mcgees.org

Apparently, according to international law, items that are the product of “genius of nationals” of countries in the world are worth more (morally) in the country where they originated.

However, export of these materials — which include some books, furniture, stamps, and coins — “increases the knowledge of the civilization of Man, enriches the cultural life of all peoples and inspires mutual respect and appreciation among nations”.

UNESCO is intimately involved in walking this tightrope, evidenced especially by their 1970 convention text.

As I read it, this law has no retroactive applicability.  So, Native American artifacts in Asian collections, Chinese artifacts in American collections, and relics from pretty-much-everywhere in British collections, are exempted, as long as the import occurred before 1970.

Why is this relevant?  It might be, if you sell online.  As far as I can tell, if you are American, dig in your backyard, and find a flint arrowhead, you are prohibited by international law to sell it on eBay to an overseas buyer.  You may, however, be able to sell it to someone in Alaska.  I don’t really know.

What I do know is that eBay links to that page, with very little clarification of the laws.  Check out that eBay page.  It basically reads as CYA.

For more information — fascinating information — see the list at the United States Postal Service that deals with import and export restrictions for each country.  It’s really, really, really interesting, and you should really check it out.  We can even get a game going, finding the most interesting prohibitions.

Most places ban obvious things: money, radioactive materials, infectious materials, body parts, but many ban weird stuff.

For instance, I can ship to Libya, but my shipment cannot include tea, salt, or tobacco.  For Kiribati, you cannot send things colored with dyes made from coal tar.  For Nigeria, it’s “hardware of all kinds” — whatever that means (nuts and bolts are banned?)  For the UK, the list includes CB radios and horror comics.  Turkey?  Silver coins are banned, but gold coins are allowed.

This is why I have a list on every one of my eBay auctions that tells foreign shoppers to check their import restrictions.  I am certain that many citizens of those nations are unaware of what is banned.  And I’ve certainly sold tea, dyed items, hardware, and silver on eBay.

Has it ever bugged you that there is only one “h” in the middle of “Threshold”?  Of all the double-letters to do away with?

Anyway, my feedback rating crossed 500.  Hoorah!  I had hoped for that to happen in March, but I fell behind.  I am now be-purple-starred.  And as the Sibs decided some years ago, Purple is the Atheist color.  So I’m sitting pretty.

eBay seller internationalcovers has some awesome covers for sale right now.

No kickback, just thought the cover collectors would like to know.

Big news, released today, that I stumbled upon at eBay while looking for something else entirely: beginning 1 April 2008, eBay will launch its own “Partner Network” affiliate program.  If you are a content publisher, set an alarm and visit the not-yet-live eBay Affiliate site in two weeks’ time.

Is mcgees.org going to participate?  OH YES, if they’ll have me.  I see dollar signs.  Maybe I’ll have to get rid of my Auction Sniper link to be admitted…

I’m slowly-but-surely building my eBay feedback.  It’s at 460 now.  I’m aiming for 500 by the end of the month.

A friend of mine, a PowerSeller, saw my feedback when it was right around 400 and said, mockingly, “Oh, how cute!”  I worked bloody hard for those 400, damn it!  Can you imagine reaching 13,000 or something?

Actually, I can.  It’s sort of the route I’ve planned for myself, at least in the near future.

Aside from one very recent, very undeserved Neutral, all of my feedback has been positive.  Knock on wood…

There’s an eBay lot that I really, really want.  The auction closes in less than one hour (4:40 a.m. PDT is probably some sensible time in Johannesburg, where the seller resides), and the bidding is at 14% of my high bid.  I would love to get this lot for 14% of my high bid.

I can’t sleep, as you can probably tell, so I’ve been fiddling (they call it a “one tweak loop” in computerese) with the sidebar.  Let me know what you think — if you can tell the difference.

Firefox did not complain about the word “computerese”.  Wow.

Anyone have a better translation for schnelle Lieferung aus USA - Alles Bestens, gern wieder !!! than snaps supply out of the USA - everything, gladly in the best way again!!!?

eBay make(s) it possible to blacklist (or, if you will, black list) bidders.  This prevents the named eBay users from bidding on one’s auctions.  The page has been made much more difficult to find, so here you go.

Given eBay’s recent “reforms” that essentially assume all buyers are good and all sellers are criminals, blocking bidders is going to be, more and more, the only recourse for sellers.

I’ll seed the list.  I’ll maintain it in this top post in a form you can just cut-and-paste into your blocked list.  I’ll have a comment that justifies each addition.  Feel free to use my list.  If you have additions, post your eBay ID, the bidder(s)’s ID(s), and the reason you block them.  I’ll check it out, and if you have glowing feedback and the other guy has lousy feedback, I’ll incorporate your addition into my list.

Sellers can block up to 1000 User IDs.  Yes, that’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a start.  Let’s get this list as close to 1000 bidders as possible.  When we pass thirty User IDs, I’ll make it a text file you can download, rather than a list you cut-and-paste.

If you are one of the blocked bidders, you are welcome to post here and, in a civilized manner, explain why you do not deserve to be blacklisted.  You get one shot at this.  I will warn you in advance that it will be much more difficult to get off this list than to get on: the purpose of this is to protect sellers, something that eBay has/have ceased to do.

Over to you…

blocked_ebay_bidders.txt (722 currently)

I got a new, cheap 7.1 megapixel camera, which I think will pay for itself in increased eBay sales.  Here is one of my first pictures, when Sebastian offered to help test the “Macro” mode:

Check out the product page for GURPS Conan: Moon of Blood.  Kind of a crummy picture, isn’t it?  That’s my fault.  The book is so old that Steve Jackson Games didn’t have a copy, so I sent them a copy of the image I’m using to sell one on eBay.  So while I will, it is to be hoped, not be in possession of the volume a week from now (instead having a hundred bucks in my pocket or something), my copy will live on in perpetuity — or at least until another fan with a nicer copy and an altruistic or flagrant demeanor comes along.

I’ve scheduled 22 GURPS books to go up tonight on eBay (see my items), re-listed one more, and bulk-uploaded 94 CDs on Half.com (see my items).

I’m feeling very successful, and I am, in fact, fishing for praise, I think.

If you get an error like this when using FileExchange in Half.com:

Error - Could not find a matching product for the given input. Please provide valid values.|UPC|74646963425||Warning - The value <74646963425> of type does not exist in our Catalog.|74646963425|UPC|

It is because your ProductIDValue column is set to type “Number”, and the leading zeros are being stripped off.  Click on the column header, select “Format Cells”, and change data type to “Text”.

If this was helpful, please post.

When you place a bid on eBay, and it’s the high bid, the screen says “Hope you win!”

No they don’t!  They hope someone comes along and bids $500,000, and then another guy ups that.  “Hope you win!”  Gawd.

It’s that whole mentality of making computers seem more like people, like when Tellme says, in a concerned and slightly embarrassed voice, “Hm, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” instead of “Please repeat”.  Or when — I am not making this up — my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information.

Or — and this drives me up the wall — when charities use script fonts and blue ink on their solicitations, so it looks like someone personally wrote it with a ballpoint.  I can always tell, because there is not a single person on the planet who writes the two es at the end of my name exactly the same.  One is a transition letter, one is a closing letter, and they shouldn’t be perfect matches.  The next logical step would be to commission fonts that have n (five to ten) slightly differing letterforms for each glyph, all of which connect, and the software to randomly choose which one to render.  That might fool me.  Until then, if you send me a fake hand-written letter, you are not getting money.  Period.

No watchers, no bids, less than 24 hours to go.  Los Angeles Galaxy handkerchief football/soccer MLS.  Really surprising.

High-quality Pigment Ink Stamp Pads, $3 each + reasonable shipping, while they last.  (No commercial interest in this recommendation.)

… and bingo!

I’ve started selling CDs online seriously.  I needed storage.  You really can find anything online these days, can’t you?  Look at those prices!  I’m getting two: one shelf for each letter of the alphabet, with X⁄Y⁄Z taking up one, combined.

eBay’s justification for segregating “Mature Audiences” materials:

A number of cities segregate stores selling some types of sexually-oriented materials to certain areas of the community.  The eBay community segregates certain sexually oriented materials on the Mature Audiences site for the same reasons.

That’s nice.  Now, what’s the real reason you segregate it?

Note that pre-1980 Penthouse is allowed on the main site, and post-1980 Playboy is not.

So, weird?  Not as weird as the Offensive Items list:

Examples of items that will generally be removed:
* Items that bear symbols of the Nazis, the SS, or the KKK, including authentic German WWII memorabilia such as Olympic medals that bear such marks

Examples of items that may generally be listed:
* German coins and postage stamps (canceled or otherwise) from the WWII era regardless of markings

Any philatelist will tell you about the gratuitous Third Reich images on WWII stamps, including close-up depictions of Hitler and images of children juxtaposed with swastikas:

I expect you to flinch at those.  Those stamps are OK, but not Olympic medals?  Is this an accumulation of unrelated precedents, or is there something I don’t understand going on here?

Has anyone else found his or herself in the position of needing a retail source for newspaper-grade paper, and realizing the cheapest way to obtain it is to subscribe to a newspaper?  A newspaper, the labor of love and the collected creativity and training of hundreds of people working under draconian deadlines, plus all the machinery to print, cut, fold, and deliver, not to mention the ink — and it’s still cheaper to buy than blank newspaper stock!

Advertising dollars are pretty damn amazing.

Newspaper stock is sold at art stores now, and is priced like a “boutique” item, not like the high-acid, low-contrast, large-fiber shite that it is.

To be really green, I need a neighbor who will save me some of his used newspapers — one every couple of weeks would be enough.  I don’t care about the copy — I’m never going to actually read The Los Angeles Times — I just need the stock.  I’ll ask the guy across the street tomorrow.

Or maybe, now that I make so little, I could get Sunday’s copy alone delivered — the coupons might well pay for the subscription, and I’d be reusing all the paper.

Getting by on eBay and Half.com is frequently a question of a few cents here and there, and volume.  Here are some tips.  Subscribe to this post’s comments as I come up with more, or post your own (non-commercial, please, although paid advertisements are accepted.)

1.  If you can find a mailer that weighs less than 3⁄4 oz., normal CDs in jewel cases can ship for the 4-oz. First Class Parcel rate ($1.64 at the time of this writing) rather than the 5- or 6-oz. rate ($1.81 or $1.99).  Uline Bubble Mailers, model S-5897, are 9 lbs. per 200 units.  Dividing that gives you a weight of 0.72 oz. each, and that 9 lbs. is probably rounded up, and includes the weight of the box.  Envelopes are self-sealing, so you save on tape weight.  One case of 200 is $51 ($0.255 apiece) plus shipping.  This can make a huge difference on $0.75 CDs with small shipping allowances.

2.  Large shipping labels are expensive; at their cheapest, one- or two-per-page labels are about $0.28 a sheet.  Try printing on normal printer paper, and spraying the back with Elmer’s Craft Bond (~$7 per 11 oz. can, lighter and cheaper than tape, and lasts seemingly forever.)  Apply paper to mailer within 15 seconds of spraying for permanent adhesion.

3.  Addressing small envelopes?  Use cheap labels, and don’t worry about your printer gobbling up your expensive envelopes.  Buy Avery 5160-compatible labels in quantity, then use OpenOffice.org’s templates (software and templates free) to print a couple at a time (templates here.)  Buy them 3,000 at a time from Uline and pay 6⁄10^ths of a penny apiece (don’t worry, it’s exactly the same price as 300 will cost you at Office Depot.  Hard to believe…)  Keep running the same sheet through your printer as you need new labels, just change the positioning on the page.  Want POSTNET barcodes on the labels to speed them through the mailstream?  Give me a couple weeks.  I’m writing software to do that, and I’ll make it available for free on this site (haven’t decided whether it should be a web app or a downloadable executable).

4.  For items 13 oz. or lighter, use PayPal to print out a First Class Parcel label at the 1 oz. rate, regardless of what the item weighs, and pay the $0.18 for Delivery Confirmation (always splurge on this, it’s the best investment out there.)  Use the printer-paper-and-spray-glue trick above.  Make up the remaining weight ($0.17 per ounce, as of this writing) with discount postage (valid, legal U.S. postage from stamp dealers in non-current denominations, available from Henry Gitner for 93% face postpaid, or at your local free-admission stamp show for 88% - 90% face.)  On an 11-oz item, you save $0.17, which just about pays for the Delivery Confirmation!  Print up little decorative labels (less than a penny apiece, remember) that say something like “Collect Stamps: It’s Fun!” or “Philately: The Quiet Excitement!” and people will actually thank you for saving yourself money.  Everyone likes pretty stamps on their mail.  If you have time, to speed it through the mailstream, ask the clerk to count the postage and put a $0.00 label on the package for you.  They will happily do this if you’re humble.  Try something like “I’m not sure my postal scale is accurate at home, would you mind weighing this for me and seeing if I have enough postage?”  And while you’re there, ask nicely for hand-cancellations on the stamps to make the recipient even happier.

