Global Wandering

I’ve been trying to sell my old Windows Mobile cell phone that I replaced with the iPhone on Ebay for over a month now. My first buyer was a new Ebay user from Baltimore who didn’t pay. Ebay doesn’t make it easy to get a credit for selling fees so it took several weeks to work through that process. Plus, I didn’t want to relist the phone, because I held out hope after speaking to the buyer and receiving an email where he promised to pay that he actually might. Alas he didn’t, so I relisted the phone 10 days ago. This time I decided to broaden the audience so I agreed to ship internationally thinking there might be a market in Europe. Bad mistake. Now my buyer is from Nigeria. After winning the auction, he has sent several fake Ebay and Paypal emails stating he has paid, but Paypal won’t release payment until I ship him the phone.

A search of his UserID shows positive feedback for purchasing a number of 15 cent Star Trek badges. The search also showed that in addition to my cell phone, he won over $30,000 worth of Ebay auctions for other electronics just yesterday. Hmm. When I insisted via email that I wouldn’t send him the phone until the money was in my account, he responded as follows:

“i have made the payment and the money has been deducted from my account.. ok?.. so i will want you to send the item ASAP and send the shipment tracking number to paypal for verification and you can also contact their customers help at paypalcustomershelp@streamingmoney.com for the payment confirmation .. ok.. thanks i wait to hear from you .. “

I responded to him that streamingmoney.com was not a valid Paypal URL and given he had won so many auctions yesterday, he must be a wealthy man so I would patiently await payment.

With such shenanigans plus the other spam I receive posing as questions for products I've listed, Ebay is becoming a real bear to use.

Posted by jd at 3:35 PM | Permalink

Camden and I successfully procured an iPhone on Friday. We had a pleasant six hours of sitting in line with a group of fellow squatters. One can only converse for so long about a cell phone no one has seen in person. Hence, after about twenty minutes we moved on to more interesting topics. Our little chat group included a guy from LA who was on his way to Denver for the national barbershop singing convention, a real estate professional named Marilyn who dislikes her first name and drives an amazing 1985 Mercedes that runs on biodiesel for 60 cents a gallon, and a guy getting ready to move to Grand Rapids who was being paid $50 to wait in line for a businessman who has to have the latest technology but is too busy sitting in meetings to sit in line like us common folk. The businessman’s grandson showed up to relieve the mercenary and make the iPhone purchase.

As for the iPhone, it is truly remarkable. The user experience is such a step up from my current Windows Mobile handheld that I would liken it to the sheer delight I felt when I replaced my paper calendar with a Palm V.

Google Earth takes on entirely new perspective when you can, as we use to sing as kids, “hold the whole world in [your] hands.”

Posted by jd at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tomorrow is iPhone day. I’ve debated driving the four hours to Salt Lake City to see if I can procure one. Camden is willing to come with me since I was willing to get up before dawn to wait in line and fight the crowds for his Nintendo Wii.

On Monday I bought put options on Apple’s stock, betting its price would decline after a big run up in the last six months with all the iPhone hype. By Wednesday, the stock had declined enough for me to close out the position and have sufficient earnings to buy the phone. I consider it the ultimate irony to have raised the money for an iPhone by taking advantage of Apple’s falling stock price.

A four hour drive to buy a phone that might be sold out is frivolous indeed. On the other hand, spending the day alone, conversing with my oldest son as we pursue the frivolous is time well spent.

Posted by jd at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is what I learned Friday night when I stopped at Best Buy looking for a replacement laptop for LaPriel. We already have several Macs at home so we just need something basic that can run a few specialized PC only programs LaPriel uses.

1. Best Buy suggests you spend an additional $129 after you purchase a computer so they can slave away for 3 hours removing all the trial software such as AOL. Apparently the offending programs are now so entrenched in Windows Vista operating system it requires professional assistance to remove them.

2. Even though Best Buy sells $500 to $700 laptops, they highly recommend you don’t buy one because it takes 20 minutes for the thing to boot up with Windows Vista and even after the laptop boots up, it doesn’t work very well.

Is it any wonder why people are switching to Apple in droves. Buying a Windows laptop from a retail store is a worse experience than buying a used car.

Posted by jd at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Imagini is a UK based website that determines your "visual DNA" by having you select from a series of images. It then uses that visual DNA imprint to help you select gifts or to meet others with similar backgrounds.

