Author Archives: Maria Langer

Shopping on eBay

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I try — and fail — to get a few good bargains. But I’m not giving up.

I talked to my brother the other day. He lives back east, in the NY/NJ metro area, with his wife and dog. They live in suburbia, on a curving, tree-lined street where the houses don’t all look like each other. The first time I visited him, he had maple trees growing in his gutter. He’d just bought the house, which needed some work, and he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the gutters yet. The trees were only a few inches tall. When we lived in New Jersey, we had a 4-foot maple growing on our roof for a while.

Anyway, my brother buys just about all of his electronic equipment on eBay. The other day, he’d just bought himself a new cell phone and was waiting for it to arrive. He already had the hands-free, bluetooth headset that would work with it and was trying it out with his wife’s phone. It seems like every time I talk to him he’s telling me about some new gadget he bought on eBay.

I’m in the market for a few electronic devices myself. So I blew the dust off my eBay account and logged in. What I discovered is that eBay is no longer the garage sale of the Internet. It’s now the flea market of the Internet.

Why the difference? Well, a garage sale is usually full of used stuff — much of it junk — that the owner no longer wants. A flea market has much of the same junk, but it also has brand new, still in the box (abbreviated NIB for “new in box” on eBay) items. Call me spoiled, but when I buy a piece of computer hardware that I need to depend on, I want it brand new.

The first thing I needed was a portable external hard disk that I could use with my PowerBook. Experimentation the other day with iMovie and my video camera ate up the remaining 5 GB of unused space on that computer’s disk. I’m not replacing the hard disk — Mike went through that with a local computer consultant a few months ago and it was a 2-month nightmare. Instead, I’ll get a portable FireWire hard disk I can use to store big, fat media files. Like video. (Although it wouldn’t hurt to pare down my iTunes library on that computer; 12 GB of music is a bit much when I carry around the same songs and video on my iPod.)

So I hunted around on reputable sites — including the Apple Web site — and found a name brand and model I liked. Then I searched on eBay. I had literally dozens of matches, many of them NIB. Wow.

At the same time, I decided I needed some more RAM for my G4, which will soon be upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server. The machine, which is currently doing server duty with the dreaded WebSTAR, has 384 MB of RAM. That was quite generous when the machine was new 4 or 5 years ago, but nowadays, it just doesn’t cut it. Especially with the Webcam and audio streaming software running on it. Near as I can figure (without opening the box), one of its 3 RAM slots should be free. I figure I’d put 512 MB in there to pump up the RAM. And, if I could get the RAM cheap enough, I’d buy 2 512 MB “sticks” (apparently the RAM lingo) and throw away (or eBay) the 128 MB one I pull out. I did a search and found dozens of compatible RAM sticks. Whew.

I started bidding. And after two days, I noticed a pattern that I had noticed once before. You can be the winning bidder right up until about 10 minutes before bidding ends. Then someone comes along and outbids you. If you’re paying attention, you can bid back. That results in a bidding war and, if you’re not careful, you’ll wind up paying more than you really wanted to.

I’m careful. And I know how much these items are worth at their cheapest (or cheapest I can find) retail source. So someone outbids me and I start the process all over again with another item.

I have a theory about this. I believe that some vendors who sell the same thing over and over — dealers, in a way — have buddies who help them out near the end of an auction. Their buddies come along and bid to get the price up. They’ll bid right up to the amount the dealer really wants and step back. The bidder that crosses that line pays more than the dealer’s bottom line. And if there is no other bidder, the dealer pays the listing fee on the price his buddy “paid” and re-lists the item. This is how so many items can be sold without reserve. (A reserve is a minimum price the seller will accept. It costs more to list with a reserve and lots of buyers won’t bid on products that have reserve prices.)

The long and the short of it is that I’ll probably be ordering that RAM from an online retailer today. I can’t seem to get it on eBay any cheaper than I could get it from a retailer, so why risk a private seller on eBay?

I haven’t given up on the FireWire hard disk yet. And I’ve started looking into another iSight camera for a portable Webcam. And you know, I can really use a FireWire hub…

NaNoWriMo Expanded

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I talk more about beginning novelists.

The other day I wrote an opinion piece about NaNoWriMo ’05, which I turned into a podcast for Maria Speaks. Here are some related thoughts and experiences.

One of the things that has always bothered me was way organizations prey upon people who want to be writers — particularly novelists. They have writers’ workshops and writers’ magazines and and writers’ Web sites with forums and writers’ mail-away courses. They sell products to writers to motivate and inspire them and make them better writers. I’ve seen these products and although I admit to have bought my share of writing books, I’ve also seen enough to know that only a small percentage of what’s sold will really help a writer. And the thing that bothers me most is the fact that the vast majority of writing publications focus on topics of interest to beginning writers — people just starting out. I’m talking about people who haven’t had anything published yet. It’s as if they never expect their readers to get beyond that point.

The people they prey upon — the beginning writers — have a story (or or two or three or dozens) inside their hearts that they’re trying to get out. They’re convinced their work is better than bestselling author, fill-in-the-blank. They believe that the editors who have rejected their work are stupid, selfish, and evil. But rather than spend their time writing, getting those stories out and fine-tuning them for submission and possible publication, they waste a lot of time whining about editors and publishers and the industry in general in online writers’ forums. Or providing all-knowing (or sarcastic) answers to serious questions posted by other want-to-be novelists.

This is where something as silly as NaNoWriMo can help. If these people would stop wasting time and get down to it, they might actually get some work done. A novel in 30 days sounds impossible, but if they’ve been thinking about it as much as they’ve been wasting time in online forums, they should have all the hard part done: the planning, plotting, and character development. Getting the words down should be easy. Just stop procrastinating.

And if there’s one thing that’s always helped me produce, it’s deadlines. Ask Cliff, Nancy, and Megg, three of my editors. (More on that in another blog entry.)

Here’s a real life story about someone I knew years ago. There’s a slight chance she might read this and, if she does, I hope she’s not offended by me telling her story from my outsider’s point of view.

Mary (not her real name) always wanted to be a novelist. I think she was partial to fantasy and science fiction, but she may have had other things in mind. I don’t know because I only had an opportunity to read one thing she’d written. She spent most of her non-working hours online, frequenting bulletin board systems’ (BBSs’) message boards (precursors to the Internet’s forums). She had a BBS and so did I. In fact, that’s how we met.

Her BBS posts were consistently negative toward publishers and editors. She spent a lot of her writing time writing short stories and entering them into contests. She never won. (More about writing contests and other gimmicks in another entry.)

Sometime around then, she sent me one of her short stories to read. I don’t remember what it was about. I don’t recall it being bad, though. But it did have one big flaw. At the end of the story, which takes place in Washington, DC, the main character looks out the window and sees the Pentagon. It was an important part of the story’s irony — seeing that building. I remember that clearly. But it was also a serious flaw because the Pentagon is not in Washington, DC. It’s in Arlington, VA. And it simply cannot be seen from the location her character was standing. When I pointed this out to her, she got extremely offended, as if I’d gone out of my way to find something wrong to pick on her story. I hadn’t gone out of my way. The glaring error was there, right in my face. I would have done her a disservice if I hadn’t pointed it out.

Anyway, she didn’t send me any more stories.

Then one day she decided that the biggest thing holding her back from being a published author was her job. I’m talking about her “day job” — the one where she spent time to earn money to pay rent and buy food. That job. So she quit and retreated into her apartment to write her novel.

A year later, Mary was completely out of money and borrowing from family members to survive. She hadn’t finished her novel and she hadn’t had anything published. I think someone pulled the money plug and she was forced to go back to work.

That’s about the same time I left my day job and started teaching computers and writing how-to books. She claimed I “sold out.” I think she meant that I was writing non-fiction instead of fiction because I was in it for the money. Maybe I did, but my current lifestyle sure beats the 9 to 5, suit-wearing grind I’d be stuck in if I’d kept that corporate job. And who the hell wants to be a starving writer, anyway?

I moved to Arizona and we pretty much lost touch. I heard she had a short story published in a small literary magazine. She was paid in copies. (See my blog entry about Freebies.) But she had her first clip.

The point of this story: this is one person I know who falls into the same category as many of the beginning writers attracted to things like NaNoWriMo, writers’ magazines, and writers’ Web sites with their forums. I’ve just reported her progress in about five years of her life. Five years is a long time. Too long to waste if you’re serious about becoming a writer.

Every day you don’t write, though, is a day you waste if becoming a novelist is your goal. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that participating in those writers’ forums is good practice for writing your novel. I’ll agree that it’s good practice for typing your novel. But it isn’t going to get you any closer to finishing your work in progress.

So why are you reading this? Get back to work!

How Expressing My Opinions Gets Me in “Trouble”

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And why I don’t care.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally — or often, depending on how I’m feeling — express my opinions about things. And sometimes those opinions seem rather harsh in that they go against the grain of what other people think. Or think they think.

That’s the key, of course. It all comes down to thinking. And I believe that’s where I differ from my critics. I think. They let other people think for them.

[Uh-oh. Another harsh one coming. Better put on your mental armor and get your hackles up.]

For example, a few years back I wrote a blog entry putting forth my opinions of the snowbirds that flock to Wickenburg every winter. I commented on the increased traffic, crowded parking lots, and blocked supermarket aisles. I made some observations about the attitude of most of these people toward their winter home and its year-round residents. The observations were not positive. I also commented about how the town’s dependence on a seasonal economy supported by fixed-income, part-year residents was a big mistake. The blog entry gained me fame throughout Wickenburg. The people who spread the blog entry were trying to make me look evil. But most of the people who read it — the year-round residents in the same boat I was in, looking with the same kind of eyes and heart — agreed with me. I was stopped quite often for a few weeks by people who told me how much the blog entry had made them laugh or how it was nice to read something that wasn’t the same old party line.

I’ve written other blog entries with my opinions in them. I think my opponents have realized that calling attention to my blogs was helping my cause more than theirs because I haven’t gotten much local publicity lately. Too bad. It’s always fun to stir up the pot here in Wickenburg. Too much old school, old boy thinking.

I did a piece a while back about the yellow ribbons that people were sticking on their cars. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one bothered by the yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons. I’ve since read dozens of blog entries with the same basic opinion.

And then there was the one about public sacrifices for the War in Iraq. I didn’t get any feedback about that one. Could it be that everyone who read it actually agreed with me?

Last week I wrote a podcast about NaNoWriMo where I stated a few very strong opinions. It might be safe to say that I “blasted” the folks who run the NaNoWriMo Web site. But I made my statements — as I make most of the statements I make here — after some deep thinking about the topic. In that case, I’d been exposed to NaNoWriMo for a few days and had visited the Web site in question. I was able to look at it with the eyes of an outsider, someone who has succeeded as a writer and knows something about the business, even though I’ve spent my time on the non-fiction side of the business. (More on NaNoWriMo in another new entry.)

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts from NPR, Slate, and the Progressive (egads!). They’re full of strong opinions, even stronger than the ones I write here. I agree with some of them and disagree with others. But in all cases, I’ll admit that the authors of the pieces have put a lot of thought into what they composed. They’re logical arguments based on facts. And I think that’s why I listen to them. They not only expand my knowledge of a topic, but they provide insight into the way other people have thought about it. People with brains. People who aren’t afraid to think for themselves. And sadly, for the rest of us.

I think that’s a huge problem today. I believe that only a small percentage of the U.S. population actually spends time learning about and thinking about the things going on around them. I don’t think they spend time making their own opinions. Why bother when someone else can make opinions for them? A political party, a church group, a club? Find a herd, join it, and follow it anywhere it goes. Put a flag or yellow ribbon on your car because everyone else is doing it. Just don’t miss the next episode of Desperate Housewives, Lost, or the latest incarnation of C.S.I. I don’t belong to a herd and I’m not interested in joining one. I’d rather think and act for myself. And if it gets me in “trouble” with people who don’t agree, so what? The more of them who speak out about the things I’ve said or written, the more I know my message has reached them.

And maybe, just maybe, it’ll get them thinking, too.

WebSTAR Technical Support

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I have an experience that convinces me that it’s time for new Web server software.

Last week, I upgraded my office Internet connection from cable modem to DSL. The new connection has download speeds about 26 times faster than the old connection and it costs less than half the price. Upgrading was a no-brainer. The only thing I don’t understand is why it took me so long to realize that DSL was available in my area.

