But then you realize that the buyer who just bought your item has zero feedback, and created the account less than a month ago.  Red flag.  But let’s be optimistic… surely they created an account because they wanted your old iPhone so badly…  Surely they will pay!

Nope.  They don’t pay.  So you want to re-list your item as quickly as possible to get past all this, yet eBay makes you wait about 4 days before they consider the item ‘unpaid’.  Fine, we wait.

A week rolls around, and finally the item falls into an ‘unpaid’ status, where you can use the ‘unpaid item assistant’ to file a claim on your behalf.  Why do you need to file a claim?  You need to because you now owe eBay the commission on your item that ‘sold’, even though it is now unpaid.

Makes sense?  No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.  This is eBay’s scam #1.  Now, on to scam #2:  This claim won’t be filed until the next month, so you are stuck ‘owing’ eBay money until the next billing cycle.  I can live with that part, but guess what?  They will only refund you the commission and the listing fee… They WILL NOT refund you the reserve auction fee!

That’s right, eBay’s scam #2 is that they do not issue a full refund on unpaid items, because they consider certain options (such as reserve price) a ‘service’ to be used at the time of auction, to help your item get sold in a manner that you want.

The only problem with this logic is that your item never actually sells because the auction was rigged by a fake and scummy buyer who never had the intention of paying in the first place.  However, eBay doesn’t care what the end result is… they just want their fees.  So in the end, the breakdown is something like this:

Insertion fee: $2.40 (this will be refunded, in a month)
Reserve auction fee: $2.40 (fuck you, pay me)
Final Value Fee: $30.00  (this will be refunded, in a month)

The best part?  I get to pay another $2.40 to re-list my item as I wait for this claim to go through.

What a fucking scam.  And just in case you were wondering, I’ve been an eBay seller for over a decade, with many sold items under my belt.  I’m a veteran eBayer, and as such, I have every single seller protection tool enabled that I can possibly enable, including blocking all buyers that:

These are the most aggressive settings that eBay allows, yet they are missing one critical setting:  The ability to block bids from ‘new’ or zero feedback accounts.  You can only block bids from shoppers with a known sketchy history.

I understand why they don’t allow this setting… after all, how could any new eBay shopper be able to shop if all sellers enabled this setting?  Fair enough.  Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to have this kind of restriction available to sellers.  But as it stands now, sellers on eBay can be effectively bled dry of money simply by being scammed over and over by these fake eBay shoppers, all while eBay collects the juice.

Fuck that.  If this happens to you, call eBay and scream bloody murder until they give you a FULL REFUND on your original auction, including all ‘service’ fees.  That’s what I did, and I’ll do it every single time this happens to me until eBay addresses this issue properly.

How should they address it?  Howabout automatic refunds on unpaid items for ALL FEES, and a discount on re-listing your auction (as a nice gesture for your lost time and hassle)?

That would be a great start.

So if you were hoping of porting your entire Zune subscription over to iTunes Match, you are out of luck, but all of your mp3 files (as well as the mp3 files you get from Zune’s keep 10 a month program) will upload and/or match just fine, as these are DRM free by default.

There you have it…  Time to start converting everything to MP3!

He made Pixar.

He changed the music industry and popularized the portable music player.

He revolutionized the cell phone industry.

He created the tablet industry.

He managed a company that went from near bankruptcy to the largest corporation in the history of mankind.

Even if you adjust for inflation, Jobs created bigger industries and capital larger than any industrialist before him, save for potentially the Rockefellers, but that is more due to land value, not industry.

People can hate all they want, but facts are facts.  There is no such thing as the solo inventor anymore (arguably, there never was) – only incremental evolution that eventually is done right and combined into a product that changes or creates an industry.  Automobiles existed in various forms before Ford came along.  Had Edison not usurped Tesla, the history books would be crediting the latter with the birth of the modern electrical age.   The Wright brothers emerged from obscurity just ahead of their competition…. if they had waited a bit longer, history would have never heard of them.

Jobs had a better track record than all of these guys combined, save for possibly Benjamin Franklin.  He had vision, and he knew how to assemble the right team to execute it.  It isn’t just marketing.  Something must eventually be behind the marketing, and Jobs always backed it up.

If you think the smartphone that is sitting next to you isn’t as significant as flight, you really need to re-evaluate your critical thinking.  Try using the internet that is in your pocket for inspiration.

Looks like I won’t be qualifying for early upgrade pricing from AT&T until at least a month after the new iPhone 4S launches.  This is due to AT&T’s policy of not allowing special (and by ‘special’ I mean slightly less ass-rape-free-money-for-at&t-fee) pricing until you are within 6 months of the end of your contract.

