Dear Treasury,

Best regards,
Citigroup
Too Big To Fail Since 1998

Last year, countless herds of morons trampled and crushed other morons in a fight to get cheap electronics. Many of us felt this was simply nature culling the herd of its weaker members… killing off moron genes.

Many of the trampled morons had arrived at midnight and waited in line in the bitter cold for 6 or 8 hours till the stores opened. I’d be in a hurry to get inside, too.

What the stores failed to mention in their ads last year was that “limited quantities, no rain checks” mean “We have one of these things at the listed price.” So once inside the store, more fights broke out due to the fact that after waiting for 8 hours in the cold, the store didn’t actually have a sale going on… just good marketing.

This year, CNN polled America to find out how many people planned to shop on Black Friday. 13%. And stores changed their approach as well, in hopes of avoiding having crowds of morons trampling their employees to death.

This year might be a calmer Black Friday, but that still won’t lure me out. I’d gladly pay full price to avoid spending my day with the morons who still choose to brave the day.

Especially in a recession, I love Ebay.

Thanks to Ebay I have many things I could never have afforded. I bought a Nikon D200 on Ebay for $400… brand new. I bought my Nikon SB-800 on Ebay for $120. I bought 3 Harmony 890 remotes on Ebay for $40 each.

As I’ve been doing more and more photography, I realized that I needed a tablet for retouching. Using a standard mouse to retouch is like doing surgery with boxing gloves on. I did my research and decided what I needed was a Wacom Intous4 8×12 tablet. I went to Dell.com, where I always do my comparison shopping and it was $499.

Ouch. That’s a lot of money.

So I went to Ebay and bid on one… new in box.

Won it. $80. Free shipping.

Go shop on Ebay.

Afford stuff you can’t afford.

It’s an ASUS. Yeah, I’ve never heard of them either.

But get a load of the specs:

- Pentium Dual Core 2.50 Ghz
- Windows Vista Premium 64 bit
- 640 GB Disk
- 4 GB 800 Mhz RAM
- 7 USB Ports (3 front, 4 rear)
- HDMI and DVI Video
- 2 Firewire Ports
- Slot load DVD/RW
- Integrated Wireless N Lan
- Integrated 2.4 Ghz Keyboard & Mouse

So I checked these babies out on the web, and apparently they’re pretty cheap even when they’re new – run about $600. However, on Craigslist, they’re much cheaper.

I’m still working out the bugs. Haven’t gotten file sharing working yet with my main computer upstairs, but they can see each other… just won’t let me in. I think it’s a firewall issue.

Anyhow, hopefully this will be the first of many posts from the man room.

And when I’m finished posting, the simple press of a button on my Harmony 880 remote, and I shall be watching TV. Or a DVD. Or playing Wii. Or listening to my iPod. Or watching a movie off my iPod. If only my microwave worked with the Harmony remote… life would be perfect.

I read an article in Time talking about how Wal-Mart is eating Target’s lunch. Let me tell you, it’s not on my account. Wal-Mart is a vast wasteland of downtrodden white trash and Mexicans. I’m sure that sounds rude, but I’m serious.

When a Wal-Mart goes into an area, you can be positive that within 5 years, the yuppies will all move out and the Mexicans and white trash will move in. I’m not sure if that’s universal, but it’s definitely true in the Midwest.

Wal-Mart is not only a beacon of capitalism, it’s a beacon of deals that even trailer trash can afford.

Target on the other hand, has well lit, well maintained stores, with prices just high enough to keep out the riffraff. I will gladly spend a little more money to have an enjoyable shopping experience…. one that doesn’t include toothless morons leering at me and unkempt Mexicans trying to communicate in another language.

I’m not a racist. I’m quite sure there are Mexicans who speak English and bathe. I just don’t know them personally. I’m a culturalist. I think other cultures suck (as I’ve said before), so if you don’t meet the mark, I look down on you. Bathing is key to meeting my mark, as is basic dental hygiene and of course speaking English.

I often wonder at what point a person gives up on life to the extent they no longer care enough to cover their BO. (Incidentally, am I the only one that finds it funny that Obama’s program on his website is called “myBO”?)

Target is filled with good smelling, clean-toothed, English speaking patrons. I don’t see how they can lose.

Just because the market went up the last 10 days doesn’t mean it will go up on day 11. Just because it went down 10 straight days doesn’t mean it will go down on day 11. The upward trend the past 100 years has been consistent, and has consistently had fluctuations – some large and some small. If you just left your money alone, you’d have earned around 12%. If you take it out after you lose 40%, you have lost 40%. If you just leave it in there and let it recover, you’re not out anything.