5.  Buy a laser printer.  They cost pennies on the dollar to operate, compared to an inkjet.  Even if you have to put it on a high-interest credit card, do it.  It will pay for itself so quickly it takes your breath away.

6.  Go to “Printer Settings” — whatever it’s called on your Operating System —  and set everything to print as “Grayscale”.  Save your expensive color toner for times when you’re printing for yourself, not printing packing slips.

7.  Use Auctiva to list on eBay.  It’s easier to use than eBay itself, offers any number of free pictures, free super-sizing of images, a “store window” applet to increase additional add-on sales, easy re-listing, free scheduling, automatic feedback settings, convenient “Profiles” for commonly-sold items, free professional templates, and tons more.  Don’t waste your money on Blackthorne or pricey eBay “listing upgrades”!  And remember, very soon, eBay Gallery for your item ($0.35 per auction, and essentially required for successful sales) is going to be free.

8.  For stamps, avoid eBay entirely and go to StampWants.  StampWants is so cheap it’s almost free, it’s designed specifically for stamps, and is so inexpensive you can sell items for a dime and make a profit (just try that on eBay.)  Have more than 50 items to sell?  Get a store at StampWants!  It pays for itself with lightning speed.

9.  First illegal one: selling miniature liquor bottles?  Try it, it’s a high-margin item.  You aren’t supposed to send them through the mail, but the clerk can sometimes feel the liquid sloshing and will ask.  Mark them “Fragile: Snow Globes”.  I’ve never met a clerk so mean as to keep little ol’ snow globes from collectors’ hands.  On eBay, to sell the bottles, cut-and-paste exactly the “collectible container” text that you can find under “Prohibited Items”, and (they don’t tell you this) add a line that says “Sorry, I can only ship to the U.S.  eBay’s rules”.  Don’t offer any international shipping rates.  In my experience, overseas bidders will ask you anyway.  Use your discretion on what you want to do, but one possibility is to tell them to inform eBay, if they ask, that they’re using a U.S. address (I’ve never had them ask a bidder.)  Then go ahead and charge them $7.99 (most happily pay this rate) and ship the bottle overseas.  Everyone loves Snow Globes! 

10. Set a reminder for yourself — an alarm in Outlook, a cronjob, a Yahoo! alert, or something — to fire some time during the first week of each month.  Then download the previous month’s PayPal history.  Save a copy, print a copy, and upload a copy to Google Documents.  Come year-end, when the tax man comes knocking, you will be startled that PayPal only offers 90 days’ worth of account activity to download.

11. Keep a mileage log, to and from your post office and PMB.  Don’t have a PMB?  Again, it’s a great investment.  Don’t, under any circumstance, use your home address on eBay or on whois pages.  If you’re doing this daily, you’ll have hundreds of miles to deduct as a business expense at the end of the year.

OK, there’s eleven to start with.  Please contribute.

(Note added 26 February 2008: Instead of selling on eBay or Half.com to make money, of course, you could do what “Max” did, and repost my selling tips and ask for donations!  Oh, right, we’re paying for his research!  Silly me.)

OK, first I’ve heard of it, and it starts in a little over an hour.

Sellers — apparently many sellers (including PowerSellers) — are going to be boycotting eBay due to huge rate hikes and questionable changes to the feedback system.  The rate hikes could be as much as 67%, according to analysis I have read.

Power Sellers Unite is a site with much detail about the eBay boycott.

It looks like the most tenable competitor right now is iOffer.  They seem grassroots, kind of craigslist-meets-eBay, and have nifty tools to transfer your feedback and items.  I haven’t gone through the steps yet.

Anyone else involved?  Anyone boycotting, or not boycotting?  Any other suggestions of sites on which to list?  Any idea of what to do with the listings I currently have running?  Discuss!

I had to leave my first negative eBay feedback in years.  Seller: theplace3.  This date (10 Feb 2008).  Be sure to search.

Let’s see if I get retaliatory feedback, and see if eBay are good to their word about removing it.

