So last week I decided I wanted to sell something for the first time.

I wrote up a blurb, took some pictures, went through the web forms and bam! an error! Some sort of generic error after I tried to do the phone authentication thing. I waited a half hour, tried again .. same thing. Waited until the next day, same thing.

Then I tried to use eBay’s “live chat” to get a solution, and got two solutions, one of which didn’t work, and the other was “make a new account.”

So I emailed tech support. They told me that I could use the same first solution that didn’t work, and a second solution — which also didn’t work — of recreating the auction from scratch. They also misidentified the problem [I was not getting a "page not responding" error; I was getting an error from the web app, not the web server.

[You will note that I am using the term "solution" in a loose manner.]

So I went back to the tech support email form, pasted in my original email, the original set of solutions, and a note that neither of the two worked.

Guess what I received?

A form letter listing the same two non-working solutions! 100% identical except for the name signed to it!

So today I gave in and created a new account, and it worked peachy keen, and if you’d like to buy the rare-ish Classic BattleTech book FedCom Civil War, you can checkity the link below. I’ll be listing some other gaming stuff that I’ve had sitting around my office, but maybe not until after Gen Con. We’ll see how things go.

My eBay Auctions

PS: If you work for eBay, and if you have a smidge of care for me and/or my work in the gaming industry, you know how to reach me. I’d love for my original eBay account — adamjury, not adamjury2008 — be properly set up for selling.

Voting on the ENnies will be open later this month.

Plus, the 2008 Diana Jones Award nominations were just announced. No nominations for anything I even so much as sneezed nearby, but myself and Posthuman Studios are one of the sponsors of the awards this year. The awards ceremony will be Wednesday the 13th — the day before Gen Con — at that uber-secret location in Indianapolis.

Furthermore, it’s not at the mercy of whatever post-processing script you use to deal with the file afterwards: if that script munges the uploader’s file in some way, the file is already uploaded and since your script does its work on a copy of that file [right? right?!] when the script gracefully [right? right?!] fails and alerts one of your staffers that there’s an issue, the uploader doesn’t have to care because he’s already off doing some other piece of work [or perhaps even sleeping!] knowing full well that the service will take good care of his files, instead of sitting by the web browser trying to figure out if the badly-documented error is his fault ["Maybe the filename shouldn't have underscores?", he asks] or the fault of the service provider ["Perhaps their hard drive is full!"]

Transcontinental, one of the largest printers in North America, simply allows users to upload their files by FTP, and if they need to send you a file back that’s too large for email, they just put it on the FTP site for you to download. Simple, readily accessible, no bullshit–now that’s professional.

I haven’t had time to do more than flip through the books yet, but I’m looking forward to taking a few evenings over the next week to give them a good reading.

And of course, if you’re a word nerd, the Grammar Girl podcast is a great resource.

and Eclipse Phase, the Roleplaying Game of Transhuman Conspiracy and Horror: