My Halloween Spam Index

Well, Happy Halloween everyone. Gmail deletes my spam after 30 days be default. So rather than me ever peeking in there, I just let it all pile up. I like to watch the number to see if I'm getting more or less Spam than the previous 30 day window. It's been up to 705 at one point. Since then I changed some mail forwarding rules and am bouncing more mail (meaning it never gets to me) than I used to.

Anyhow, I thought today's index was appropriate being Halloween and all.

You all better buy Scott's Star Wars Art

Scott wants to sell his wonderful Star Wars art on eBay so he can buy some Star Wars toys. You better go place a bid here.

Look what Gayla found

Gayla was picking grapes and found this nice little guy (or actually it's a female) on the side of our house by the grape arbor

She came and started hitting me after that. I'm not sure what the deal is. Cat spiders are harmless, but you better watch out if Gayla sees one!

Prince of Persia in Flash

This is one of the coolest things I've seen done over the web. I used to play this game all the time on my Grandmothers old 286. (Thanks Grandma)

House Update

It's been over a week now, but I forgot to mention we finally got a road built in front of the lot for our new house. Our builders representative said that they got the permits back from the city to start building some of the other homes and we were among the first few to sign up. They expect our permit to come back any time he said. Hopefully we should have a schedule of when they will start and how long it will take within a week or two.

We're not expecting anything much though based on past experience. Perhaps we'll be surprised.

Baby Pop Quiz

Today during church, I was holding Tim and he fell asleep. I looked down and it occurred to me that he looks a lot like Dallin did at that stage. So today I decided to post the Baby Quiz. Lets see if you can tell which kid is which.

Each picture is either Tim or Dallin. Post your answers in the comments and I'll post results one of these days and let you see how many you got right (or wrong).

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Everyone take a guess!

Edit:Gayla got one of them wrong :D

Why mothers stop breast feeding.

What's left of Tim's last bottle:

Pretty colors in the mountains.

Saturday Jed and I rode motorcycles up above Heber. We were at the very top of the mountain if you go up past Tibble Fork in American Fork Canyon. We rode a good 2 1/2 hour loop around some of the peaks up there. We wanted to make sure we got at least one last good trail ride before the beautiful fall colored mountains become winterized and unrideable.

Here are some of those pretty fall colors. We had a great ride. It's worthy to note that whenever I ride with Jed, I don't have to wait for anyone. There was one part where I was ahead of him and got to test out a slippery hill. He had to wait for me to get out of the way for a tiny bit there. There were patches of snow on a lot of the North facing slopes and for some reason, I couldn't seem to get quite enough speed at the bottom to make it up all the way. Jed was sure to get a picture of me pushing my bike up the last part but I'll leave that part to your imagination.

We saw lots of other people (considering the weather) up on top of the mountain. There were a few hunters on horses and a few other people riding bikes. Some of the guys on bikes (coming down the trail) didn't think we could make it up the ice trails but they, having never met us before, were unaware of our history of going places that other people say you can't.

All in all, we had a fun time. Just as we got back to the truck, a few drops of rain started to sprinkle. I suppose our next ride may be down at a little lower elevation.

Finally sold the laptop!

Yea! Horray! It took a few tries but I finally sold the laptop.

Here is the secret of my success this time over the previous times.

1. Use the buyer protection tools. This is the most important one I think. eBay has a newly implemented feature that allows you to limit certain buyers out. You can check a few different options like: "Limit buyers in countries I don't ship too." and "Limit buyers with negative feedback.". The most important one, and the one I think saved my Laptop from being bought by a Nigeria Scammer was "Limit buyers who don't have a Paypal account.".
   
   I still got all kinds of offers from scammers who wanted me to ship the laptop to their sister attending College in Nigeria but they couldn't actually click the buy-it-now option.
2. Use a reserve. A reserve costs 1% of the reserve price but the fee is refunded if the item sells. My reserve price was $13.50 but since the item sold eBay gave it back. This protects you from the next item.
3. Start the bidding low. The low bid attracts buyers at the start. Once they start competing, the item should go up to a fair value. It's cheaper to start the bid low too. My initial cost was about $5.50 to list the item not counting the reserve fee. If you start the bid higher, the listing cost is higher and it isn't refunded.

Summary:
Listing Fees: $18.90
Final Value Fee: $35.31
Refund Reserve Fee: -$13.50
Total: $40.71

That isn't the real total though. You can't accept more than $500/month with a Paypal account unless you upgrade. Upgraded accounts charge you 2.9% on received money though. We have a new Paypal account that we upgraded (goes to an old bank account) so that we can use it only on large items. That way my current on we can still use as is and not pay 2.9% every time we get money.

Paypal fee: $43.00

So all in all it cost around $83 to sell the laptop. That doesn't count the FooBar first attempt!

Edit: I payed for shipping too, that cost another $63.33 for UPS 3 day Air.

Flat Tires

For some reason, we can't seem to keep the air in any of our bike tires this summer. When I say any, I really mean ANY too. I'm not sure how they got flat, but at the start of the summer I had to replace both of Gayla's (actually Holly's bike that Gayla is borrowing) tires and one of the kid carrier tires. I have a patch kit too. We bought too tubes and I thought that I'd just use one and patch the other one and then we'd have an extra tube. That worked for a while, but within a week or so, the tire was flat again so I just put the new tube in.

One of our neighbors gave us a bike for Scott to ride. He has a smaller one he learned to ride on but has outgrown it. We'll just save that one for Dallin. It wasn't long after he started riding it around that it had a flat back tire. I think the tire just had too many miles on it. It was quite bald and the tube was pretty thrashed. (He rode it a bit after it was flat.) I bought a new tire and a new tube and fixed that back up.

Then the other day, I had the kid carrier with Dallin and Tim. Scott was riding around with me following to supervise. We rode over by some dirt so Scott could play around on. I didn't notice until a couple days later, but there were little brambles or sticker things that had stuck in the tires. (There were just way too many holes to patch this time.) Gayla went to K-Mart to buy two more tubes for her bike and a new tube for Scott's bike. While replacing those 3 tubes, I noticed that the other tires were flat too. That's right, 6 tires were flat not 3. We didn't go ride bikes that night.

A couple nights later, Gayla bought 3 more tubes, I did the grunt work and we were able to finally ride bikes again.

Well, it's been a few days since we last rode bikes. I wandered by the bikes in the garage and noticed that Gayla's back tire and one of the kid carrier tires are flat again. There were so many stickers in those tires that I was bound to miss one or two. Hopefully I'll get them all this next time around!