Weird Huh?

Huh?
Now it seems I can access cdcomplete.com at work, and can view the individual titles again. Weird. I wonder how long that will last. I still think the format of the site needs some work. Plus I wonder why they don't have some of the cover images, when they have all the track information. I guess some of those million selling records only have a handfull of cdcomplete members who have purchased them. That and I guess most of those members don't phyically own the albums in their collections but rather the mp3s, and the downloaded files of the songs. I suppose that is one of the things that even if I do breakdown and get an ipod, I won't do much downloading of songs, I'll just rip (is that the right word?) from the physical CD and copy it to the ipod.

April Showers Or Something

Hmm OK so this seems to be my first April Entry. Yay! I've got several things I need to do and should be doing and as usual no time to do it.

In the next few days/weeks I will be in rehearsals for a show I am directing for The Sandy Spring Theatre Group (www.sstg-home.org). The show is Steve Martin's Picasso At The Lapin Agile the preformances will be in the first three weekends of June in Gaithersburg. Right now I have most of the cast, there are two more male characters that I need to cast. The turn out for auditions a couple of weeks ago was dismal. I had to go searching for most of the actors I did get and have additional auditions a couple of times. Needless to say I will be pretty busy and might not have very many entries here in April and May, so what else is new.

A few days ago I discovered at work that another website I like to visit and use has been blocked by their silly security programs because the site promotes mp3 file posting, ugh. So now I can't update any of my stuff at CDcomplete.com while at work. I used to be able to at least look at my collection there, then I started noticing errors whenever I would try to look at a specific title (while at work). Then work blocked the site all together. Oh Well I still can get to rateyourmusic.com. I noticed they have updated that site since I had last used it. Now there are more cover images and they seem to have more titles. I was using that site only for my cassette and vinyl collections (with some of the special CD box sets) since the CDs were covered by the CDcomplete site. I only have a couple of tapes listed there and about 20 vinyl albums in my collection list, so I have to buckle down and get more entries there. For about a year and a half I only had about 24 titles listed there. I listed more of my CDs there on Thursday and Friday so there are about 100 of my CDs listed there now. I have a big task ahead of me there. I had the same sort of task when I had first set up my account over at DVDSpot.com it took me awhile (Like over a week) to enter my 200+ DVDs I had, now since I'm updated there whenever I get new DVDs I can add it to the list easily. I hope to be able to do that with CDs shortly, but it will probably not be completed until sometime in the summer. Also rateyourmusic has always been a little simpler to add to your list than over at cdcomplete. At cdcomplete you needed to know the UPC number to identify which version of a title you had. It isn't too user friendly when it comes to comparing different versions. Rateyourmusic is more user friendly and more community oriented sort of like over at DVDspot. All this reminds me that I am still only about a fifth or sixth of the way through with catalogueing my books over at bibliophil.org which I have a few issues with, but that is for another blog entry now isn't it?

Blogging Etiquette

You know I think that if someone is going to write a blog, they should make an effort to edit their posts to correct spelling and or grammar errors. There are many blogs around the internet, that constantly have spelling errors and dropped letters. Oh well I guess some people don't have the time to go over something they are done with.

March Madness!

Hmm Have I mentioned in this that I don't watch or care about the sport of Basketball, or the whole championship series called "March Madness"? I used to watch it some as a kid and liked the Washington Bullets (They began as the Baltimore Bullets), but then they moved from the "Capital Center" which was later renamed "USAir Arena" and in 2002 was demolished to make way for a shopping center, which now has one of those Magic Johnson's Movie Multiplex Theatres) in Laural, MD to the "DC Convention Center" (Then to another newer Convention Center I think) in Washington DC which was later renamed "The MCI Center" and then when Verizon bought MCI it was renamed "The Verizion Center". The Bullets changed their name to the Washington Wizards somewhere before the MCI Center name, to be more PC so as not to promote gun violence. So I stopped watching Basketball seriously sometime in the late 1970s around the time that Michael Jordan was making a name for himself, and the uniforms were becoming long baggy skirts with untucked shirts instead of shirts tucked into shorts. Maybe I shouldn't mention the uniform change because people might think I'm gay, but these modern "basketball shorts" that are baggy and look like gaucho skirts are the ugliest thing to come to sports uniforms since boxing sparing head gear. I got the biggest kick one time by seeing a video of some high school kid tripping on his "shorts" as they were falling down, served him right for trying to run around in a baggy skirt.

New On-Line Selling Venue!

I have sold stuff via Ebay for about 6 or 7 years now, off and on, mostly off, but lately very on. While surfing the Ebay Community Boards I found out about a totally free venue to sell stuff, you can also buy stuff from there which isn't free. Ecrater.com so far is Totally free to set up a store and start selling stuff. They don't charge a monthly fee to keep the store open, they don't charge final sale fees upon conclusion of the sale, they don't charge listing fees. The only fees they charge are premium fees for sellers who want to have their items featured at the very beginning of search pages. They have some sort of partnership with Google Check Out service which I need to check out the details about before doing it. Some in the Ebay forum have said that their sales are greater there than over at Ebay. Of course you have to promo the heck out of your store to generate traffic, many use their Ebay About Me page to do that (That seems to be one of the few places that Ebay allows outside links on).

So the next few days I will try to figure out how to work with that system, I've got a ton of collectible stuff that I want to unload, and the more I can get for it the better.

Stupid Bowl

Ah The Stupid Bowl : For the last few years, if one of my favorite teams (Washington Redskins, Los Angeles ney St. Louis Rams, Carolina Panthers, Seatle Seahawks or maybe even the Baltimore Ravens) didn't make it to the Super Bowl, I would be dissappointed and concentrate on what the silly $2,000,000,000 (Two Billion Dollars) or whatever the price commercials were shown (I do that anyway). Usually it just boils down to the Budwieser Commercials with the Clydesdales, the FedEx commercials and the occasional Coke commercials with the polar bears or maybe a cool Pepsi ad. Oh the game? Well sometimes they are exciting, like last years Steelers and who did they play? Oh yeah it was the Seahawks, bummer. That is one of the problems I usually am so disinterested in the game that I just barely remember who the current Stupid Bowl Champs are and totally forget who they creamed. This year (#41) The Sneaky Leave Baltimore in the middle of the night Colts beat Da Bears! What was it 29 to 17? The first half was pretty exciting but the second half was kind of boring. That is the way many of the last 10 games have been, could it be because the AFC has won something like the last 8 or 9 of the last 10? Or just because the whole thing has become a media circus and the game of Football has taken a back seat?Did I mention I was sick of hearing about Dungy, Payton Manning and the Colts even before the Stupid Bowl?

Selling on Ebay

Even though I've been selling on Ebay for quite a few years now, every once in a while I get a high point. Well yesterday I reached a high point. 3 auctions of items I was selling sold. One of them I thought would take a long time to sell, like the romance novel book I've had for sale for the last 5 years or so. Anyway I put it up on a 10day auction, someone was watching it for like six days and about 2 days before it was to end they bid on it, well then someone else bid on it. Long story short an item that started at a buck, I ended up selling for Ten. That is not my largest sale, but one of the big ones. I usually sell buttons and trading cards for a buck or two, once I sold some videos for $20 or $25 bucks so I think those were the biggest sale I've had. I can't quit my day job just yet because I'm lucky if I sell one item for a buck a month. Part is due to not having many items up for sale at one time. But recently I had my all-time high of 80 items on sale 1/2 of them were regular auction format, the other half are still in my Ebay store as in-store items sitting on the shelf as it were. Of course I would one day want to have enough regular sales every month to be able to quite my daytime job and sell on ebay full-time. That unfortunately is easier said than done. Buttons and penny-anti trading cards don't cut the mustard, so I sell an occassional CD or video, once a DVD. I've thought of trying to sell DVDs and CDs in bulk but again there are no guarantees.

All those late night "Make a fortune on Ebay" infomercials are bologna, they use what is called "Drop shipping" which is very risky and only makes money for the company that is doing the drop shipping. In a nutshell, you buy stuff from the drop shipping company, put the auctions up on ebay, they do all the order filling and shipping you pay them a fee and maybe get some money from the sale.

Family Frodo

Today (Saturday 27 Jan 2007) my mother and I had our picture took for the 50th anniversary directory of my families church. The photography studio was Olan Mills (olanmills.com). For at least the last 10 years (I'm guessing here) or so they have been using computers to process the proofs for the photos. Many years ago you would get your pictures taken, then wait several weeks for the proofs to be sent to you, then you picked which one(s) you wanted and waited a few weeks for your portraits to arrive. Now the proof process is done with computers so within a couple of minutes after your pictures are taken you view the proofs on the computer screen pick which ones you want and then wait for your portraits to arrive in about 4 weeks. Pretty cool eh?

Blogging More Often!

Ahhh it feels good to blog every now and then. My biggest problem is coming up with something to say. Not good for someone who has dreams of writing sci-fi novels and screenplays. I'm not much of a writer and don't do it too often so there goes the dream of making big bucks as a writer.

I am getting frustrated with my financial situation. Barely making enough money to "Afford" a rent, but still not quite able to afford to do it. Loads and loads of late fees and over-the-limit fees on credit card(s) that went BOOM! And sometimes not being able to make the minimum payments which are now almost impossible to pay. Definately without a huge loan and soon.

Photos in buckets and stuff

Blog it, blog it, blog it,
Write it up and blog it,
Whatever.

OK so I have officially joined the ranks of the photobucket society. Mostly for my Ebay selling endevers. I used to use Sparedollar, because the first month was free and then, at the time I signed up, it was only $4 per month. Then they raised the price to $5 a month and eventually $8, then they were bought out by InkFrog and now that costs $9 per month for 300MBs of image hosting. Photobucket right now is FREE with 1GB of image hosting. To save money I will drop the InkFrog soon. Heck I saved money this month anyway by letting my Netflix accout cancel out since my credit card went BOOM! and it will be sometime before I can get it back down, unless I can get a huge loan soon.

At work we are almost done with our archiving of documents so we will soon have to move on to other stuff. At least that is what our nice office manager says. That means when people ask me what I do at work, I won't know what to say. D'oh! I wasn't going to mention work here much if at all.

Wind it UP!