I took a sick
day and stayed at home goofing around. Some people call it a mental
sick day. I just really didn't want to deal with work today. Of course
that means I'll have to deal with work tomorrow. Do I feel bad; guilty?
... Not really. Maybe I'm just getting tired of my job. Or maybe I'm
just getting tired of life.
So I put another four items on eBay. Took me a couple of hours. The
amount of time I put into writing the descriptions and getting the
pictures together is really not worth it except for a few higher priced
items. Still, I guess the alternative is to toss what I don't want.
That would be quite a shame.
My Wolverine comics collection sold in a couple of hours. I had a Buy
It Now for $125 and someone wanted it. Really, it's quite a bargain as
the comics are worth at least $400. But the point is not to try to make
the most money possible. The point is to get rid of this stuff. I used
to just give away stuff I didn't want. This time I at least want a
little bit but it's not important.
Another problem is that I'm running out of big boxes. Well, they're not
big boxes but they're bigger than a small package. It's going to make
it dicey selling my other comic collections. Will either have to split
them up or ship them in pieces which is more expensive and it's not
fair to pass that cost to the buyer.
I went to Powell's Books and bought 13 Star Trek books. Some used but
most new. Powell's doesn't really provide any sort of used book
discount, at least online. But they're a huge store and you can get
used and new books there all in one order.
|
The problem
with Barnes and Noble is that their used books are either rare or
handed off to other sellers. Amazon's used books are alwats other
sellers. This makes it very hard to get a bunch of used books from one
seller so you don't end up paying shipping individually. Even Alibris,
which has a low shipping cost, it only applies to books from their
warehouse, which is like, what, 10% of the books listed?
The big problem is that you can't ship from multiple locations
economically. You can't solve that problem, so used book shipping is a
killer. So you need to buy from a large used books seller like
Powell's. Half Price Books uses Abebooks for online ordering. But their
so unorganized that the few searches I did turned up nothing. If you've
been to a Half Price store you know that it's a miracle if they keep
track of their stock.
Tonight's Gamesome Mac guest was Ben Haller, author of Solarian II.
I've listened to his previous appearance two years ago surprisingly a
lot of stuff was repeated. Well, maybe not surprisingly since it has
been two years. But in talking about his time at Berkeley Systems and
his early software it was pretty much the same as before.
Of course he's done more since then and the new stuff was interesting.
He talked about porting Solarian II to Mac OS X. Also talked about his
game Trisection, a Tetris variant. Talked a bit about Fracture and his
old screensaver Flowfaze. It was fairly interesting though I wasn't
quite paying full attention so I missed a couple of things.
Saw an episode of LAX. It was interesting. Airplane loses instruments
and has to land while there's a marine layer over the runway.
|