This one made me crack up, for obvious reasons. With the kind permission of Chris Eliopoulos, I present another “Misery Loves Sherman” comic strip:

(c) 2008 Chris Eliopoulos, of course

• This guy will do some things for money. He’ll take a trip and send you a pic. He’ll write a letter of apology. He’ll think about you. Weird, but fascinating. And, no doubt, a big profit making venture.

• Pictures of an avalanche on Mars.

• Yes, this is incredibly freaky. Blame Johnny Bacardi for pointing it out.

• The Sony Trinitron is dead. The last TV I bought before going HDTV was a Sony Trinitron. It was a great machine, and still runs to this day in my parents’ living room, some 7 years after I bought it, as I recall. Still looks great, too, though it does have an odd tendency to snap out of mono sound into stereo and vice versa without provocation. The stereo sound only sounds good if you’re sitting directly in front of it. Seated to either side, it sounds hollow.

• One man played Wii Fit for a week. He lives to tell the tale.

• Evolution of the TiVo logo.

Here’s the latest batch of Twitterisms from the last week. Visit my Twitter account to see them as they happen!

• @gruber - Monoprice.com for your HDMI cable needs. I think I paid $6 for a six foot cable there most recently. Not that shipping is cheap

• Why would I watch a movie awards show when I haven’t watched any movies this year?

• @justnathan - oddly, the fashion is the least interesting part of the Oscars for me. Yeah, I’ll just catch Go Fug Yourself in the morning.

• Sometimes, you have to realize that it’s just NOT your night for Guitar Hero and walk away. I’m very zen about it tonight.

• @jbacardi - I don’t care WHO August Rush is, I just root for whoever they are/he is based on that NAME along. “August” rules!

• @justnathan - TV is not always right, unless it’s HIGH DEF TV. Then, thou must obey, in extra resolution!

• When tracking an item on UPS.com, you no longer need to check off the box to agree to their T&S. Very cool!

• If the upcoming HULK movie is an homage to the TV series, then they learned nothing from the debacle of Superman Returns. Discuss.

• No MacBreak Weekly podcast this week? This is sad.

• Greatest comic of the year, by far: All Star Batman #9. Brilliant! (See Pipeline this week for why.)

• This week’s ep of One Tree Hill just tried way too hard to do what Dawson’s Creek was doing so well in its second season. Too forced.

• Looking forward to reviews of the new Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS Lens. Might be my next lens. MIGHT be.

• Perusing Soleil. BEAUTIFUL comics. We’ll never see 99% of ‘em in the States. I wanna move to Paris.

• Got the Wii Zapper today. The Wiimote will leave the Guitar Hero III controller for the first time since Christmas tonight now.

• @ronxo - my wife looked at me through LOST and said “I don’t get it.” I didn’t even try to explain it to her. Some people can’t accept it.

• Viveza is now available! Click here for a 15 day free trial. Unfortunately, the final program will set you back $250.

• Bad Microsoft! Bad! This kind of behavior isn’t exactly unique to Microsoft, though, and the end result isn’t too surprising, but that doesn’t excuse it, either.

• There’s at least two reasons I knew that Apple wouldn’t be introducing Blu Ray drives into their laptops last week. First, it’s too soon. Those units that went on sale probably started production BEFORE the war was over. Second, battery life. I can’t imagine that Blu Ray doesn’t suck the life out of batteries, given the way Flash and every other video playing bit of software does at a faster rate than most everything else. Here’s confirmation on the battery life. I still think you’ll see Blu Ray drives on the Mac Pro first. It’s always plugged in, so battery life isn’t an issue there. You’ll likely never see Blu Ray in an Air.

• How to make a better Twitter. First step: Better uptime. Most important step: Get all the people on Twitter to migrate there. It won’t be easy.

• Unbelievably, SCO still hasn’t gone away.

• Happy March, everyone!

Fox Said To Be Exploring Termination Of Google Advertising Deal

Even while parent company News Corp. continues to try to disrupt the Microsoft/Yahoo merger, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is rumored to be in negotiations with Microsoft take Google’s place as the MySpace advertising partner.

To recap, then: Microsoft wants to buy up Yahoo. It’s a hostile takeover bid.

