Random Acts of Blogging
Why Am I Just Finding Out About This Now?
Thursday, December 27th, 2007A hearty hat-tip to Mike Starr, who informed me of this website by actually walking me by one of the stores on our way to lunch yesterday: i-SoldIt.com.
Here’s how it works: You have an item you want to sell on eBay, but you either don’t have the time to do so, or you have no freaking idea how to go about selling something on eBay. So what you do is bring your item to an iSoldIt store (they have 138 stores, located in 36 of the United States, as well as Canada and Australia). They will photograph it for you, write the text that appears on your eBay auction, wait for it to sell, then package it up in a box and send it to the seller. When the seller pays them, they send you a check.
So, to summarize: you drop off your stuff, and they send you a check.
The only downside appears to be the cost: they take 33-40%, plus eBay fees (1.5-5.25%) and payment processing fees (3%), so you could be taking home only about half of what your item sells for. That said, if your item doesn’t sell, there is no fee. You can either pick it up within 10 days of the auction’s close, or they’ll donate it to charity.
What I find most interesting about this business is the fact that eBay has a trust component to it – sellers that successfully sell a lot of items get higher ratings, which makes buyers more likely to buy from them. And since ISoldIt aggregates sellers, they are (or at least, they claim to be) the #1 Seller on eBay, which can actually help your item get sold.
A real bricks & mortar implementation of an eCommerce idea. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it before now…
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The Year in Review According to JibJab..
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007This is awesome:
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Random Acts of Blogging III
Thursday, December 20th, 2007Lots of little things today:
1) 2007 Top 10 Finalists – Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest (Hat tip: Lisa Fiorenzo)
2) Soundboard.com – 78,000+ sound files, broken down into 6,000+ “Soundboards.” Find “soundboards” from your favorite movies, tv shows, celebrities, etc. It’s the YouTube of sound clips…
3) Just when you thought Britney Spears was as messed up as she was going to get:
- Her 16-year old younger sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, is three months pregnant.
- Jamie Lynn is the star of “Zoey 101,” a show on Nickelodeon that’s popular with preteens. Or at least she was. Nickelodeon says the show has already wrapped it’s “fourth and final” season. I’m guessing the writers’ strike wasn’t the issue here.
- She says the baby’s father is her “long-time” boyfriend, Casey Aldridge, who is 19 years old. Just how “long-time” could this possibly be?
But here’s where it goes beyond messed up to just plain weird:
- Britney and Jamie Lynn’s mother, Lynne Spears, was under contract with a Christian book publisher to publish a parenting book, tentatively titled, “Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World.” The publisher calls it “a parenting book that’s going to have faith elements to it.” It had been set for publication on Mother’s Day in May 2008, but is now on hold indefinitely.
- Jamie Lynn gave an interview about her pregnancy to OK! magazine and, according to TMZ.com, OK! has offered her $1 million for an exclusive photo shoot after the baby is born
This is wrong on so many levels, just the thought of typing it all up makes my head hurt.
4) Time’s Person of the Year for 2007 is . . . You again! No, just kidding. It’s Vladmir Putin. The title of the article is “A Tsar is Born.” Clever title, although I think he wins for being infamous as opposed to famous. Yet another contest Al Gore could have won but didn’t, me thinks. At any rate, this site is kind of cool. It shows you the covers for all the Person of the Year issues, dating back to 1927, and lets you view them by category – US Political and Military Leaders (30), International Leaders (31), Business and Technology (5), Science and Medicine (5), Religion and Philanthropy (3), and Concepts (7).
5) Finally, a quick Instapundit roundup. Glenn was chock full of blogabble stuff today:
– Did you know that 70 Senators, including 22 Democrats, voted to extend the Iraqi war funding by $70 million on Tuesday? Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that Democrats were vowing to end the war? The 2006 Congress marked the “end of the rubber stamp Congress,” right? Maybe this had something to do with it.
– Did you know that printer ink costs roughly $8,000 per gallon? And that ink monitoring software tells you the cartridge is out of ink when it is an average of 20% full? The worst offender, by the way, is Kodak’s EasyShare 5300 which would have you waste an astounding 64% of the ink! I’ve never understood why people don’t just turn off those ink monitors and print until the printouts start degrading (always keeping a spare cartridge handy, of course). That way, you know you haven’t wasted any…
– Did you know that the free market seems to be doing what the Kyoto treaty could not do? Some fascinating stats, comparing 1997 (the year before Kyoto was signed) to 2004 (latest available data):
– Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
– Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
– Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
– Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.
– Emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto.
That’s all for now…
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And the Winner of the Mitt Romney Look-alike Contest is…
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007…his father, George Romney:
I’m not usually one for the whole “he looks just like his father thing,” but my lord – this picture is eerie, no? When I first saw it in the paper, my reaction was, “why is that picture of Mitt Romney in black and white?” Looking more closely, I still have trouble believing it’s not him…
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Headline of the Year…
Thursday, December 13th, 2007Ike Turner died this week. And since his death pre-dated Tina Turner’s death, here’s the headline the New York Post decided to run:
Ike “Beats” Tina to Death
It’d be an instant classic if it weren’t just a little too mean…
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging, Words about Music | 1 Comment »
A Whole Year, One Sentence at a Time
Thursday, December 13th, 2007A meme from Jason Bennion over at Simple Tricks and Nonsense:
Repost the first sentence of the first blog entry in each of the previous year’s 12 months.
