Arrant Nonsense

OMG Y'ALL LOOK AT THIS OMG.

And it is mine mine all MINE.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: eBay is my very good friend.

For the link-o-phobic among you, it's this bad boy right here:


And I found it by searching "iron man cosbaby". And now you can get them too.

The Hubby basically told the guy that since he'd bought a new hard drive for the computer and we had no way of knowing if that was even the problem, he wouldn't give him a refund.

And the buyer just left him feedback that said:
good seller recomended

Ha. Stand firm and call people on their bullshit. It works.

Remember the Hubby's numpty eBay buyer, who thought that a computer that had been formatted twice and declared clean by both Norton and Avast might have a virus that had damaged the motherboard?

Yeah, he claims that when he started it up, it gave him a Blue Screen that said "Windows has encountered a problem, check your computer for viruses, check your hard drive." Now, I'm not a connoisseur of the BSoD, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen that particular message.

It gets better.

He went to Best Buy. They sold him a hard drive. Of course they did, that's what they do. And now "it works."

I'm a little skeptical. For one thing, the Hubby never did figure out, on multiple attempts, how to break into the case of the thing without actually breaking it. Whether they installed it for him or he installed it himself is a moot point.

For another, the guy now wants a $50 partial refund.

Yeah, no. He didn't even attempt to troubleshoot it with us, never tried for a different resolution, just toddled down to Best Buy and shelled out $130 for a hard drive for a computer he spent $210 on?

Whatever, dude. You had "scammer" written all over you since Day One (no, we're not going to take a Walmart gift card as partial payment *eyeroll*). You expect us to believe that you spent nearly as much for a hard drive as you spent on the machine, and installed it yourself. We may have been born at night, but we weren't born last night.

Enjoy your laptop. I hope you choke on it.

My husband sold his HP on eBay.

Before doing so, he reformatted the hard drive and reloaded WinXP on it from the recovery discs. A diagnostic showed no bad sectors on the hard drive.

The buyer is claiming that a virus wiped out the hard drive and is "hoping that the motherboard isn't affected."

So I ask: Is it possible for a virus to do this? Wouldn't a reformat and reload wipe out a virus?

My buyer got back to me and agreed to pay for the auction. I'll watch my account and see when he decides to do so. I will not give him forever.

In other news, I love my little computer so very very much. I'm still getting used to the teeny little keyboard and where the right side shift key is, but it's tiny and quiet and doesn't burn my lap and I luuurrrrrrrrves it, I does. Yesh.

In other other news, I think I know where I'm going with this scene. I didn't hit word count yesterday, but I'm pretty sure I will today what with everything that's going to happen here.

Oh, not!Harry...

I think...I think she lives. He just doesn't know it right away. And if there could be some sort of role reversal here, where he has to take care of her, that'd be peachy.

So, we sold our little Sony Picturebook on eBay last night. Got a pretty decent price for it, and I thought all was well.

And then I wake up to this in my inbox:

hello Julie i was the winner of this item. I wanted to pay you the fee, for you to relist this item again. The reason was that i put a bid in another laptop and also i win. if is ok with you i can send it by paypal so you can relisted just let me know what is the cost.
thanks

NO, MORON. IT IS NOT OKAY. What part of "Your bid is a binding contract" don't you understand? eBay cautions you over and over against bidding on more than one of the same thing at a time for just this reason. Not only that, but you bid in the final minute of the auction! Snipers are supposed to be smarter than this!

Do you have any idea the hassle this is going to cause me? Not only do I have to deal with eBay's and Paypal's fees, but I either have to relist it or mess with a second-chance offer--and I'm going on vacation next week. Not only that, but I have to find a diplomatic way of saying "Suck it up, you won, you pay," which may be even more of a hassle for me but might save some poor other seller some grief down the road.

YOU SUCK.

DAMMIT.

X-posted to ebay_stupid.

...in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers...

My new (old) Sony VAIO Picturebook.

And it's little. And cute. And light. OMG, y'all, this may be the perfect traveling laptop. Seriously, the keyboard is 9 1/4" long and 3 1/2" wide. And the whole thing is a little under ten inches long and six inches wide.

That is, if I don't have to wrestle with it for two hours (like I did this morning) in order to get its internet working. For some reason, it was not liking the PC card...and then it randomly decided that it was all right after all.

I don't get computers.