Yahoo is resistant to becoming part of the Evil Empire.

Yahoo begins round the clock negotiations with FOX Interactive to find a way to make a deal work with them to keep Microsoft away.

But before all this happened, FOX Interactive (owners of MySpace) made a deal with Google for advertising on the heavily-trafficked social network web site with some of the worst design in post-millenium history.

Now, FOX is considering pulling out of their deal with Google to make a better deal with Microsoft for ad revenue, while at the same time trying to work a deal with Yahoo to prevent Yahoo from having to sell themselves to Microsoft.

I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this soap opera. It’s almost as much fun as watching the fall of HD-DVD — a technology Microsoft championed.

Online auction listings down 13% in boycott of eBay - USATODAY.com

The biggest boycott by eBay sellers concludes Monday, capping a week of acrimony after the online-auction site raised fees and changed its feedback policy.

Auction listings on eBay.com dropped some 13% since the strike started Feb. 18 to about 13 million items, according to third-party tracking sites such as dealscart.com and medved.net.

This would be more impressive if it weren’t for the fact that eBay listings are going to shoot back up 13% over the usual numbers tomorrow.

Wanted to give a pointer over to Chris Eliopoulos’ month-old webcomic, MISERY LOVES SHERMAN, available at MiseryLovesSherman.com.
Here’s a sample, shrunked down to fit into my site’s measurements:

:

Full disclosure: I did some design/back end coding on the site, which uses the ComicPress theme for the WordPress blogging engine. I tried writing an engine by myself using Ruby on Rails, but it didn’t get far enough. It was quite the learning experience, though. I learned I suck.

The strip runs every week day and is family friendly. Give it a shot. I think it might give you a chuckle or two, particularly if you enjoy his excellent FRANKLIN RICHARDS comics over at Marvel.

I’ve been a vocal Amazon Marketplace user for a few months now, but there are certain things that aren’t feasible for Amazon. Items that don’t have an Amazon number, for example, can’t be sold through the Amazon system. Also, you’re selling one item at a time, so bundle packages aren’t part of the process. If I want to sell the last year’s worth of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, or package together a couple of textbooks I have lying around, I can’t do it. The individual items don’t have their own entries in Amazon’s database, and you can’t do more than one item per listing.

There’s the limitation.

In the case of comics, you have a periodical problem. Amazon sells magazine subscriptions, but not individual issues of the magazine. (There are a few exceptions, but I’m talking about the general rule of thumb here.) You can’t sell last month’s issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN because it’s not there, nor can you sell the last year’s worth, because that doesn’t have an Amazon number.

So for those kinds of things, I’ve been investigating eBay recently. eBay has a couple of good things going for it. First, it has eyeballs. The traffic numbers on eBay are pretty good. It’s the most popular auction site out there, and when you’re trying to sell items with bidding wars, you have to have lots and lots of people interested in buying your item. You need those eyeballs. Second, you have greater shipping flexibility with eBay than Amazon. At the Marketplace, Amazon tells you what the shipping charges will be and that’s the end of the story. On eBay, you dictate that cost, and you can do it any way you want — media mail, first class, Priority Mail, etc. You can charge for the envelope you’re using to make the shipment. Disclose it all, and if there’s a buyer willing to pay it, you’ll make a sale.

The downsides are, as previously mentioned, that it takes more work in dealing with people, and the money goes through PayPal (best case scenario) or separately via check or money order or some other service. Again, you can dictate how you take payment, but the more choices you offer, the more money you’ll make.

But I discovered something while perusing eBay lately - there’s not much there anymore. I’m looking up Completed Auctions figures to see what I might be able to sell some of my stuff for, and I’m coming up blank. Granted, some of the stuff is relatively obscure, but not all of it. Where have all the eBayers gone? Is there an up-and-comer in the on-line auction market? Is there a separate comics-only auction site that all those sales have gone to? There’s still a ton of stuff on there, but the oddball stuff that you used to find on eBay as a matter of routine is missing. What happened?

I wrote all of the above about a week ago, truth be told. After that, something else happened. eBay changed its fee structure.

