One of my friends who attends Western Kentucky University has been missing for the last five days. Anyone who might have any information please contact the Bowling Green Police Department or you can send it to me and I will forward it to the family.
UPDATE: She’s been located and is ok.
Do you want live lobsters? How about never leaving your house or picking up a phone? Well, then you can Buy Live Lobster on-line! You still have to boil the water however.
Ok, I normally wouldn’t do this, but I want to make sure no other student at Murray State University has to suffer the wrath of a horrible Wireless Communications professor, Abdul Yarali.
I was very outspoken about the difficult time I was having in this course. The biggest reason I was having a difficult time is the professor was not clear on assignments, communicated poorly, and ran a very disorganized and unstructured class. All of my other on-line classes have given a schedule up-front that allowed you to know what was due when. A must for an on-line class because on-line classes fill the void for non-traditional students who have full-time jobs or other responsibilities that keep them from attending traditional on-the-ground classes.
Mr. Yarali did not understand this. He ran the on-line class exactly like a on-the-ground class. He gave pop quizes that lasted online for only 24 hours. If you didn’t login, you missed it. He scheduled tests for specific 4 to 5 hour windows, which again if you had work or anything else you had to reschedule your life because the most notice we were given with one of these tests was approximately a week.
He banned the use of the on-line discussion board. He never used the on-line gradebook or even emailed you grades of your assignments. This makes calculating your grade on your own impossible, and also makes checking his final grade submission impossible as well.
His written English skills were poor. I feel any professor giving an on-line course where clearly written directions are critical should at least have some proficiency in the English language.
If you are taking the on-line TSM degree at Murray State University, please for your own sanity avoid this professor. I’m not even sure I would take this professor for a regular class.
Even though this video is an advertisement for a band, that does not negate the fact it raises some good points.
Is the PS3’s rendering of PS2 and PS1 games intentionally broken or just poorly implemented? You be the judge. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, but the PS3 contains PS2 chips inside to make all of the games compatible, so why are they being rendered so poorly? Also, lets not overlook the fact that the colors of the PS3 display look horribly washed out. Anyone else feel the whole system was a rush job?
It’s obvious I like desktop wallpapers so here is one I didn’t create. It’s called Get Things Done and it turns your desktop into a workflow organizer. Very neat.
Apparently digg picked up my Playstation 3 article on the frontpage today. This didn’t make the server at Dreamhost happy. WordPress was bringing that server down, along with my other site, helpmewithmygameproblems.com. I got a nice email from Dreamhost support telling me why they disabled it, not because digg was causing too many requests or killing my bandwidth. No, it’s because WordPress was hogging all the CPU time generating the same page over and over. They told me how to enable WP-Cache, which I did and the site appears to be running much smoother now.
TL;DR (That’s Too Long; Didn’t Read for you non-Shackers) Make sure to have WP-Cache enabled if you run a WordPress blog for the off-chance you get dugg or Slashdotted.
I moved some things around in the wallpapers sections. All of the celebs (read: babes) are now together. The misc car and cartoon wallpapers are now located in the /wallpapers directory, while the celebs reside in /wallpapers/celebs.
I also added a new image of Rachel Bilson.
This article/blog is being written for my friends over at Shacknews. A frequent poster today announced he walked into Target and aquired a PS3. He’s not sure if he should keep it or take it back. People are suggesting he eBay it for mad moneyhats. I’m suggesting otherwise, as I think the eBay market has crashed. Systems that were once going for $2,500 on average are now barely breaking $900. And that’s not even a guaranteed auction price. I’m going to take a quick sampling of the listing closings right now, December 5th, 2006 at 11:00 AM CST and just see what the average profit* is.
*Profit assumes seller simply walked into the store and bought a PS3. If the seller spent any significant time hunting down a PS3 for sale, this profit would actually be smaller as I’m sure most people are like me and don’t consider their free time worth $0 an hour.
Auction 1: Bids 8, Price $927
Auction 2: Bids 45, Price $1,059
Auction 3: Bids 29, Price $890
Auction 4: Bids 0, Price $900 (But didn’t sell, so $0 profit)
Auction 5: Bids 21, Price $850
All of these prices were current as of the time I visited the auction, but all were under 5 minutes remaining so the ones that were not closed I do not think changed significantly. However, if they did let me know and I can recalculate. I included the one auction that did not sell because there is the probability of the auction not selling.
Auction 1 sold at a $327 profit. Auction 2 sold at a $459 profit. Auction 3 sold at a $290 profit. Auction 4 did not sell, $0 profit. Auction 5 sold at a $250 profit. The average profit was $265. The profits listed here are PRIOR to eBay fees. I am going to assume each listing started at $600 dollars to make the calculations easier, even though we know this assumption is false as Auction 4 started at $900. I am also going to calculate the closing fees based on the average profit, so each system sold for $865 in calculating fees. I’m just looking for an average cost to insert a PS3 so this will work.
Fees are calculated based on the published rates.
$4.80 in insertion fees.
Final value fees are calculated at 5.25% of the first $25 = $1.31
Then the value up to $1,000 is calculated at 3%.
$865 – $25 = $840 x 3% = $25.20
Total closing fee = $26.51
Total fees = $31.31
This gives us a total of $833.69 after fees, so an average profit of $233.69. This is far below what the original auctions were going for, and this average is probably skewed due to the low sample size. So if you were able to walk into a store, purchase a PS3 without waiting, and eBay it this is the profit you are looking at.
However, lets say for arguments sake you had to spend 12 hours hunting down a PS3. Twelve hours of your free time, this is far less than what some people sat in line for. If you spent just 12 hours looking for a PS3 you only made $19.47 per hour. I don’t know about you, but I value my free time at a lot more than $20 an hour.
Edit: Auction 3 closed much higher, so I will include the new price of $1,100 in the calculations below:
Average profit per auction: $307
Fee recalculation @ average sell price of $907: $32.57
$907-$32.57 = $874.43 Total Sale price, or $274.43 profit.
$22.87/hr @ 12 hours time spent to find one.
Even with this adjustment it does not make a for a great increase in profit.