Enter at shipitwinit.com for a chance to win $10,000 to spend on eBay.  You can make one entry between now and June 13, one between June 14 and June 20, and one more between June 21 and June 30.  This is a different contest from the previous one I mentioned.

eBay Pack Your Bags & Win It Contest Rules: “All random drawings will be conducted on or about 12:00 pm, P.T. by Strobe Promotions, Inc., the independent judging organization, in Hicksville, NY … As a condition for receiving any prize, winners who are residents of Canada will be required to correctly answer (unaided) a time-limited mathematical skill-test question.”

What?

Enter the contest.

“As a thank you to our great customers, we are happy to announce that all snipes entered on our site [Auctiva] from 12:01am PDT to 11:59pm PDT Friday, May 26th will be free!”

I made a $60 eBay error. I listed an item as “immediate payment required when Buy It Now is used,” not realizing that that forces the item to be “ship to U.S. only.” Be warned of this.

You have got to be kidding me.  They really presented a gold-plated money clip to the people who filed past Reagan’s sealed casket at the Presidential Library?  Seriously.  Not a David Cross routine.  Real life.  I’m not making this up.  A gold-plated money clip.

Good to know that you didn’t have to be there to get one, though.  Follow the link above to buy one on eBay.  Greed Is Good®, right?

My workplace in Thousand Oaks closed early today, as the only route of egress was the motorcade route. We’d have been locked in a research facility with a jammed soda machine and only sputtering chambers and broadband connections to entertain us.  Sounds like an Fox sitcom premise, when you think about it.

The motorcade was scheduled for evening, but at 11:30 a.m. people were lining Lynn Road (I swear I am still not making this up) with padded folding chairs, sunglasses, tacky beach visors, and red Igloo coolers of Diet Coke. When I left, I saw more of the same, along with hordes of miniature people born during Clinton administrations I and II — and someone had thoughtfully gone through and placed red, white, and blue helium balloons around the route.  It was packed like Disneyland on the Fourth of July weekend. Northbound 101 was jammed with cars for miles; driving past I felt like Judd Hirsch in Independence Day, hauntingly feeling like I was somehow going the wrong way.  Southbound 101 was accessorized with hovering military helicopters armed with fucking missiles.  For real.  This is still real life.

A few unconnected notes:

1. Blogger has been redesigned.  Check it out.  You’ll like the round corners.
2. I got a modified CueCat barcode reader in the mail. Very cool, but I wish it would read in book UPC codes as ISBNs rather than UPCs.
3. I forgot how exciting it was to have auctions running on eBay.
4. The last post, my “feeling better” one, was the 500th mcgees.org post.

It is hard to believe a seller this vile, aggressive, and disingeneous is allowed to operate on eBay.  Note that they write over and over that the dissatisfied buyer has accidentally left negative feedback for the wrong seller — as if that’s a daily occurrence.

(No, I didn’t buy from them.  Always check feedback.)

In the game Magic: The Gathering, there are different types of play, which can be simplified to “you can use (almost) any of the cards you own” vs. “you can use only the cards that have been recently released.”  These are called Type I and Type II, respectively.  (Yes, I’m simplifying things a bit.)  Wizards of the Coast now appears to have completely stopped supporting Type I.  It would be easy to see this as a money-grab scheme, and I have certainly thought of it as such before, but when one really, truly thinks about it, one sees that it’s the game’s great leveler.  A short illustration of what would happen if you set out to construct decks by purchasing cards on eBay, before considering shipping charges:

The cost to assemble, today, using the cheapest editions of cards possible, the Type I deck used by former world champion Olle Rade to defeat me in 1997: $2,435.23.

The cost to assemble my non-tournament-worthy-but-lots-of-fun-to-play Type I deck: $571.49.

The cost to assemble the deck used to win the 2003 U.S. Type II Nationals: $71.89.

That being said, I still only play Type I.  Why?  Because I love the richness of the environment, giving you thousands of cards to choose from rather than hundreds.  Also, I’ve spent a lot of years and a lot of money building up my collection, and it’s a terrible shame to see it all just sit in a closet.

This is creepy.  There is a charity auction going on now at Yahoo! Auctions in which one can pay obscene amounts of money for the outfits Britney Spears wore in the recent Pepsi “Now & Then” ad campaign.  The auctions specifically note that the clothing items are “unwashed” since the filming of the commercial.  I was surprised that this high-profile auction was happening at Yahoo! rather than eBay until I discovered the unwashedness of the clothing; such items are specifically prohibited under the latter’s rules.