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Every muscle and joint in my body hurts. This past week was my vacation, and rather than taking a trip, we opted to take on a few needed home improvement projects. What we did was replace the flooring in about half of our house.

First up was the kitchen floor and the formal dining room (which is used as my wife’s office).

The kitchen had a linoleum covered floor that was extremely difficult to remove. I rented this “floor stripper” for the day which set me back about $75, but well worth it. I first made an attempt at it with a manual scraper, and didn’t get very far before deciding to spend a little more.
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It’s easy to feel like you’re getting smacked around by your computer. Sometimes it even seems scary to me how much we rely on technology. Can you imagine how the world would just shut down if there was no more electricity?

Anyway, I get a call at work last night from my wife, that her computer froze up on her, and now it won’t reboot. So I get home, not only will her computer not reboot, but thanks to the power company who were cutting down a tree in the neighbors yard, the telephone line is down……along with my DSL connection. So, no internet. I’ve gone through all the standard stuff to check on a Windows XP machine, and the thing is just…..gone. The problem is that one of the Windows system root files has been corrupted. I guess that’s a sign of a virus?

I tried:

• rebooting in safe mode - it wouldn’t play along
• rebooting with last known configuration that worked - the pc looked at me with a devilish grin
• I got a copy of the corrupted file off my other pc and put it on a thumb drive, thinking I could replace it through command prompt - nope
• rebooted off the XP install disc - tried to fix the master boot record - nothing
• took the hard drive out, put it on my other pc as a slave (maybe I could at least save some of her files onto my hard drive) - I got an error message saying it was “inaccessible” - hmm….it wasn’t password protected.
• XP install disc - repair install - it couldn’t recognize Windows even being on the partition.

Am I a little frustrated? Maybe a little. As I write this, I’m reformatting the drive to put a clean install on it. I hate to have to start over because I’m sure there are some files she will lose…….not to mention re-installing all her software, drivers, etc.

I’ve hardly had a chance to get online in the last four days, so today (since I’m off from work) is a perfect day for the internet connection to be down, rather than a few days ago. The phone company came out and got me up and running. They just left about an hour ago.

This post has been somewhat of a rant…….I know…….nobody cares. Anyway, I feel better.

I would imagine that most people have experience on eBay - if they’ve ever been on the internet. eBay is seen by many as a great opportunity to make a living from home, as long as you can find the right products at the right price to resell. My wife is a Powerseller on eBay, and it’s anything but easy. It’s work. But she enjoys it, and makes a great sideline income from it.

Those of you who are sellers on eBay, what do you think of the feedback system?

It seems that no matter how careful you are, and no matter how good the customer service you provide is, sooner or later some idiot is going to leave you negative feedback. Personally, I’ve dealt with a few people who probably deserved a negative, but I’m slow to leave a negative because of the permanence of a negative comment. You see, if you leave a seller or a buyer negative feedback, it hurts their feedback rating…..permanently. On eBay, the feedback rating you have is your reputation. With this knowledge, there are some buyers who will use this to try and bully you into doing anything they want. They will hint around that they’ll leave negative feedback if they aren’t 100% satisfied (this usually comes with the feeling that they are gonna be extremely hard to satisfy).

Do buyers really look at that feedback rating seriously?

You better believe they do. On a number of occasions, I’ve decided not to bid on items due to the seller’s feedback rating. On the other hand, if a seller has a couple of negatives out of a huge number of positives, they’re probably very good to do business with. If you actually go to their feedback page and read through it, many times those who left a negative are obviously in the wrong. What prompted this post, was a negative my wife received back four or five months ago. At the time, she had built her feedback rating up over 1200 transactions, with 100% positive feedback. After receiving the item, a buyer decided they didn’t want the product after all. They were offered a refund. Because she wouldn’t refund their money + the shipping charges paid sending the product to them, they left a negative.

Since that time, she’s come in contact with, what’s the best way to say it, other buyers who were unreasonable. To date, she still only has the one negative in her career on eBay, despite this. I was thinking about a few traits that seem to be common among eBay buyers who are quick to leave negative feedback and/or be unreasonable:

• They usually have a fairly new eBay id. This makes you wonder if they are really new, or they had to start over due to their past on eBay. If they are new, they really should learn how the system works before bidding.
• If you look at their “feedback left for others“, they leave negative feedback on a regular basis. I know we’ve dealt with a few people we thought were going to be a problem. When we looked at what type of feedback they left others, that didn’t help our feelings in most cases.
• They are usually slow to pay when the auction ends. It’s a bad sign when you’re paid through Paypal a week after the end of the auction. That’s usually the buyers who start sending emails wanting to know when the package was shipped and how quick they can expect it.
• They are usually the ones who will not answer emails at the end of the auction. Then all of a sudden they are unreasonable.

So my little piece of advice is this - if you can’t be reasonable, you’re better off not using eBay. The eBay community will be better off without you as well. If a buyer or a seller deserves negative feedback, by all means leave it for them. Let others know that this person wasn’t that great to deal with. However, understand that you are doing PERMANENT damage to their reputation. Once you leave it, it can’t be undone……..so think twice before you do it.

I just read What Bothers You Online?, and Joshua Dorkin had me shaking my head in complete agreement! He makes a list of all the “trends” online that are annoying, including people who give advice on subjects they know nothing about……

Make Money Online

The first online annoyance that he listed was all the blogs about “making money online”. I’ve stumbled onto quite a few of these myself. Now obviously, there are real experts at this, but there are TONS of blogs about the subject, and I would guess that the far majority of them have never made one cent! I think a good way to tell is if the site is about nothing but online marketing and making money, yet their advertisement-covered-site has no comments and very few subscribers………I would say that’s a pretty good sign.

I guess my headline could be a little mis-leading. There are some great resources online that won’t cost you anything, but most of the time it’s easy to spot the real thing.