To upgrade to DSL, I had to lease or buy a DSL modem. Since it only cost $60 to buy, I bought it. I was very surprised to discover that it was also a wireless router. Within twenty minutes of the telephone man leaving, I had the wireless feature up and running and was connecting my network computers to it, thus cutting my Apple Airport Extreme Base Station out of the loop.

Things are never as easy as they seem — not that the configuration stuff seemed easy. It seemed hard. After all, I had to obtain a fixed IP address, then map it into the new router and use port forwarding configurations to point incoming traffic to my G4, which does server duty. If I talked about it in detail with a layman, his eyes would glaze over and he’d pass out. If I talked about it in detail with someone really knowledgeable, he’d know the truth: that I knew just enough about networking to make me dangerous.

I set everything up and, on Friday, had my DNS guy, Dave, make the changes to my DNS records. PGS Internet Services handles DNS for the 19 domain names I host in my office. In the past, I’ve handed over some of my more bothersome Web clients to them. PGS charges more than I do, but they have infinitely more patience. I think they feel like they owe me for the business, so they host my DNS for free. I try not to make changes, but this was a biggie and it had to be done.

By Saturday morning, the DNS had already propagated through to the Cable America DNS server. I access the Internet via wireless cable modem (how’s that for a contradiction in terms?) at home and I was able to connect to all of my Web sites except, for some reason, aneclecticmind.com. That came later in the day. Feedburner and Blogger still couldn’t see the sites, so I couldn’t update my podcasts or the ones I do for KBSZ. But I knew it was a matter of time.

By Sunday evening, everything was accessible from just about everywhere. Mission accomplished. Total downtime: less than the 48 hours I’d expected.

But, like I said, things weren’t as easy as they seemed. Because when I got to my office this morning, I quickly discovered that my production computer was unable to access my server for FTP, e-mail, or Web sites.

I had a lot of work to do — I’m still working on that QuickBooks book and I think I’m supposed to have it done by the end of the week. (Oops.) So I didn’t start troubleshooting right away. But it was driving me nuts that it wouldn’t work. And the fact that I could access it if I connected to the Internet via the Airport wireless network, which was still connected to the cable modem, was driving me nuts. So I went into full troubleshooting mode and spent about an hour banging away on it, trying all kinds of things, before I finally called the DSL modem company, Adaptec, convinced that it was a router configuration problem.

Now Adaptec has a technical support policy that basically says that they’ll help you with easy stuff for free but you have to pay $29 to get help with difficult stuff. Port forwarding for a shared static IP address fell into the difficult stuff category. But it was worth $29 to me to get it working right so I could stop thinking about it.

And that’s what I told the tech support guy I got on the toll-free phone number after about 10 minutes of waiting (their dime). But he said that he might not have to charge me. I should explain the problem.

So I did. And he knew immediately what the cause was. Here’s the simplified version. When you’re sitting at your computer and you type a domain name like www.aneclecticmind.com into your Web browser, your computer goes out to its DNS server on the Internet to find out the IP address for that domain name. In my case, it was learning that the IP address for the site I wanted to visit was the same IP address as the one I was trying to visit from. Adaptec routers don’t like that and they consider it an error so they don’t completely process the request. Apple Airport routers, on the other hand, are much more forgiving and let you visit yourself as often as you like. That’s why I didn’t get the error when I was using the Airport router and I started getting it when I began using the Adaptec router.

“How do I fix it?” I asked.

“You don’t,” he replied. “But there is a workaround. Just use the local IP address of the server computer.”

The local address is the address assigned by the DHCP services in the router, which I’ve manually set on the server computer. I typed that into my FTP software and it worked. Then I tried e-mail and it worked, too. Then I tried the Web browser and bzzzt. It didn’t work.

“It should,” he said. “There must be a configuration problem with your Web server software.”

Since I’d already taken up enough of his time and he’d solved most of my problem for free, I thanked him and hung up. The problem was sufficiently fixed to get my mind off it enough to work. I finished Chapter 6 of my book, then churned through 4 chapters of edits that had arrived that morning. I had to fiddle with my printer to get it to work on the network. I wasted about 30 minutes and 50 sheets of paper trying to get it to clear out a very old IP address so it would accept a new one from the router. No luck. But at least I could print.