Even though the iPhone 4S took a little longer to bake in the oven (putting us closer to end-of-term for the iPhone 4′s 2 year contract), all of us original iPhone 4 adopters still aren’t eligible for the cheaper upgrade price until November 25th (and that’s if you bought the iPhone 4 on launch day):

$250 extra if you want the iPhone 4S on launch day.  Well, that sucks.  And, it’s a total bonehead move from AT&T.  You can never capitalize on launch day fever if you make people wait an extra month to buy a product.  Why make us wait AT&T?  All you are going to do is make people salivate over other carriers, or worse, your customers cool off so much they decide they don’t need to upgrade at all… and then in 6 months they are free from your artificial shackles.

If AT&T were smart, they’d move that early upgrade date to October 7… the day the iPhone 4S is up for pre-order.  There is only upside in doing that, and you don’t need an MBA to know why.  You lock in your customers for another 2 years, you kill any chance of buyers remorse, and you don’t give customers the opportunity to think about early termination.

But as it stands right now, all AT&T can do is lose customers.  And with Sprint and Verizon waiting for AT&T refugees (especially now that the iPhone 4S is a world phone), it really makes you wonder what genius is guiding AT&T’s decisions.

The good news: the price has been reduced from $14.99 to $9.99.  The bad news: instead of syncing to 6 devices (3 portable, 3 computers) and keeping 10 tracks a month, you now get 4 devices (any combination) and don’t get to keep anything.  If you are already on the $14.99 plan, you get to keep it, but it’s not an option for new subscribers moving forward… only the $9.99 plan is.

For most, the reduced pricing will be a welcome change, but for long-timers like me, I see it as the potential beginning of the end.  Microsoft is effectively taking away a couple of nice features that really set the Zune Pass apart from competing subscription models.  I have always seen the Zune Pass as being generous, so I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen, but that generosity is exactly why I’ve been a subscriber for so long, and one of the main reasons why I love the Zune so much.  As it stands with the new plan, there isn’t much (by way of raw subscription features) to differentiate it from others such as Rhapsody or Napster, and it clearly gives Spotify (or other free-ish streaming services) a leg up.

Consider how my family uses the pass now:  We have two Zune players, and 3 PCs that we synchronize from.  That’s a total of 5 devices all coexisting happily under one Zune Pass account, each with their own libraries of music, and I can independently sync what I want, when I want, without having to blow out any libraries, etc. (try that with iTunes, et al).  AND, I get to keep 10 tracks permanently as MP3 copies, every single month.  If you count an MP3 download as costing roughly $1 (in iTunes, it would be $1.29 or so), then I’m really just paying about $5 for the streaming service – an incredible bargain.

Under the new plan, I’d have to get rid of one of the devices (most likely a PC), and I no longer get to keep any tracks as MP3.  Really kind of a bummer.  I wish Microsoft would just keep both plans, and continue to offer the old one to new subscribers.  In the context of music, taking away choice is never a good thing.

For those of you who just don’t understand what makes the Zune so good, download the desktop software and give it a go.  Explore the Marketplace, the Smart DJ, the ‘Picks for you’, and the Mix Views, etc.  Anything else will seem positively ancient (looking at you, Spotify and iTunes), and I guarantee you’ll never look back.

If the rumors were true, Groupon should have just sold to Google in the first place.  Hindsight 20/20 for Groupon’s board.

Of course, we all know Steve Jobs isn’t just any other CEO.  He is the CEO.  He took a company that Michael Dell would have shut down and turned it into the largest corporation ever known to mankind.  So yeah, Steve deserves a little attention… but the attention he is getting disturbs me.

Ask yourself, if Steve Jobs’s health was never in question, would he still be getting the kind of press he is getting today?  Definitely not.  And to be honest, this makes me sad.  I’ve been reading article after article about Jobs’s decision to step down, and I have to re-read most of them to make sure they don’t include funeral plans at the end.  The world’s greatest CEO deserves some attention for stepping down, but let’s stop eulogizing him.

Steve isn’t dead.

These are quasi-specific to Excel 2007, but might be relevant to other versions:

1. Launch Microsoft Excel
2. Click on the main ribbon button in the upper left or similar menu for other versions, and click ‘Excel Options’
3. Click on ‘Add-Ins’ on the left-hand side
4. Near the bottom, see the ‘Manage:’ drop-down, and choose: ‘COM Add-Ins’
5. Find the Adobe Contribute COM add-in, highlight it, and click ‘Remove’ on the right-hand side
6. Completely close down Excel, and re-launch it.
7. Celebrate!

So there you have it…. Adobe’s gremlins at it again… in your computers, screwin up ur programzzz.