Guess what? eBay sucks even more now. They’ve lowered the listing fee, but increased their percentage on the final selling price. It’s a greater fee if the final sale is less than $25. This is eBay’s attempt to get more products listed at their site, possibly to help promote the auction business over the store fronts and Buy It Now listings that currently dominate the site, from what I’ve seen. Problem is, all those smaller auctions are resulting in less profits. So either people will find ways to bundle auction items together to get to a $25 price point, or just not list them because the profits are sinking.

Here’s a hint to eBay: If you REALLY want to drive growth in your business, cut the rates across the board. As listings grow, all eBay has to invest in are more hard drives, I suppose. It’s not like every item listed results in man hours of labor or storage. It’s ALL bits. eBay can afford to cut rates in an attempt to gain more listings, more auction listers, and more eyeballs. It’s about time eBay did that. If they really want to grow their business, it’s time to take the price advantage. Lower the rates, increase the number of auctions, reap the benefits.

Cutting listing fees while hiking final sale fees to cover it is just insulting.

In fact, the best thing they could do is cut out the PayPal transaction costs. eBay bought up PayPal. They’ve integrated it into their site to make it the easiest payment method for users. But if eBay is already getting their money from listing fees and final price point percentages, why charge their users twice by making the seller pay for the honor of receiving their money?

Just to give you all something else to read aside from American Idol chatter, here’s some recent Twitter postings, with my editorial comments/updates in brackets italicized afterwards:

• I’ve gotten to the point where I get home from work and have three or four pages of Tweets to read. Might be time to cut back.

• I just picked up the MacHeist bundle. I feel slightly dirty, but I couldn’t pass up the price for a few of these programs. [I need to do screencasting now, don’t I?]

• But, really, does App Zapper exist for the sake of being given away in Mac bundles?!? [And slower days on MacZot.]

• This just in — Heath Ledger is still dead.

• Added to my To Do list (long term): Read ABSOLUTE WATCHMEN before the movie hits screens.

• I fear “Story of My Life” on Hard level might be the end point for me on Guitar Hero. Ouch, my fingers. . .

• No, dumb customer who thinks he’s funny, that item is NOT free if the register scanner has a problem reading the bar code. IDIOT!

• I love on-line retailers who accept PayPal. Makes it so much easier. [I Heart Adorama.]

• Given the results of Week 17 of the regular season, the Super Bowl, er, “The Big Game” should be an interesting one this year.

The internet has shrunk the word; it’s 24/7 living out there, across the globe. But the major blogs still shut down for the weekend. . .

Air Plane On A Conveyor Belt episode of Mythbusters is January 30th. You’ve been warned.

I wanted to give it another day before hitting you all with another Twitter dump. So here are some more interesting links to go around, in the meantime.

SoFoBoMo - It’s Solo Photo Book Month. For photographers, it’s the challenge of creating a photo book in 31 days. The best part is, you get to choose the starting date.

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter. (Ah, so Twitter shows up today, anyway. It’s so much fun.)

Nintendo’s Wii Fit is now scheduled for the second quarter here in the States. Of course, if you’re in Japan then you’re likely already jumping up and down on it. They sold a million units here in December. Enjoy a demo reel, in the meantime.

HD-DVD Whoops.

Pachelbel rolls over in his grave. Breakdance! I expect we’ll see this on So You Think You Can Dance this summer. . .

Image of the week: Commodore SX-64 versus the Mac Air.

Unfortunately, I had one repeat gift at Christmas time this year. Thankfully, I had the receipt on the one item, so I was able to “take it back” for a return. This was at Amazon.

I went to the Amazon returns page and followed their directions, filling in my name, e-mail address, and the order number. So far, so good. It’s been years since I had to return anything to Amazon. Last time I did, I remember filling out a form and them sending me a box to return the item in, postage paid. That’s what I was expecting.

It was this selection of choices that boggled my mind. Remember, now, that this is a gift item I’m returning, something which I’ve previously specified:

Don’tcha think that it would be smart not to include options beginning “I ordered. . .” when returning a gift item?

In the end, none of these is the reason for my return. It’s just a dupe gift. That’s all. I had to choose “I just don’t want it anymore,” which didn’t make me happy.

