Disorderly Content

Thanks to Engadget for reporting on this eBay auction item. Whether the idea was to turn technology into art or simply to make the best of a post-BSOD-rage moment, who can say? Whichever it is, the result is both compelling and emotionally satisfying.

No, not Alice's Restaurant. Not this time, anyway.

You can find most anything on eBay. Including a gentleman's club with a drive thru. Yes, it's twoo; there is an actual strip club on auction. Minimum bid is $300,000, with a reserve price that's even higher. And all that for a crappy building on Route 22 in Pittsburgh. One assumes that the performers are extra.

Buyers and sellers on eBay do their best to have high feedback scores. Your score is a measure of both the quality and quantity of your transactions: add one point for every positive experience and subtract one for every complaint. If you do get a complaint, you can reply to the feedback to try to explain why it wasn't your fault. That's the only use most people make of the Feedback Reply feature.

But not this guy, oh no! This eBay bozo who goes by the name of mizzelphug never saw a remark he couldn't one-up. Even his own feedback shows a certain attitude and a disdain for proper eBay etiquette. I wonder if he does funerals...

Thanks to Slashdot for pointing to a BBC News story about someone using eBay to sell advertising space on his forehead. At this writing, he's been bid up to over $15,000! (Follow the auction here.)

Not so amazingly, a couple of other people are trying the same stunt, although with less success. Oh, and I feel compelled to mention that an eBay search on "forehead" also comes up with these belt buckles that are emblazoned with the slogan "Place Forehead Here". Which seems an odd thing to have on your belt buckle, doesn't it?

You can find all sorts of wonderful things on eBay. But it doesn't get more special (in the Special Olympics sense at least) than this: a one of a kind iPod signed by David Hasselhoff and preloaded with his Christmas album. Wow! As I write this, bidding sits at around $200 (the iPod is listed in UK Pounds), which is less than the price of an iPod that hasn't been smeared with his handwriting.

Oh, and if you go to the listing, you get a little audio from the man himself. How exciting is that? Not as exciting as that "Hoff in a Speedo" poster that's flying all over the net, perhaps. But still pretty wonderful.

Update 12/20: Amazingly enough, somebody paid over $500 for this desecration. I guess Mr. Hasselhoff has more (or at least more dedicated) fans than I anticipated. Then again, that's only £45 more than the UK Apple Store price for an unenhanced iPod. Not much to pay for a true believer. (In what, I have no idea.)

A few years back, eBay had a major IT disaster when one of their Sun servers failed and took the whole auction system with it. Lots of noise in the papers and on the web about it, about the causes of the problem (as I recall, an unpatched Oracle bug) and eBay's lack of a fault tolerant architecture (which was planned for installation, albeit just a little too late for this particular failure).

And yet... yesterday saw a similar class of failure at eBay's Paypal subsidiary. For most of yesterday Paypal was inaccessible, returning errors if it responded at all. And not a word in any of the instant media at my disposal. I was worried that it was my personal account that was failing, rather than a more general problem with their service. At least until things came back. And then later I saw a piece on Slashdot reporting the failure.

Which is quite a surprise. Given Paypal's preeminent role in web commerce, how did the problems go unnoticed or at least unreported for so long? Granted, big sites don't use Paypal for their transactions. But lots of little sites do. And what of all those eBayers who suddenly had no way to pay for their purchases? Why was it all so quiet?

Insert your favorite conspiracy theory here.

I was in Fry's this weekend, looking for various techie odds and ends. And while I was there I decided to pick up a PCMCIA Compact Flash adapter to use with my new digital camera. (Digression: PCMCIA stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. It does not stand for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. Now back to our story.) The only one Fry's had was for Type I Compact Flash cards. I wanted one that could also handle the thicker Type II cards, since I have a couple of Microdrives and I'd like a faster way to transfer pictures than the slow but not as awful as serial USB 1.1 interface on the camera.

So off I go to eBay, to see what I can find. And once I sift out the Type I only adapters, I find just what I'm looking for. And at a great price too: $5. And it's Buy Me Now, so I don't even have to worry about getting beaten out at the last moment of an auction by a sniper. (Yeah, I've sniped too. But only out of self defense.)

Great deal, right? Especially since Fry's wanted $13 for the one they had. And I'm all ready to buy it when I notice the fine print. Shipping & handling: $10. Plus another two dollars for mandatory insurance. Plus sales tax if you're in California. (Which I am.) On the whole amount, bringing the total to $18.50 for a five dollar item.

We know what's going on, don't we? Set the price low, first to catch the unwary buyer and second to reduce eBay's cut on both the listing and the final sale. And of course, there's no way to search eBay based on what it's really going to cost. Heck, even CNet's price comparison site lets you figure out what the best deal really is.

I don't know who to be more annoyed with, the eBay'er who's trying to charge more but make it look like they're charging less, or eBay, which doesn't do more to get us a fair deal. As for me, I found somebody out of state who only wanted $5 for shipping and didn't make me buy insurance I didn't want. That's the way it ought to be.

(Gee, three postings before my first rant! That's some sort of record, isn't it?)