Now, the thing is old. It's running Win98, with a PII chip, and 64megs of RAM. I'm wondering if I can upgrade the RAM; I've seen some on eBay, but I wouldn't know how to install it.

Also, it doesn't like my (newer) Memorex thumb drives. I was wanting to use the machine to write with when I'm on the road, so that was a problem--until I realized that I can email the files to myself, DUH. Yay, technology.

Anyway, I think I'm going to like this machine. :)

Remember my little laptop battery fiasco? I just got an email from the seller:

Hi:
Have you received your battery?
Can you leave a feedback to me please?

Thank you very much!

D**** L**

Dear seller:
Why are you asking me if I received the battery when we've exchanged emails about it and you basically blew me off and told me to resell it on eBay? I still think your auction title is somewhat misleading, and any feedback I leave will probably reflect that. So, yes, I can leave feedback. Are you sure you want me to?

Also, begging for feedback FTL, man. This makes me less likely to leave it, not more.

Hmph.
agilebrit

Okay, yes. I should have read the auction copy a little more carefully and compared my own battery to the picture. I'm not sure that would have helped (we see what we want to see, right? and the things are damned similar. Just...not similar enough), but hindsight is 20/20. But asking for feedback in an email is a social faux pas on eBay, and if I was one of the denizens of the Feedie Forest, I might just slap him with a neg for doing so.

However, I'm a Biddie. Even though I haven't been there in, like, ages, I still consider myself one. We're the "nice" board. And I did get exactly what was advertised in the auction, shipped speedily--although seriously overcharged on shipping, which seems to be SOP for battery sellers there, and I knew that when I bought it. Seriously, $17 to ship a laptop battery? Whatever, dude, talk to the hand.

And it worked out in the end, no thanks to the seller. We swapped the good cells for the bad ones (after some wrangling with a little green board/chipset thing inside) and actually saved a good $50 on what an actual 3270 battery would have cost. Chances are, if I ever need another battery for this computer, we'll go the same route. Because we're cheap.

So, I'll think about it. But I have very mixed emotions about this transaction, so, dear seller, you probably want me to think about it some more rather than leave you the neutral feedback my knee-jerk reaction wants to leave.

Item title: Averatec Battery TH222 -- 3120 3150 3200 3300 Series

My bad for thinking that the frelling battery might fit my 3200 series laptop. Some sort of punctuation in the title might have cleared up that little misunderstanding, or possibly changing the order, say "3300 series, 3120, 3150, 3200." And, had I looked at my battery and compared it to the picture, I might have noticed that they're different. Or I might not have. Because they're not that different.

And the seller won't take it back. Guess I'll be reselling that puppy. Yay. Because I need the hassle. Not to mention that I still need a battery. Stupid Averatec. WHY change the battery just for the 3260, 3270, and 3280 computers--and then change it back?

The Hubby is tearing into my old battery to see if we can move the cells from the new one into the dead one. They're exactly the same, other than the pluggy thing. Apparently, from what I'm finding, the proper battery for the 3270 is about $100, give or take. AUGH.

Oh well. I shall now dive into the A&tS story and make it SUCK LESS.

Today was better than yesterday. For one thing, I only left the house to go to the chiropractor. I didn't have this big elaborate expensive thing I had to do that would cost us dearly if I screwed it up. So that was a shiny thing. My back still hurts, and I still can't touch my knees, but it's minutely better than it was. Yayness.

For another, my S2 Farscape DVDs came today. To my surprise and pleasure, they're four-disc sets instead of the two-disc, double-sided sets I was expecting. I looked at Amazon's reviews, and apparently they had trouble with the two-sided discs, so...here we are. Yay!

In honor of getting them, I made a wallpaper. It's probably not all that, as wallpapers go, but it's mine and I like it and I share it with you. It's snaggable if anyone wants the silly thing.

Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size pic:

1024x768

In other news, the Hubby made it to Colorado in the new plane okay, although it wore him out. Apparently we need to get a GPS for it, stat. He may stay an extra day; he hasn't decided. Depends a lot on what the weather does.

In other other news, the Angel Scriptbook comics I BIN'd on eBay three weeks ago still haven't arrived. *sigh* I'm about ready to give up on eBay for comics. Because, dude. I emailed the seller, but with the holiday weekend, who knows when I'll hear back from him. I hope to hell they didn't get delivered to my front porch while we were at Little Brother's wedding, and then someone took them. Because that would suck.