Shoestring Theory

While surfing for something completely different, I ran across MIT’s Scratch program yesterday.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

It uses a graphical interface to string together common programming scripts. The littletheorist keeps talking about becoming a game designer when she grows up, so this looks like an amazing tool to let her develop some simple games now and learn the logic behind programming. I played around with it for most of last night so that I can help her learn how to use it. I built a simple, graphical eBay fee calculator. I still want to touch it up some, but I’ll post it once it’s done.

The site has thousands of user created programs and animations. An archery shooter is one of the best examples of how good a game can look with Scratch. Anyone who is interested in programming or game design needs to check this out.

Tags:   offtopic · programming · scratchNo Comments.

KCTV5: If it ain’t sensational, it ain’t news.

Kansas City police and the FBI raided multiple Kansas City locations to bust up a multi-million dollar stolen property ring Monday, according to KCTV5 in Kansas City.

The story was surprisingly solid for a KC television story, right up until the reporter, Shaun Broyls, felt the need to throw in some sensational editorializing:

Here’s the interesting thing about that, if you’ve ever bought anything on an online service like eBay, you might be in possession of stolen property. Because police say that after the thieves stole the property, they turned right around and pitched it on eBay.

So, you don’t know what you’ve got if you’ve bought something on eBay. – [Transcribed from KCTV5 video – ed]

Thank you Shaun. Never mind the millions of law-abiding eBay members on eBay. No, screw those people. Every purchase could put stolen goods in your hands! Danger, Will Robinson, danger! What’s wrong with simply stating the facts? “Police say eBay was used to sell the alleged stolen property.” Simple, direct, and lets the viewers draw their own conclusions. KMBC-TV managed to cover it without the dire warning.

Feel free to contact KCTV5 at kctv5@kctv5.com or the reporter, Shaun Broyls at…hmmm, he’s not listed as a staff reporter on the site. Just make sure to mention him in the email to the station.

Thanks to a reader for the tip on this one.

Tags:   eBay · fraud · KCTV5 · news3 Comments

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! See the epic battle of carrot versus stick! One time only! You’ll pay for the entire seat, but only need the edge! (Bat and Carrot from OCAL)

Okay, eventually we’re going to finish slogging through all the changes. Today we’ll tackle the new PowerSeller reward system. There are basically two components to this, fee reduction and greater protection.

PowerSeller discounts on Final Value Fees (or Transaction Services Fees)

-DSRs of 4.6 or more (based on the last 30 days): 5% Final Value Fee discount

-DSRs of 4.8 or more (based on the last 30 days): 15% Final Value Fee discount

For years I’ve thought PowerSellers deserved additional rewards for maintaining their status. So, while this should be a “WooHoo!” type moment for PowerSellers, this won’t offset the fee increase some of us will be seeing. Also, I want to see numbers about how many PowerSellers actually maintain that DSR of 4.8 in every category. Some of the best sellers I know carry a 4.7 or 4.6 in at least one category. There’s also the question of exactly what is the carrot for a seller. Especially in shipping fees, lowering shipping cost to attain a 4.8 in that category could end up costing sellers far more than the fee savings.

[Click to read more →]

Tags:   changes · eBay · PowerSeller · rewardsNo Comments.

Screen capture of Feb. 5, 2008 video stream from cnn.com.

So I’m in full political junkie mode, watching the live stream from CNN while surfing the web looking for more SupTu (that’s how the cool kids say it) info.

The colors on CNN’s Republican Super Tuesday map floored me:

• McCain: Republican Red, the color of a patriot’s blood
• Huckabee: Pinkish (or coral as CNN called it), the kind of color you deck the guest bathroom out in, not what comes to mind when one names “Presidential colors”
• Romney: Sh*t brown. Sure, CNN called it bronze, but we can all see who they’re taking a dump on

Glad I got a screen shot of this one, as I couldn’t find the same map on their site.

[Update: So the ladytheorist tells me that I’m color blind and that Romney’s color is in fact “Rusty Red.” Still not a presidential color. What does everyone else think?]

[Update numero dos: The Daily Show ran a bit mocking all of the map colors the TV news channels used to identify SupTu candidates. I feel vindicated now. They don’t have an embed code for the color map bit, but you can check out the intro after the jump or head over to thedailyshow.com.]

[Click to read more →]

Tags:   color · offtopic · politics · shoestring theory3 Comments

I still don’t know who I support the most, but no doubt Kansas Dems love Barack.