Amazon then gave me a page to print out with a mailing address label and a return invoice. At the bottom was a note that I would be given an Amazon Gift Certificate in exchange, but that the shipping costs would come out of my pocket since it wasn’t their fault.

I’m still not sure how I feel about that last part, but I do know that the choices on the drop down box shown above stink.

Thankfully, I had to go to the post office to drop off a DVD I sold on the Amazon Marketplace, so it wasn’t a wasted trip.

Last week, I gave you some tips for maximizing your profit at the Amazon Marketplace. Then, I showed an odd case where used DVDs are selling for more than new ones.

This week, I just have some random thoughts. Sorry it’s not sexier, but I am including hard numbers on this. I hope that will help.
Most of the items I’ve sold have gone on a weekend. Sunday night seems particularly busy. During the week, the orders I get tend to be at night, also. Whereas lots of people seem to shop and buy things during the work day, the Amazon Marketplace seems to work on a complementary schedule. I hear eBay is similar to this schedule — you want your auction to end on a Sunday night.

Shipping a DVD is easy; shipping a comic book is a pain. It’s almost not worth the trouble. You have to be so careful with comics for fear of losing that near mint status and outraging the buyer on the other end, that the shipping costs skyrocket. I’d stick to hardcovers, just for their durability, but I don’t have many of those to sell and they have big weight issues. I sold a trade paperback last week. It was a lightweight thing — 144 pages or so. I stuffed it in a plastic bag, sandwiched it inbetween two pieces of corrugated cardboard, and taped the whole thing together to keep it from knocking around and potentially damaging the edges of the book. Amazon takes a $3.99 shipping fee for these books. It cost me $4.50 to ship it media mail. Live and learn. Maybe it IS time for eBay, where I’ve noticed most people pay the extra for Priority Mail, which the USPS gives envelopes away free for.

It’s particularly annoying when a book isn’t listed on Amazon. In those cases, go to eBay. I’ll be looking into that option again soon. Some of the stuff I might consider listing, though, hasn’t been sold on eBay in a while. There are no “finished auctions” to check prices on. That makes me nervous.

Expect to lose at least 20% to Amazon. I just looked at my pending statement, for items sold in the last two weeks. It’s been a very profitable time, particularly with higher cost DVDs. Amazon took just over 20% of the total dollar figure in fees, and then I have to pay shipping afterwards. Out of the $222 worth of stuff sold, Amazon took $46.71 in fees. Those nine items probably cost me about $20 in shipping fees at the post office. So I sold $222 (granted, about $27-$30 of that was shipping fees Amazon charged the buyer), and I’m netting about $156.

It’s all a numbers game, and I can probably massage these in other ways to make it sound great. For example, if I didn’t have the ease and convenience of Amazon, I wouldn’t have sold any of them and I’d have made $0 while boxes lay around in storage and in the backs of closets, taking up valuable space.
Everything is a tradeoff. The convenience of having Amazon handle all the money for you and of receiving that money as store credit, in effect, is a wonderful thing. eBay might take less fees, but then you’ll have to deal with PayPal.com fees, instead, which are awful. And you’ll have to deal with tracking down buyers. And you’re paying to list an item that might never be sold. These are all things that add up. I have about 40 items in the Amazon Marketplace right now, and I’m fairly certain that half of those will likely never sell. (I’m a realist.) Those fees would have added up something ugly.

You can transfer your owed payments at any time. Amazon disburses your moneys to you every two weeks. At least with when you’re using the Amazon Gift Certificate option, you can opt to have the moneys transferred immediately without an additional fee. It takes the usual couple of days for the transaction to complete, but it’s better than waiting out the arbitrary two week period if you need it now.

In August 2007, I started selling parts of my DVD collection on the Amazon Marketplace. It’s been a generally positive experience, so I thought I’d share some points to consider for anyone else thinking about doing the same in the new year, whether it’s for DVDs or books or anything else that’s been accumulating in their house over the years.

Use Delicious Library. If you’re a Mac user, this is a Must Get. Not only does it do a nifty job in helping you catalog your DVD, book, and video game collections, but it also automates the process of selling them on the Amazon Marketplace. Just click on the item you wish to sell, and go to the drop down box at the bottom of the window that leads to “Sell on Amazon.com” (Minor Usability aside: That location for a drop down box is highly inconvenient and a nuisance.)

