Author: woowoowoo

I get a laugh out of online auctions. Lots of people seem to add the words ‘online’ and ‘auction’ together and come up with = bargain! wrong!!

Take this auction (no longer online) by traditional auction house Gray Edsell Timms at GraysOnline. It’s an auction of the hottest electronic toy around – iPods. Current models too, about 10 Video, 13 Nano/4G and a lonely 1Gb Shuffle.

The auction still has two days to go, but the top bid for each item type (not each item – yet!) comfortably exceeds the cost of buying the product new from the Apple website. It’s not immediately obvious, because GraysOnline charge a 12.5% ‘buyers premium’ (whatever that is!) and $12 delivery. So by the time you bid $169 for the shuffle (as ‘K.M’ from Epping NSW already has!) and add the extras, it has cost you $202. Apple have it for $199 – free delivery. Duh!

The top bid for a Nano already totals $16 more than the Apple Store!

I’ll be watching this auction with interest and I’ll report back with the final prices. Should be worth a laugh!

OK, here’s the update

As the auction closes it’s got even sillier than before. Someone has bid $204 for the Shuffle which will cost them a total of $241.50, that’s $42 dollars more than if they bought it from Apple!

Now, here is a screen grab of the current Nano price at Apple Australia. So, you wouldn’t want to bid more than $309 (do the maths) at Grays, would you? Well, that’s exactly what 13 people did today, one of the bids will end up costing $45 more than the retail price… yay! fools and money 🙂

There was less interest in the 60Gb Video model, two people actually beat the retail price by $5, another five got a price equal to retail, while few nongs paid up to $27 more than retail. I just love it!

Today when I logged into del.icio.us I noticed things were a little different. It’s had a freshen up in the colours, but it’s the little interactive bits that make it so nice. I’m sure there are little, new changes each week, but it’s all done with such little fuss and so much finesse!

Oh, and the import feature is up and running again – a bit late for me given I migrated back from Furl a few weeks ago.

To celebrate the new changes, I set up the feed of my last 10 bookmarks in the sidebar.

I watched (on TV) Australia’s Socceroos qualify for their first World Cup appearance in 32 years. It was spectacular stuff… the event was huge and there was certainly drama and action aplenty… but what is it with this acting? how can they get away with that?

I was impressed that the Spanish referee seemed on several occasions completely ignore the agonised writhings of one particular Uruguayan player – who was then left with no choice than to make a Lazarus like recovery and rejoin the game, but that didn’t seem to stop his team mates or, I’m sorry to say, a few of the Australians from diving and writhing whenever an opportunity presented itself.

Those watchers of ‘contact’ sports, such as AFL and the various Rugby codes around the world will be quite familiar with the body language that accompanies pain inflicted on a football field, and it’s nothing like the ridiculous squirming that soccer players seem to learn from some bad acting school. We know when something hurts – we don’t need interpretive break dancing to tell us.

I don’t know if it’s possible to eliminate this, but each time it happens, the game loses a bit of credibility. The referee certainly helped by ignoring several instances, but as is the case with Cricket, cameras are everywhere and they concentrate on the mistakes the referees/umpires make, so it’s a problem that is not going away. There definitely needs to be consideration of a sanction for overacting… maybe three instances make a yellow card, I don’t know.

I’m not a huge soccer fan, so I’d like to say I don’t care, but lately this sort of thing has been seen in Aussie Rules games. There’s nowhere near the scope for it in ‘our’ game – the pace is so much faster; ‘incidents’ so much more intense, and it is a ‘contact’ sport – but I certainly hope umpires don’t let it get to the ridiculous levels it has in the ‘world’ game.

Better get used to it I suppose… there’s going to be a whole lot more in the next 9 months!

The building I work in is beautiful. Very old, very grand, sorta gothic sandstone. My office has real windows we can open and there are lawns outside the window. Alas, old buildings are expensive to maintain, the sandstone parapets are broken in places and the facade is cracked and flaking – mortar and finishing are deteriorating all over.

So, I was pleased to see this morning that some workmen had blocked off my usual entry to the building and had erected some scaffold. Was this the start of renovations? The answer was appalling…