Picture the scene. You’re a teenage schoolboy, you come bounding out of school after another hard day slaving over a hot pen. You think, “I think I’ll hurdle the barrier on to the main road, what could possibly go wrong?”

This must have stung a bit.

What surprises me most about this is the total lack of response from any of the other schoolchildren! They just wander around like no-one is lying in the road… the first person to show any urgency is someone who comes running from the other side of the road.

Apparently he recovered from his injuries and maybe he’ll actually use the crossing next time…

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South Korea’s archers have been all-conquering at the last few Olympics.  Indeed, they won the team gold medals in Beijing too.  However they positively slumped in the individual competitions, only winning measly silvers in both the mens and womens.  The reason for this has just become clear…

Park Sung-hyun and Park Kyung-mo, their two individual medallists, have announced they are engaged (aww bless etc…)  So basically they were being rude when they should have been giving full concentration to their sport!

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The Register reported today that eBay are changing their seller fees structure from 24th September. The bottom line is that between eBay and their payment subsidiary PayPal they’re going to be taking an even bigger chunk of the sale value from you:

- Buy It Now (BIN) insertion fees becomes a flat 40p, from a scale between 10p (1-99p value) and £1.30 (>£100 value);

- BIN final value fees increase to 9.9% (<£50), 5.9% (£50-600) and 1.9% (>£600);

- Auction insertion fees are unchanged;

- Auction final value fees increase to 8.75% (<£30), 5.25% (£30-600) and 1.5% (>£600).

Of course if you use PayPal then they will also take a slice on top of all of this!

Once you add all of these charges up, the sale price you see on your auction can seem quite a long way away. The general opinion seems to be that eBay are skewing their pricing structure towards volume sellers, which just helps eBay to become even more of a community of dodgy China and Hong Kong-based sellers, with a sprinkling of more local con artists.

It’s very frustrating that I’ve managed to accumulate a nice feedback score over the years which is pointless when it doesn’t make financial sense to sell the occasional item any more.

I’ve heard that eBid is a credible alternative to eBay with lower charges, but I’ve never used them before… can anyone recommend them or indeed any other alternatives?

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We’ve all had a sneaky video clip moment in the office (haven’t we?) so Tim should know the rules by now - keep your horsey porn to yourself…
(sound probably not suitable for kids…)



See more at Channel Bee!

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I’m enjoying the BBC’s extensive online Olympics coverage but you normally can’t keep the video windows on top of other windows. I’ve found a free utility called Power Menu that does just this for any program window in XP.

Install it from here and options to keep ‘always on top’ and ‘minimise to tray’ are added to the usual minimise, maximise and close options when you right click at the top of a window.

It’s simple but does the job efficiently - just launch your sport in the BBC pop out player, set it ‘always on top’ and away you go!

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“And that was it. Right there.

That was the moment. I suddenly realised that unless something changed soon I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine… and I’d finally die, fat and alone, and be found three weeks later half-eaten by Alsatians.

Or I was about to turn into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction….”

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