reflection on them, it’s just a feeling I have.
Next we went to a Nissan Calgary dealership and test drove the Nissan Altima 3.5 SE Coup – what a car! Ashley and I were both quite impressed with the handling, the power (oh what power) and the quality and spaciousness of the interior. Road noise was also very low – it felt a lot like a Saab in terms of road noise and interior spaciousness, but has the exterior look of a sports car. It’s got a lot of nice features, including Bluetooth, an MP3-compatible deck, and an auxiliary line-in on the stereo. Though I can’t for the life of me figure out why they wouldn’t put it inside the main console and provide power as well (USB would be nice). The Mazda 3 designers seem to grasp that people want to carry their MP3 players in the car with them, but they don’t want to have wires dangling about. The Nissan designers don’t seem to grasp that. On the other hand, if I want to burn six CDs worth of MP3s I can carry about 42 albums worth of content in the car, which is pushing 500 songs.
I wasn’t expecting to like the Nissan Altima Coup so much, but it quickly became #1 on our short list. The biggest problem? Swallowing the $36K price tag – which works out to around $39K after all the added charges. I’ve always tried to keep my car purchases under $30K because I don’t attach my self-esteem to the type of car I drive and I think it’s silly to spend so much on a hunk of steel and plastic to get you from point A to point B. But this will be a car we buy and keep for a long time, not lease, so it might make more sense to buy a higher-quality vehicle that we’ll get a lot of use out of. The other problem is that Ashley and I both have a strange need to buy things new, rather than used – which is an expensive habit when you’re talking about cars. Though the fact that this is the first year for the Altima Coup makes it more or less impossible to buy used makes me feel just a bit better. 😉
So, any opinions on the Nissan Altima Coup?
When I wrote about this issue a few days ago, I made sure to go in and check my settings to indicate that the only things Paramount was allowed to email me about were the Iron Man movie and the Marvel Comics newsletter. Here’s what my profile with them looks like today:
So imagine my surprise when, once again, I received another promotional email for the “How She Move” movie. That seals it: Paramount is using my email address to promote other movies to me, without my permission. Guess I need to blackhole that email alias since Paramount doesn’t have the ethics to follow their own rules. I’ll try unsubscribing from everything first – we’ll see if they honour an unsubscribe request or if they keep using my email address.
The snow was fresh this morning, so I decided to step into my backyard and take a few pictures of it. These are also my first public photos with the Nikon D300 (an amazing camera!).
The Wall Street Journal has published an excellent article about Bill Gates and the work he’s starting to focus on after his full-time job at Microsoft has finished. He’s promoting the concept of “Creative Capitalism”, which involves not only the pursuit of profits, but also improving the lives of others. In discussing this article on the private Mobius discussion list, I shared my views in response to a post by Jeff Kirvin about the way Wall Street and public companies work.
“I remain convinced that when a company goes public, it sells its soul to the investors and hands it’s brain to the board of directors – it can no longer do what it wants, pursue it’s own vision, or run a “just enough profit” style of company that encourages fair treatment of employees (with profit sharing, fair wages, and other elements found in responsible corporate behaviour). I have tremendous respect and admiration for companies such as Kingston that do not go public. I wish more companies were kept private.
I’m a believer in capitalism, but always tempered by compassion and generosity – things that seem foreign to most public companies who (necessarily so, sadly) need to be focused on the non-stop, quarter after quarter growth. Yet as an investor with mutual funds myself, it’s not like I can excuse myself from wanting ever-increasing profits either. We live in a screwed up world, that’s for sure.”
In the span of my lifetime, I fully expect Bill Gates to accomplish more for the world’s poor than anyone else in the past 100 years – I’ve always admired him as a computer geek, but the past couple of years I’ve come to admire him even more as a human being. I think this quote says a great deal about what drives Gates (in response to William Easterly’s comments about how the money sent to Africa over the past few decades has done nothing to raise the economic status of the region):
“”I don’t promise that when a kid lives it will cause a GNP increase,” he quipped. “I think life has value.”
On the opposite end of the quote spectrum, you have this assclown.