Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Some Things I listed on eBid

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
eBid logo

Many of you probably haven’t heard of eBid but it is an eBay alternative. Reality is that eBay has so many scammers and for two decades plus they have adamantly refused to allow users the ability to blacklist shit vendors from their search results. Adding insult to injury it really has become a front end for Amazon. Admit it. You have ordered stuff from eBay believing you were not doing business with Amazon only to have it show up in an Amazon box with an Amazon shipping label. Rather than allowing you to create your own shit vendor list to be used as a filter in the results shown, eBay makes you crawl naked across broken glass to open a case.

When it was “America’s Garage Sale” eBay served a purpose. Now that it is mostly a front for Amazon it serves none. Yes, other “garage sale” sites have sprung up. Craigslist kind of worked for a while. Mostly nobody looks at it now. Those who do look want a $10K item given to them for free.

OfferUp is a joke! This is a shining example of why you don’t use Agile and you never let Script-Kiddies develop anything. You can’t sell anything via the Web site. You have to have an iMbecile phone and use “the app” to list anything. Notice how you can purchase via the Web site though! This is a glaring design failure and it has existed for many years. I believe it has existed since the site was known as LetGo.

Time to Make Room in the Office

Those of you who read this blog know I’ve been in IT for roughly four decades now. I have built up machines for various projects and kept most of them around for too long. Always tough to know when to get rid of something you once used to work on a medical device with. Those things can be out in the market for 10+ years before any changes happen. I still see contracts for someone to work on a medical device using OS/2 every few years. Full 510K filings are expensive. Minor enhancement filings less so.

Items on eBid

Summary

I will try to delete items as they sell. Should only be a couple more things I put on this list. Yes, it is eclectic, but also priced cheap.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.