Then I listened to my voicemail messages from the weekend, which I’d also put off until I was done working. By that time it was about 3:30, my normal quitting time. But instead of quitting, I dove into another troubleshooting session, this time with the folks at 4D.

4D, which started life as a database software company, bought StarNine, makers of WebSTAR Web server software, several years ago. I’d been using WebSTAR since version 3.0, when an evaluation copy of it had been given to me by Eric Zelenka, WebSTAR’s product manager. Back then I ran it under Mac OS 9 on an 8500/180 with an ISDN connection to the ‘Net. I believe Eric upgraded me to WebSTAR 4 and later I paid the big bucks to upgrade to WebSTAR 5. I’m currently running WebSTAR 5.3.3 on Mac OS X 10.3.9 on a 866MHz G4 with 384 MB of RAM.

Since upgrading to WebSTAR 5, all I’ve had is headaches with the software. The most bothersome thing is its spurious restarts: the software will shut down and restart itself about 100-200 times a day. For several months, I used 4D’s free technical support option — e-mail — to try to troubleshoot the problem. No luck. I gave up. I had to write an AppleScript that would automatically go into a specific folder where WebSTAR kept storing “backup” files it didn’t need every time it restarted itself. I discovered the buried files when I realized that something was eating up my disk space: by that time, there were over 12,000 of the damn files in the folder. Now the folder is cleared out every morning as part of the restart process.

So today, I wasn’t expecting much from 4D technical support. I knew whatever help I got was going to cost me. $40 was the going rate at 4D. But again, I thought it was worthwhile to get the problem resolved by talking to a real person.

I called and talked to a real person after being on hold (my dime) for about 15 minutes. To his credit, he really did try to help. But after going over the obvious — which I’d already done — he was out of suggestions. Time to “escalate” the case. That means time for me to break out my credit card.

He switched me to someone named David and he took my American Express card info. Then he tried to switch me back to the original guy. I was on hold for about 5 minutes when he got back on and told me the lines were busy and I’d have to wait in the queue. Duh. So I waited. My dime turned into a few bucks. On top of the $40 I’d already spent. At least the hold music was better than Adaptec’s.

Finally, a guy who sounded pretty French to me got on the phone. I groaned. Not because he was French, but because I knew I’d have to explain the problem all over again from scratch and he’d try all the things the first guy tried before getting down to real business. So I explained it. And he said, “I know exactly what the problem is.”

I laughed. “I bet you don’t. But I’m willing to listen.”

He spent the next 30 minutes crawling around inside my configuration files by accessing the server as an administrator. He made some small changes. He had me try accessing. It wouldn’t work. At one point, he had it set up so that I could use the local IP address to access one of my Web sites. But I wanted to be able to access all of them.

While he was fiddling around, I was thinking. Something he said gave me an idea.

“How about if we create a new Web site with a default folder that’s the same as the WebServer folder (the folder in which all of the other Web site folders reside). We can set that as the default that’s accessed with the local IP address. Then I can just type in a slash and the name of the folder containing the site I want. That should do it.”

“It won’t work,” he told me, dashing my hopes. He tried to explain why, but I didn’t really understand what he was saying.

I let him fiddle around for another five minutes. I was thinking hard. I couldn’t understand why my idea wouldn’t work. So I tried it. And it worked.

I told him and he had difficulty believing me. But it worked and although it wasn’t the perfect solution, it was a workaround I was willing to live with.

“So tell me something,” I said to him. “You didn’t fix the problem and I did. Do I get my $40 back?”

The answer, after a long story in which he explained that he was actually in charge of technical support, was no.

So I spent $40 plus about 90 minutes of long distance telephone time to come up with my own solution for the problem.

I’m still trying to decide whether I should call American Express and begin a chargeback for the $40. I didn’t, after all, get what I paid for. What do you think?

In the meantime, I’d spent a lot of that time on hold doing research. I discovered that Mac OS X 10.4 Server will indeed run on a G4. And it includes not only the well-respected and highly compatible Apache Web server, but e-mail, DNS, blogging software, streaming audio server, steaming video server, iChat server, and so many more things I don’t have. Of course, it is a bit pricey at $999.

But after my dismal technical support experiences with the 4D WebSTAR folks, I’m ready for a change.