The key here is that you’ll be selling the right thing. So long as you’re entering items by scanning in their bar codes, you’ll be sure to list the right item. This can be tricky with certain DVDs that have been released in three or four different packagings. If you get the item listed correctly the first time, it will save you expensive refunds later down the line, not to mention your approval ratings.

List it all! Amazon charges you nothing to list an item. They only charge you if it sells. So list everything. Charge high prices you don’t think anyone will pay. You can always go back later and adjust the prices. Items stay listed for 60 days. After that, you get a nice e-mail from Amazon with a link that will help you automatically relist the item for another 60 days for free. This is the big selling point on the Marketplace as opposed to eBay.

Approval Ratings are nice. Keep it highly positive. The Amazon Marketplace is not that different from eBay that way. I always print out the “Label and Packing List” page to include as a receipt in each package. I’ll write a quick thanks and sign that receipt, as well, which one or two of my reviewers have mentioned they liked. That personal touch can be handy on the internet.

Price your item at the proper point. When you list an item, Amazon tells you what the lowest price listed for it is at the moment. Don’t just underbid that number and call it a day. There will be plenty of copies of that same item at that low price point, give or take a buck. But every now and then, there’s one outlier pricer who is trying to undercut the competition for a quick sell. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you. Be on the look out for it, though. If ten people are selling an item for $10 and one person lists his for $5, undercutting the $5 price point won’t be helping yourself. You might want to undercut the $10 price point, instead. If one price is $5, and everyone else is between $6 and $7, then you’ll probably want to be in the low-$6.00 range.

You do want to be listed on the front page. When a user clicks on “More Buying Choices,” odds are they won’t click past the first page of listings. Don’t price it so high that they never see your listing without scrolling down a bunch of times or, even worse, having to click through to the next page.

Send the item quickly. The rules of the Amazon Marketplace state that you have two days to ship an item. Don’t count Sunday or major holidays in that, but do respect it. You’ll also get positive feedback from users who receive an item quickly. I got one from a user who got his item two days after he ordered it. Timing is everything.

Check your Amazon Marketplace home page daily. Yes, Amazon will send you an e-mail whenever an item sells. However, e-mails get lost along the way. Spam filters block them sometimes. Since you only have two days to ship an item after the purchaser pays for it, that last day or two between checks can be killer.

Don’t send items out right away. Yes, this directly contradicts everything I just said, but it’s within reason. Don’t go past two days before shipping something. But if you can wait that extra day to ship an item (i.e. day TWO instead of day ONE), another item might sell. The last thing you want to do is go to the post office on your lunch break every day. Save yourself some trips and gas money. One thing you’ll learn over time is that someone will always buy something off your Marketplace within hours of your return from the post office. C’est la vie.

Amazon Shipping is a Very Good Thing. This is almost not nice to admit, but I profit off most of the shipping fees. Amazon collects $2.99 for each purchase. A single DVD in a bubble envelope mailer will run between $1.98 and $2.25. I buy envelopes in bulk, off a seller on eBay. They wind up costing me about 15 cents a pop. So I’m making a half a buck or more on each purchase. I tell myself that my DVD prices are lower by that amount and live with myself. If I were selling onesie-twosies, then I wouldn’t make any profit, because I’d be spending money at CVS buying the envelopes for a buck or more each. There’s profit to be made in volume selling.

That said, I did have a recent TV series boxed set that cost $3.15 to ship first class. I could have sent it for cheaper, I guess, but I’ll take the couple dime loss on that part and call it a day. I like getting the product to the user inside of a week, thanks. Media Mail doesn’t do that so nicely.

Refund Amazon Shipping in one and one case only: Multiple orders from the same person at the same time. Combine those orders into one package. Refund the user the difference. It’s not necessary. It’s just good kharma.

You get your money sooner. If you’re an Amazon Associate with links on your blog, you know the pain of waiting two months for Amazon to pay off on your credits there. Amazon Marketplace works within the month. You can take your money in Amazon credit or bank transfer. I use Amazon credits. All the money stays in my hobbies/play time.