Results were mixed. My visual DNA for finding friends seemed spot on. The gift finder was a bit dubious. It suggested I would be ecstatic to receive a new set of cutlery and some tea.

Posted by jd at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So I posted a Twitter badge on this blog’s sidebar about a week ago. Twitter, as I understand it, is a simple way to stay connected with your social network by answering the question, “What am I doing?" Updates to that question can be made via text messaging, the web or via instant messenger.

There’s only one problem. I don’t have a social network of people who really care about what I’m doing at any given moment of the day. Okay, well my kids ask me what I’m doing a lot, but it seems rude to tell them to go look it up on Twitter.

Since I’m in Idaho and my coworkers are in Ohio, they often ask me what I'm doing via instant messenger, but it’s easier to just answer on instant messenger than via Twitter.

John Edwards has an account on Twitter. I suppose if you like John Edwards it would be helpful to know what he’s doing. I’m not a big John Edwards fan.

There’s a public timeline so you can see a constant stream of updates from complete strangers about what they are doing. Now that can be entertaining for a few minutes. It at least allows me to practice my Spanish. The same public timeline also provides updates on breaking news, new podcasts, and other miscellanea.

Here’s a few snippets from the public timeline:

Someone named RLTZ says in Spanish she’s doing homework, listening to antidoping and about to cry. Apparently antidoping is a Mexican reggae group.

Somebody named Book2 writes, "Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly." A closer looks shows Book2 has decided to post James Joyce Ulysses line by line via Twitter. That's ambitious.

Lot of folks are eating, going to bed, going running, and doing things I wasn’t aware existed. Now I suppose that is a benefit of Twitter. Learning new things.

On the other hand, it all seems just a bit narcissistic. Which is why I haven’t updated what I am doing for four days.

Posted by jd at 9:46 PM | Permalink

I'm pleased to report to all my potential mainland China readers that this blog has not been blacklisted by your country's servers and is freely available for your reading pleasure. Not that I have anything particularly relevant that you would find of interest.

For those that want to test their own blogs, go to Greatfirewallofchina.org. (DC, I'll be interested to see if your blog makes it through.)

Posted by jd at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I don't play many video games, but I thought this cute little flash game called Sprout was fun. The best part is it challenges your logic rather than your reflexes. That and you can win the game in 20 minutes and never have to play again. Enjoy.

Posted by jd at 6:46 PM | Permalink

Netvibes is my favorite free web service. I've been using it for about a year as my web browser start page. It's brilliant because they keep making it better. Founded in Paris, the company launched its service only 15 months ago. It now has 10 million users in 60 different languages.

Netvibes allows you to pull data from all over the web and organize it on your desktop. You can pull in RSS feeds from newsites and blogs, pictures, email accounts, and other web services, such as Box.net, Flickr, delicio.us. and many others. Information can be organized on separate pages with tabs, using customized column widths and layouts.

I use Netvibes to track close to 100 blogs, newspapers, and other web sources, all of which sit nice and tidy on my desktop. The consolidation of all this data in one place is perfect for me, because deep down I'm a mess when it comes to organization. I despise paperwork, because it just piles and piles up, and then I lose things. So now I do everything I can to digitize and store things in cyberspace. As long as it is out there, then I don't have to worry about it cluttering up my office.

Posted by jd at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I don't play many video games. Most of them make me dizzy. Except this one.

Line Rider is an ingenious game that is the perfect mindless activity while sitting on a conference call. Breanna and her friend are downstairs on the Mac playing it, while the boys are doing the same up in my office.

For inspiration on what you can accomplish on this game, here is a video from YouTube. Enjoy.

Posted by jd at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was sitting toward the back of the hall this morning in College Station, Texas where I was scheduled to make a presentation. A student in a wheel chair at the front of the room readied to give the invocation upon the start of the meeting (do all public meetings in Texas begin with prayer?). He sat up higher than usual, but my view was obscured by the podium so I didn't give it much thought.

A few minutes later, I took a closer looked and was amazed. The student was balanced on two wheels as if he had popped a permanent wheelie. After he gave his prayer, he lowered the chair back down on four wheels and drove off.

This chair apparently is the iBot 4000 and it employs a clever use of gyroscopes -one of the many scientific phenomena that is beyond my comprehension. The beauty of this chair is it allows its occupants to be at eye level when speaking to others. So much of our socializing is done while standing. Now individuals confined to wheel chairs can participate fully in those type of settings. Ingenious.

