3 October, 2006

Wow.

I’m in a bit of shock here, since yesterday. I was sure that I had seen someone else submit before I did, but they were on Blogspot. I couldn’t get their post to even load, so I guess it was a bogus post.

I had initially intended to stitch the image together as I got the pieces, but as the pieces came roaring in faster, I realized that the fastest way for me to get the whole payperpostbignews thing put together would be with what I feel I excel in: HTML.

I initially started out with eight rows, with 8 images per row, because I assumed there were 64 pieces.
When I saw piece number 65, I thought, “Ah, crap.”

Fortunately, HTML is easy to retune. I quickly adjusted it to five wide, to get 13 rows of 5 images each (65 images total), and added an extra row, because my hypothesis was shattered. I was no longer sure just how many images there were!

So, the pieces kept rolling in, and I surmised that there were exactly 65 images, since the bottom row had so much ‘white’ space. I sat there, curling images as I saw them, and stuffing them on my home box’s web directory. I then realised, “Hey, I have to have this up and ready, if I’m going to win this.” So, when I was down to about 5 images, I tar cf puzzle.tar pppbn‘ed the local directory, and used wget from the server to grab it. I then extracted it, and used the remote server’s copy of curl to grab the remaining images as I saw them.

I had given up, because I couldn’t find image number 16, though. I had just posted that I think I’ve been defeated, and decide, “Eh, log in to PPP and find my third post for the day.”

When I logged in, I saw piece number 16, and nearly wet myself.
The next few moments were a blur of
curl -k -O ...;
Tabbing in to [ESL], composing the message as rapidly as possible with shaky hands (hence the numerous spelling errors above the horizontal rule, though I’ve cleaned them up since);
Tabbing over to PayPerPost to take the $1000 opp that is for completed puzzles;
Firing open my email client, and with shaky hands, copy/pasting both my blog post’s URL and the url to my completed puzzle, then sending it;
Poking PayPerPost on Skype to ask them if I made it on time, or if someone beat me.

I’d like to take a moment to state that fat people (like myself) should not jump on wood floors if the house is elevated. I came flying out of my room, jumping and OHMYGODding as I got the confirmation that YES!, I am the winner! My weight shook a few things off the bookshelf (hahahaha), and I stopped. I looked at ‘em, said, “You’re not broken,” put ‘em back up, and continued to jump around.

The family all gathered around me and asked what happened.

And the rest?

Well, you already know that.

Okay. I know some of my readers are also fans of eBay, whether it be to hock their entire life over the internet, or to pick up those excellent deals.

With that said, I’d like to introduce everyone to an eBay listing tool I found earlier today, called .

I can honestly say, from personal experience, that List’d Express lives up to its name. All you have to do is register at the site, which will pass you over to eBay for permission to post as you. Once you grant permission to List’d, it brings you back to their interface, which is a much-simplified version of the several pages long eBay listing tool.

There are only five steps to deal with:
1: Choose keywords to select a category. You may override the keywords and directly set a single category, if you wish.
2: Enter a title and description. Tell everyone about what you’re selling.
3: Add images. You may either just upload them from your PC, which eBay does charge you for numerous pictures, or, thanks to List’d’s partnership with Photobucket, you can choose images from your Photobucket account.
4: Pick a listing template. You can opt to use the default eBay look, or choose from a few, well designed templates that List’d offers at no additional charge.
5: Set the details of your listing. How much would you like to start selling your item at? Would you like to offer Buy it Now? What kind of payment formats do you accept? When do you want to start your auction? How about shipping?

That’s it. All you have to do then, is take a preview of your auction, and then submit it.

When you have a bunch of items to list, and don’t want to go through five pages of eBay just to have it not work, or deal with the 40 questions eBay asks, List’d Express is a really nice tool.

In fact, here is an auction I did with List’d Express, before I came to spread the news.

I can honestly say that I’d use this again, if I had things to sell on eBay.

made easy with List’d Express. This has been brought to you by the letter PPP.