Now, if you’re about to retire, by all means, cash out. But that isn’t most of you. Not only is it dumb to take a big loss on your investments, it also snowballs the crashing market. If everyone starts selling off, then there’s tons of stock available that no one wants. That means one thing – everything loses value.

The best thing you can do to improve your position is to hold on for dear life, stop looking at your 401k balance online every day, and just STOP doing anything. You’re only making it worse by trying to meddle with something you don’t even remotely understand. Right now, even Warren Buffet has lost like 100 billion. But he’s not panicking. He’s BUYING. He knows it’s only a loss if he sells it at a loss.

So stop making things worse. Put down your statement, take a chill pill, and focus your energy on working hard so when the job market gets worse, you won’t be the first person laid off. Shoot – if you can hang onto your job, a recession will be like a big sale! Plasma screens for $50!

My experience with Ebay has been love-hate from the beginning. I love being able to sell to such a huge market, and I hate that the large market includes about 25% scammers. Fraud is so rampant on Ebay that they have to have a huge division to deal with it, and frankly, they’re doing a piss-poor job.

I’ve sold about 25 things on Ebay in the past year, and 6 of those involved some form of fraud. Fortunately for me, it’s always been buyer fraud (they try to get stuff from me for free) and not seller fraud (where I pay and get nothing). The sophistication of these scams is a marvel to behold. If the same energy were harnessed to solve the world’s energy crisis or cure cancer, we’d have both problems knocked out in about a week.

The early scams were lame and transparent. You’d get an email where the name would say “Abu Ebuoforitoan” and the message would be something to the effect of “Please click this link http://10.124.52.92/~paypal and enter your Paypal username and password to confirm your account”. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that’s a scam. The emails back then didn’t even LOOK like the Paypal emails.

Since then, it’s reached a whole new level. The latest scam I was almost taken by was very well executed. The scammer hijacked a legitimate Ebay user account and clicked “Buy it Now” on my listing. Shortly thereafter, they sent a very authentic looking email to me that looked like a Paypal payment notification. It was odd, however, because it came to my secondary Paypal email address. However, stranger things have happened and I was still game, because payment is payment.

This morning I came in and went to Paypal to create a shipping label for UPS. I went through the whole thing, and then at the end, it said “Your Paypal balance is $0.00, your checking account will be charged for the shipping.” And I said “WHOA, THERE!”

I immediately emailed scam-boy and told him the money wasn’t there. He told me to look at the “Paypal” payment email and make sure I verified my email address, because the account was unconfirmed, which meant the funds were in limbo (according to him). Well, that sounds pretty darn flaky, but I went ahead and looked at the email again.

There was a link… something like http://CONFIRM.HUMPDICKER.FAKE.US/PAYPAL/CONFIRM. Just for the fun of it, I clicked the link, and it took me to a VERY authentic looking Paypal spoof… and get this, it even showed paypal.com in my browser URL. However, it asked me to confirm personal information and a quick glance down was all it took to see I was on an unsecure site. Paypal wouldn’t ask for personal information anyhow, but they certainly wouldn’t do it without SSL.

Then comes the really fun part. I email fraud-boy again and tell him I’m wise to his plot. IMMEDIATELY, he CALLS me on my cell phone (SCARY) and begins to threaten me! I’m not making this up! This guy was so mad I didn’t fall for his scam he had the gall to go off on ME!!

I told him I was reporting him to everyone I could think of and hung up on him.

After 45 minutes of talking to Ebay, I realized why they were victim to so much fraud. They are idiots.

So, in a last-ditch effort to make this ugly transaction go away, I emailed the guy and told him if he agreed to mutually withdraw from the transaction, I wouldn’t report his activity.

We mutually withdrew.

Then I reported him.

Scammers 0, Pete 1

Watch yourselves out there!

Pete

Ebay works a lot like the blogosphere. It’s a self-policing e-cosystem where if you behave badly, you get beat down by your peers. If you screw someone, you’ll be run out of town.

Recently I discovered selling on Ebay. Not really “discovered” but “began using.” I hate selling nice stuff, even if I haven’t used it in 2 years. However, that’s not really very smart, and I’m forcing myself to sell stuff I don’t use anymore. I sold a bunch of computer equipment, a Nikon camera, a couple of external hard drives… I’m really getting good at it! I’ve even figured out how Paypal, USPS, and Ebay are all integrated… VERY nifty.