Posted by jd at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Om Malik points out that Skype has been averaging $318,000 per day since they were bought by Ebay several months ago. I've been testing Skype for two weeks. On average I've noticed they have 3 to 5 million customers online at any given time. So if you assume Skype has 10 million active customers that means each customer is generating 3.2 cents per day. I on the other hand must be a superuser because I average 50 to 75 cents a day (10 cents a day for my two incoming regular phone numbers and another 40 to 65 cents a day for outgoing calls to regular phone numbers).

I suppose the main point of Skype is to talk to other Skype users for free. I haven't quite got that aspect down yet. I don't know any other Skype users⎯unless you count my son who enjoys calling my upstairs home office from the iMac in the living room. Somehow folks in the investment field haven't jumped on the Skype bandwagon. On the other hand, I estimate I'm doing 80% of my business calls via Skype, cutting my long distance bill by 75%. My partners in Ohio can now reach me in Idaho by calling a local Ohio number.

Voice clarity has been excellent. I've experienced no dropped calls when dialing out to regular phone numbers and only 2 dropped calls when others have called me. The dial in service is still in beta so I suppose they are still working out the glitches.

Of course, the best part of Skype is the potential to set up a virtual office in some warm, sunny locale with egregious phone rates, like Mexico for example. Ah, the possibilities.

Posted by jd at 8:16 PM | Permalink

A few days ago Apple came out with a new website program called iWeb. I'm not a web developer, but I did manage to use iWeb to create a new home page for this site. You can check it out here. I'll keep it up until everyone else that buys iWeb uses the same template and then there will be three million look alike web pages.

Posted by jd at 9:23 PM | Permalink

The tech blogosphere is dominated by posts on a phenomenon called Web 2.0. There is no formal definition for Web 2.0 ⎯ the definition itself being part of the debate.

But after spending several months reading blogs that focus on it (TechCrunch, Om Malik’s Broadband Blog, Solution Watch to name a few), I being a non-techy sum it up as follows:

Web 2.0 consists of lots of new web applications,
With most in beta form,
Most are free,
All use the same simple font with pastel color schemes (Times New Roman is definitely not part of Web 2.0)
All employ social collaboration as a distinguishing element,
Most use something called AJAX – which as I understand it allows some functionality to be embedded in the HTML that resides on the client rather than a need for constant updates from the web server,
Most rely on user feedback to determine enhancements,
Most are named something cutesy or nonsensical (Kaboodle, Rollyo, Riya, etc.)
Most either make money through Google Ads or have no idea how they are going to make money,

And some are quite useful. I suppose all are useful at some level. The problem is there are so many new applications, it’s impossible for a typical user to sort it all out.

Call it Web 2.0 Application Overload.

To date, there are four Web 2.0 applications I use daily that make my life easier:

1. Socialtext – This WIKI software has been around for a few years, and breaks some of my tenets for what defines Web 2.0 (i.e., they charge money, I don’t believe they employ AJAX, and Socialtext is not a cutesy name, but then again they named it before Web 2.0 was officially inaugurated). My colleagues and I use it as the collaborative workspace for our investment firm. We jointly edit documents, store important files, hold portfolio discussions, and dramatically cut down on e-mail. Socialtext needs a more attractive user interface, but it’s still worth the $500 annnual charge.

2. Backpack – This is where I track all my projects I don’t place on Socialtext. It’s simple, flexible, and the ability to have text reminders sent to my cell phone is phenomenal. My success rate at e-mailing my Backpack site from my Treo has been spotty, particularly compared to e-mailing my Socialtext site, but it’s still worth the $5 monthly charge.

3. Remember The Milk – I use this to store To Do Lists. I hate To Do Lists so I don’t like to clutter my Backpack and Socialtext sites with such minutia, and I hate keeping lists on my triad of Treo/Outlook/Entourage because I always forget to sync. Remember the Milk has only been up a few weeks and it lacks the functionality to access the site from mobile devices, but all in all, I am better organized with it.
4. del.icio.us – I have to admit, it took me a while to see the value of this whole social bookmarking concept, and I’m still not sure I totally get it. Since I keep most of my day-to-day bookmarks on my Safari toolbar, I couldn’t see why I needed to post bookmarks to Del.icio.us. I occasionally view LiveMarks to find out what other people are bookmarking on del.icio.us (that is how I found Remember the Milk). Recently, though, I’ve found del.icio.us useful for storing links to news items and journal articles that are too specific to place on a toolbar. The question is whether my tagging system is good enough to ever find them again.