Uh…OK:
January: “‘Tis the season for the unending streams of lists – The Top 10 Outrageous Moments of 2006, The 40 Most Offensive Celebrity Arrests of 2006 (categorized by offended ethnic/religious group), and of course the always reliable List of Dumb Holiday Gifts You Can Buy on the Internet.”
February: “I realize this story is a couple of days old at this point, but I saw the headline the other day, and didn’t bother to read the article until today.”
March: “Mmmmmmm…….Computer……..”
April: “Man, talk about solving a problem no one knew they had!”
May: “OK, so there’s a nutcase out there writing threatening letters to the TV networks because they’re only televising cheerleaders who are not dressed provocatively”
June: “I may be falling behind on my ISBS Tech Guide (I’ll start again soon, I swear!), but Google Analytics has provided me the tools to create two monthly features.”
July: “Well, I couldn’t very well have a blog and not comment on the iPhone this weekend, could I?”
August: “So check it out: CNN’s story on Danica McKellar’s book links back to my post on the subject.”
September: “Oof.”
October: “Well, as promised, it was an exciting weekend.”
November: “OK, I was prepared for this.”
December: “From the Pittsburgh Business Times: Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. said late Monday it agreed to acquire privately held Chick’s Sporting Goods for about $40 million in cash and assumption of about $31 million debt.”
From which we learn………nothing at all.
Such are the way of memes…
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We’re #1,574!
Saturday, December 1st, 2007This cool, interactive chart from the New York Times shows the 5,000 most common surnames in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, who has compiled this list exactly twice in history (once in 1990, and once in 2007).
I’m proud to report that Greenberg stands proudly at #1,574, just behind Redmond and just ahead of Cote.
Most of my friends’ and fellow bloggers’ names don’t make the list, with the exception of Starr, who comes in at an impressive 1,135 (between Joyner and Morin) and Walsh, who blows us all away with a whopping #265 (between Fields and Little).
Up next: some even more useless information. Finding it may take a while, though… ;-)
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Making Buildings out of Money
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
Just so those Italians know you don’t need a leaning tower to do clever camera tricks. The $10, $20 and $50 bills are here.
Hat tip: Lisa Fiorenzo
Categories: Money Talk, Random Acts of Blogging | 1 Comment »
Tic Tac Two?
Thursday, November 8th, 2007OK, here’s a phrase I’ve never typed before: Following up on my post about Tic-Tacs…
But seriously, there’s more.
You see, the orange-in-flavor-but-not-in-color tic tacs are truly awful. They don’t taste good, and they don’t freshen your breath, which is the main reason I bought Tic Tacs in the first place. So, I went to a different newsstand in hopes of finding the old standby: plain, white Tic Tacs. Well, I found them, but guess what else I found!
So apparently, there are two types of orange Tic Tacs. Excuse my french, but what the fuck is up with that? The mind truly boggles…
Ah, but wait, there’s still more: looking closely at the back of the containers, I learn, well, more than I ever thought I would reading the back of a Tic Tac container. To wit:
The orange Tic Tacs are listed as having 1.5 calories per mint. The white ones are listed as having 1.9 calories per mint. Anyone else remember the “one and a half calorie breath mint” commercials? Are there really different formulas for these things? Did Tic Tac add something to the white flavor to give it 0.4 more calories? Was there fine print on the commercials that said “Calories refer to orange flavor only” that I missed all those years ago?
Also, the back of the orange-flavored-but-white-colored Tic Tacs doesn’t list calorie information at all, but lists the ingredients in both English and French. Maybe these are French Tic Tacs being sold illegally in the United States? Ooh, a Tic Tac scandal! You read it here first!
And…there’s a website. Here’s the product page at TicTacUSA.com. You’ll notice if you click around – no white Tic Tacs that taste orange. We’re definitely looking at some foreign mints here, folks…
Finally, I just couldn’t resist checking why they used TicTacUSA.com, instead of TicTac.com. Turns out there is no site up at TicTac.com, although the domain is registered to an Italian gentleman named Oscar Saglietti from Alba, and the technical contact is in the UK.
Someone ought to write a book (someone other than me, that is…)
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 3 Comments »
Truth in Tic Tacs?
Friday, October 26th, 2007This morning on the way to work, I stopped by a newsstand and bought a box of Tic Tacs. Yeah, I know…I’m just not a big Altoid fan, OK? Anyway, to make matters worse, all they had was orange flavored. So I take my orange Tic Tacs, walk away from the newsstand and open the box to eat a couple. Check this out:
The Tic Tacs are white. The box they’re sold in is semi-transparent orange, and the Tic Tacs themselves are white. Now granted, they still taste like orange (or at least as orange as orange-flavored Tic Tacs are supposed to taste), but they’ve obviously been packaged to suggest that they’re actually orange in color as well. In fact, come to think of it, didn’t they used to be orange in color?
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, but I felt a little duped, so I figured I’d share it with all of you. If just one Tic Tac purchaser is forewarned, I’ve done my duty to society…
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