Lord, that’s an obnoxious headline. Someone stop me. The alternate headline for this was, “Slinging mud in Kansas politics.” Weather forecast: wet, white and disgusting. Quite a few people had problems getting out of the fairgrounds after the caucus.

Anyway, so I did go out and caucus tonight. After twelve years of being a proud independent, I registered as a Democrat just to see how a caucus worked. Quite shocking that 2,218 souls from my district braved disgusting weather to go out and support their candidates. My district heavily favored Barack. Make sure to check out the full results for Lawrence and Kansas.

Not a lot of mutual love between the Hillary and Barack camps. Technically Kucinich and Edwards were still on the ticket here. When their representatives gave speeches, pretty much everyone cheered and clapped, same with Barack’s rep. When it came time for Hillary’s rep though, the only sounds of support came from her camp (mostly grumbles uttered under breath around me while her rep spoke).
[Click to read more →]

Tags:   caucus · kansas · offtopic · politics2 Comments

Editor’s note: For Sale will be a regular feature highlighting what the auction traffic is like on eBay in relation to particular events.

Every Super Tuesday, pundits and politicians stick their heads out of their holes to predict whether we’ll have four more years of partisan bickering or….four more years of partisan bickering. Always a tough call.

Anyway, pickings are pretty slim on eBay for “Super Tuesday” auctions.

22 completed listings in the last two weeks (9 Sold)
19 active listings plus 5 store items

Several Obama buttons (Superbama is my favorite), one Rudy bumper sticker, couple of crappy domain names and the ever popular Dominatrix Hillary.

As always, any links to eBay items will eventually die when eBay removes them from its servers. Any statistics may change within just a couple of hours.

Tags:   auctions · eBay · For Sale · Super Tuesday3 Comments

I was just working on the next bit of analysis of eBay’s changes and ran across something odd. Under the banner of “Safer Payments,” PayPal may begin holding payments for some items until one of several criteria are met. I’ll deal with this in-depth in another post, but I want to highlight one of the criteria here. Payments may be held until “3 days after confirmed item delivery*” (note the asterisk).

*This applies to US domestic transactions that are shipped by USPS or FedEx and either (i) use PayPal shipping labels to ship items or (ii) upload tracking information to PayPal via the transaction details page. (Bold font added for emphasis -ed)

Why are USPS and FedEx specifically named, but no other companies are (especially UPS)? UPS labels can be printed through PayPal, but FedEx labels can’t. Is this a typo, an omission or something else? I’m submitting a media request to eBay (my first!), so we’ll see if we can get clarification on this.

Tags:   changes · eBay · FedEx · shipping · UPSNo Comments.

Reader Andrew over at the AuctionBytes blog sent them an awesome calculator to show the difference between the old and new fee structure on eBay. It’s set up to do individual items and the monthly impact provided you know your average item cost and sell through rate. I (and I imagine many others) built a simpler version of this, but his is better.

Check out the blog post describing the calculator:

eBay Fee Calculator Now Live

Then check out the calc itself:

eBay Fee Calculator

Andrew also includes some good analysis about the long term impact of this. Well worth reading.

Tags:   calculator · eBay · feesNo Comments.

Fewer of these floating around the site?

With all the coverage the new fee and feedback structures have gotten, one item that has been overlooked are the changes to PowerSeller requirements.

Starting July, a score of 4.5 or more on all DSRs (based on the last 12 months) will be required for membership in the PowerSeller program.

Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) are the new feedback eBay added last year. They allow buyers to anonymously rate sellers on a 1-5 scale in four categories (accuracy, communication, shipping time and shipping cost). In trolling through seller feedback, I see the lowest ratings in shipping cost and communication, in general. I would love to see some kind of tool that could show what the average DSRs of PowerSellers are. Any new threshold is bound to weed out some percentage of sellers.

[Click to read more →]

Tags:   eBay · PowerSellerNo Comments.

A mysterious supplier who can beat my prices on every item I carry, but is always out of stock.

A routine email for me to receive:

“Hi, I usually buy this product at five percent of what you are selling it for, but my supplier is currently out of stock (shocking! –ed). Would you be willing to meet this price?”

I’m willing to negotiate and haggle, but this tactic will immediately get you banned from doing business with me. If you really have a magic supplier who can beat my prices by 95 percent, send me a name and email for this business. I will become a loyal and happy customer for years to come.

Tags:   business · definitions · eBayNo Comments.