Amazon tells you how much you’ll make. When you list an item, the confirmation page tells you exactly how much money you’ll receive. This is huge. It takes all the guess work out of your selling strategies. Amazon charges a flat 99 cent transaction fee for each sale, plus a percentage of the final price.

An example: A $20 DVD with $3 shipping charge will get you $18.19, after Amazon fees, out of which you’ll pay about $2 in shipping. So that $20 sale nets you $16. That’s a big bite, granted, but it’s worth it for the convenience. If I had to go through eBay, I’d probably never list anything. And without Amazon’s hugely trafficked store front, I doubt anyone would see my DVDs for sale.

A $5 DVD with $3 shipping charges lands you $5.44, of which you’ll wind up spending $2 in shipping. So, your net (not including envelope) is $3.44. Now you see why I don’t bother listing anything for less than $5. That’s my line in the sand where the effort becomes too much to be worth selling. Some DVDs are listed for pennies. That’s too much energy for me to spend for the return.

Link to your listings. That’s what blogs are for! Don’t forget to include your Amazon Associates ID for maximum earning potential.

If you have any questions or suggestions, use the comments below! Thanks, and good luck!

Previous Various and Sundry Thoughts:

• Amazon Musings (20 Sept 2007)
• Blatant Commerical Plug - Amazon Marketplace (31 Dec 2007)
• Amazon Marketplace (19 July 2007)

* Trajan is the movie font. Wait, wasn’t GLADIATOR in Trajan? He named three other Russell Crowe movies, but missed the most obvious one to me. . .

* LucasFilm Christmas cards through the years.

* Here’s a hobby I want nothing to do with. It involves jumping off cliffs and sailing down with a webbed suit. Beautiful video, though.

* Honestly, I’m not kidding. If you thought TEAM FORTRESS 2’s release was a miracle this year, take a gander at this: The DUKE NUKEM FOREVER trailer. No, that’s not a typo.

* Imagine familiar corporate logos done up in Web 2.0 style. Now, imagine 60 such logos. Some are improvements. Others just added rounded corners, a reflection, and a new font.

* Sometimes, I think that everything that could be said or done with STAR TREK has been done by now. Then a Flickr group comes along with the improbable name of “The Galactically Hot Women of Star Trek.” How does one not link to that?!? The only thing missing is a little icon in the corner for each of the women that Kirk bedded.

More Twitter excerpts:

• Covers to Walking Dead #45 and Astounding Wolf-Man #4. Kirkman has a Shot To The Gut fetish, doesn’t he?
• Current Secret Project That Cannot Be Named is starting to build momentum. Wheeeee!
• Lining up another creator for The Commentary Track as we speak. It’s an Image book. I shall say no more, for fear of jinxing it all.
• @coverville: Ashley Tisdale, “Kiss The Girl.” From the Little Mermaid DVD set of 2006. Kinda catchy.
• I’d write a whole lot less at night if I could Twitter from work.
• Ordered stuff for the Mrs. on Amazon tonight. Needed to spend $10 for free shipping, and V FOR VENDETTA on DVD fit the bill! W00T!
• @ronxo - I also don’t need to hear “So, have we started recording yet?” at the beginning of an interview.
• @ronxo - there’s also no need to precede any interview question with, “As we were saying before we started recording. . .”
• Just got friended on Facebook from someone I haven’t seen since, oh, about eighth grade. Crazy world.
• Perl 6 changes for the better: Empty arrays are now FALSE. Yay! I’m SUCH a geek.
• I love how Amazon ships things immediately, but tracking that order shows that it sits on the dock waiting for pickup for a week first.
• Was at a 3 year old’s birthday party today and was terribly frustrated with this pos p-a-s camera
• Had a piece of spam mail asking me to reply with my GMail username and password. I sent them “augiedb” and “*********”. I hope that helps.
• I haven’t yet come to grips yet with the fact that I’ll never see a movie I want to see ever again. Might be time to sell MORE DVDs.
• My new addiction: Lode Runner on the Wii Virtual Console
• Dear Mother Nature - Make up your mind. RAIN or SNOW. This sleet stuff is just your way of not committing.