So, I still have a few things for sale: Pete’s Ebay Crap for Sale. If you need a 6 string bass or a fancy digital camera, I’m your guy.

I recently bought a 5 string bass that’s not as hard on my carpal tunnel syndrome, and any dream I have of playing the 6 string again is just that…. a dream. CPS doesn’t go away, it gets worse. All of the treatment options suck, and most of them have a track record of not working. So, the 6 string is on the chopping block.

I have a Nikon digital SLR, so having a consumer Kodak camera, however fancy it is, just doesn’t make much sense. So, that’s for sale, too. And the 40GB hard drive… that’s for sale because I can’t even fit a single photo shoot on 40 GB anymore. I shoot Nikon NEF raw format, which makes for huge uncompressed files. I have 2 terabytes of space on my home computer, and I have dual 500GB external drives for backup. 40GB is a spit in the ocean.

Not that any of you care, but I’m enjoying purging my home office and getting some $$$ in the process.

No, what I’m actually talking about is a car. When Jenna moved to KC, she insisted that we get her a humongous pimp-car, so we got her a Lincoln Town Car Executive series. Jenna loved that big 6 liter V8.

Only trouble was, this ain’t Texas. It snows and ices here. A lot. But not enough that we know how to keep our roads cleared, and not enough that the people here know how to drive on it.

Driving a V8-pimp-car-rear-wheel-drive Town Car in snow and ice while surrounded by crackheads is a lot tougher than it sounds. We got into a situation where every time the weather got bad, either I would have to drive her to work in the 4×4, or we would trade and then I’D have to drive the V8-pimp-car-rear-wheel-drive in the snow and ice. Now, I’m not afraid to drive it, and I have enough practice driving on it in KC that I could handle it, but it still sucked.

So, on what could only be described as a whim, Jenna informed me she wanted a Lincoln SUV. I told her that we could do that in about 18.6 years since the Lincoln SUVs start in the 40k range, and that’s without any options, including a motor and transmission. So she said, “ok, how about a Ford Edge?” I informed her that Fords were not allowed to park in my driveway, but she REALLY likes them, so we looked online… 30k+. For a friggin’ Ford! No way, man.

So finally, I said “Babe, why don’t you look at the Dodge website… Dodge’s are MUCH cheaper, and they look HOT!”

So she did, and instantly fell in love with the 08 Caliber.

On Tuesday, I drove the Lincoln over to the Dodge dealership, worked my mojo, and more or less traded in the Lincoln for a new 08 Caliber. an 01 with 90k miles for an 08 with 7 miles. Same payment. Only put a grand down. Hoo-rah.

I rock.

I’ve never liked cars. I’m a truck guy. I love riding up high, I love being able to go to the Home Depot and just pick up the stuff I need instead of renting their truck or paying for delivery. I love the feel of a big engine torqued down real low.

So Tuesday the perfect storm came along. My dad is a businessman. He’s been in business for himself since 1983, and before that he worked for some of the biggest companies around, so he’s seen his fair share of negotiation. He has sold businesses for people and negotiated mult-million dollar contracts. So whenever I want a good deal on something, I invite him.

Over the weekend he told me he was going to be buying a Dodge truck for one of his businesses. He saw a deal in the paper that looked pretty decent, and the shop definitely needed a new truck. So that got me thinking… Hmmm, I’ll bet if he negotiates two trucks at the same time, we can get a REALLY sweet deal.

So Monday I told him my evil plan, and told him I’d leave it completely to him to do the negotiating. He really enjoys beating up on car salesmen. And who can blame him.. they all have the same BS story – “If I give you one penny more, my kids will starve. I’m already losing money on the deal.” Which of course we all know is retarded because no one would ever sell something at a loss.

Anyhow, Tuesday we roll into the dealership and inform mr. salesman that we want TWO new trucks, one for the business, and one for me. I set the stage right then that if my dad wasn’t happy with the deal, I was prepared to walk away.

I won’t bore you with the details of the work truck, but I will tell you about mine.

I got a 2007 Dodge Ram 1500 4×4 long bed with the SXT package (which adds a lot of power options and tons of chrome) and the trailer/tow group. The sticker on it was $30,755. I was also upside down on my Intrepid loan, so the trade was gonna have to work out in my favor, keeping in mind it was a piece of crap. Did I mention it also had about 30k more miles than a car it’s age should?

Well, long story short, my dad got them down to $16,000 and I signed on the dotted line. Yup, almost half off the sticker price. I’ll post actual pictures of mine, but here’s roughly what mine looks like:

And I feel like a grown up when I drive it.