So will Web 2.0 have a significant impact on the general populous? As of right now, I’d say probably not. Most of the Web 2.0 applications are trying to replace solutions that have existed in the market for 7 years or more, and while the interfaces are nice and there are a few new bells and whistles, the functionality isn’t dramatically improved over what established companies, such as Microsoft , Apple or Google already offer.

I’ve attended several private equity and hedge funds conferences this year, and from what I saw, venture capitalists and other institutional investors are not abuzz about Web 2.0. I don’t think it’s an issue of institutional investors not understanding Web 2.0. I think it’s a realization that there are so many me-too applications with so little added functionality, coupled with an extremely slow adoption rate by the general public that while a few individuals will make a nice living creating niche businesses, there will not be the dramatic wealth creation that characterized the original internet boom and bust.

And that’s okay. Sometimes incremental improvement is nice. It still doesn’t solve the VC overhang issue, but to date, Web 2.0 has made my life a little less cluttered.

Posted by jd at 8:26 AM | Permalink

Don't mind me, I'm just getting set up on feedster.

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Posted by jd at 9:33 PM | Permalink

Claiming Blog

Technorati Profile

Posted by jd at 6:26 AM | Permalink

Today I was rejected. I was sitting in my office reading e-mail and watching the golden cat who controls the turf where we have built our house. This cat has driven our cat away to who knows where. So with pleasure I observed this alpha cat continually miss the birds it tried to catch in the grasslands outside my window.

I glanced at my laptop and noticed an e-mail from Jose, a Mexican friend who lives in Cancun. When I looked closer, I realized the e-mail was actually from Tickle.com, informing me I had been invited to join my friend’s internet social network.

This was great news, because I hadn’t seen this friend in a couple of years, and perhaps he had uploaded recent pictures of his family on his Tickle page. I clicked on the link and was directed to Tickle’s site where they asked me to answer a few questions so they could tailor Tickle to my needs. I like customization so I eagerly answered the questions. They were simple. My last name, gender, birth date and my interests.

I sent my responses, and that’s when Tickle told me I couldn’t join. I didn’t qualify.

I was crushed. What could this mean? Am I not cool enough? They didn’t even say being denied was a possibility. If I had known I was being judged, I would have tried harder. Been more specific. Put on my marketing hat.

I pondered my responses to their questions, trying to discern what disqualified me.

My gender? They only offered two choices. I chose male. Because I am. This response couldn’t have knocked me out of the running. Jose is male, and he’s a Tickle member.

My age? This clearly worked against me. All the cool people pictured on the Tickle home page are much younger than me. But I’m not a stodgy baby boomer. I’m Generation X (albeit in the first wave). Besides, I have a very young maximum heart rate. According to the basic formula for MHR (i.e., 220 minus your age), my heart beats like a twenty-four year old. That should count for something.

My interests? This is where I think I stumbled. It was trick question. They listed out examples, such as bike riding, Harry Potter, and music videos. These were to throw people off. They must have really wanted cutting edge interests like alligator wrestling, parasailing, or American Idol aficionados. I fell for it and listed out humdrum hobbies like bike riding and reading. I should have been more specific. Instead of bike riding, I should have said competitive downhill mountain biking (I have mountain biked downhill and then off the hill entirely before crashing into the creek bed). Instead of skiing, I should have said helio-skiing in Kamchatka, Russia. Instead of reading, I should have said…. well I guess I should have left reading out entirely.

What I don’t understand is how Jose got in? I met him years ago in the Yucatan. He lived near me in a small Mayan village in a cinderblock house with a tarpaper roof. He moved to Cancun with his family as a teenager, and now is married with children, working as an accountant. He’s a cool guy, but he’s an accountant for heaven’s sake.

Anyway, not one to be kept out when I don’t want to be, I resubmitted my questionnaire to Tickle this evening, and included this recent photo of the golden cat that kicked our kitty out of the neighborhood.
Golden Cat That’s our new porch the cat is relaxing on. He must have had a tiring day of chasing birds.

Tickle let me in. But now I have zero friends in my internet social network. I can’t even find my friend, Jose. There are seven pages of Mexican Jose’s on Tickle, most without pictures.

Posted by jd at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)