First of all - Erin bought some “Rice Crispies Squares Treats” a while back for a trip we took. The box is in the kitchen, and last night I noticed that it says that its “Original” rice crispies squares treats, but also that it’s got “New and Improved taste” What’s up with that?

Had to get that out of the way while I remembered.

Speaking of remembering… I quite often come across a cool link that I want to read through further before posting. I bookmark them, fully planning to come back to them at some future date when I have time. Sometimes this takes weeks, sometimes months. I went back to the link to Sirlin.net recently, and read through some of the articles on game design that are posted there. Some of it is pretty interesting. Nothing new has been posted there in eight months or so, but there are quite a few articles anyway.

Nothing like jumping around topics like crazy…The PDA that I’m trying to buy off of Ebay is quite a bizarre story. The guy who posted the auction always has three of them up - initial bid of $45, “Buy it Now” for $49.95 - one auction expires every day. Anyway, two days ago, Erin forgot to look at her auction, and came back to find that she’d been outbid. She was pretty heartbroken. Yesterday, I had the auction up until 30 seconds left, when someone thought they could swoop in and outbid me. Well, they did, but I bid them up some first :)

The funny thing is - there’s really only a $5 range that it makes sense to bid in, since there are two other auctions with “buy it now” for $49.95 just sitting there - same seller, same product, and yet we’ve been outbid two days in a row. I’m in no huge rush to get the thing, but Erin’s kind of getting impatient. I think the whole “30 second” thing is what makes Ebay so unappealing. If there is action on an item, I think they should keep it open until there is no more bidding for a certain amount of time (say one or two minutes) - that would keep the sellers happy, since there is more chance of it getting bid up, and the buyers wouldn’t ever feel they were beaten out because someone could bid faster than them. In this particular case, I think the other person was willing to pay more than us, so they would have wound up with it anyway, but I would have bid it up at least one more time, given a choice (in fact I did, and was a couple of seconds too late.) No big deal, I suspect it won’t arrive until after I’m back from Montreal anyway, so I can wait. I’m sure that at some point, if we keep getting outbid, we’ll just do the “Buy it Now” option, but I’m far from that point.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Oh boy. That monkey is going to pay.” - Professor Frink