Claire's Random Thoughts

I am writing this post for two reasons. First, I am trying to fill the hiatus since my last post. The semester officially began, and thus, I have been busier. This means I naturally spend less time blogging due to the higher volume of school-related obligations. Second, I found a good deal and am sharing it with everyone else. After all, I typically enjoy sharing.

Surpass Hosting is running their “One Love” promotion this February 14-16 only. For only $1, they are offering shared cpanel hosting with up to 500GB of disc space and unmetered bandwidth. I’m quite aware that unmetered does not mean unlimited already (on any web host, users who monopolize the resources get their accounts closed), but for my purposes, I should use few enough resources not to get my account removed.

I plan to use this account for my blog and any new sites that I set up in the future, if I decide to. A dollar for a year of hosting isn’t too shabby to me. Even if they might not have top quality server performance, I can’t complain too much about the price, and it’s probably still significantly better than free hosting. According to Web Hosting Jury, they aren’t too bad. I will make sure to post again to review Surpass Hosting after I have used them for a while.

It’s annoying when my ebay description specifically and very clearly states Paypal only and USA shipping only yet so many buyers have to ask if I’ll accept alternate payment methods or ship out of the country anyway.

It’s even more annoying when such buyers argue with me and explain why I should accept their checks/money orders or attempt to teach me which shipping service I can use to ship out of the USA. I’m not stupid, my policy is for my own convenience, duh.

Perhaps most annoying yet arguably humorous at the same time are these messages below, simply because they display idiocy even more so than the above two types of messages.

Due to the amount of time it takes me to crop screenshots of these questions, I’m only displaying a few for now. More may come later.
Click on the images to enlarge if they’re not big enough for you to read.

What? I'm the one reimbursing you? Did you not understand that?

Is it possible to have more or stupider questions than this guy?

Somebody didn't go to grammar school

That’s it? Well, I guess it doesn’t surprise me too much. I’ve had a lot of white friends, and I do like some things white people like too, but this quiz still shows that there’s some element of Asian in me.
The quiz can be found here for anyone interested.

I’ve been looking forward to receiving my “bag of crap” from Woot since the day I successfully ordered it. Maybe part of the reason it seems so exclusive is because bags of crap are so difficult to order. When woot has them, their servers crash because they are being hammered by people who want them, making it nearly impossible to access their site. If finally came today after slooooow processing and crappy (for the bag of crap order) SmartPost shipping! Woot!
Here are the contents!

*DRUMROLL*

—————————————–

I seem to have gotten well over 3 items, which I was excited about. I always thought that normally you got three pieces of crap, one for every dollar you pay (if you pay $3, which I did). Unfortunately, some of the items I got were really crappy and 99.99999999% useless. Fortunately, the total value of all the contents I got was well over the $8 I paid for it. Since I got more than 3 items, I divided them into “bags” of which I thought Woot intended to be one item.

Bag #1: Panic Button
Panic button? This reminds me of what I press when I can’t find my car in the parking lot, because when I can’t find it I panic, right? Then I press the button that says panic, I hear my car, and I don’t have to panic anymore.

No, that’s not this one is for. You also panic when you’re playing games on your computer at work and your boss is approaching, right? So when this happens, you press the “panic” button (which you have to install to your computer first, of course), and it generates a fake piece of work, such as a spreadsheet or document and takes over your screen with it so that your game isn’t showing.

Bag #2: Two “Tune Cube” Portable iPod Speaker Sets
These aren’t the best quality speakers, but they’re convenient and portable, since they can be powered by 4 AAA batteries. They use a regular 3.5mm headphone-type input, so I can use it with any mp3 player, not just an iPod. They also fold up to a pretty small size making them ideal for travel purposes. And since I got two of these, I can give one away and keep one for myself. I haven’t been able to test these for sound quality yet since there are no AAA batters in the house, but I probably will keep one of these sets, because I like the way they fold up. Of course, if they suck too much, maybe not. I’m an audiophile, so bad sound quality is one of my pet peeves. I might have to give both sets away as gifts if I’m not satisfied with the sound quality.

Last and least…

Bag #3: Random and completely useless
3 Hello Kitty floating tubes for babies, one Christmas tree prop that’s already out of batteries, and a Santa Clause hat. Well, maybe the Santa Clause hat can be useful around Christmas the next time it comes around, but other than that, I have no use for anything in bag #3.

Ever since I heard of the “bag of crap” on Woot, I’ve always wanted one. It’s also tradition for woot to sell these during midnight between Christmas and Christmas Eve, which was tonight (or technically this morning).

Actually, I thought I had missed out, because after I clicked the final ordering button, I got some kind of internal server error message. Due to the high popularity of these bags of crap, I expected the server to be extremely slow during this sale, but I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed when I thought I had missed out when the server crashed instead of loading my confirmation page. I soon learned that I didn’t at 1:17 am when I got my confirmation email! I guess their servers were just a little slow due to the high volume of traffic.

For those of you who don’t know, Woot is the oldest one-deal-per-day site. They sell one miscellaneous item per day starting at midnight central time, and that item is for sale for either until it is out of stock or midnight the next day. They used to have excellent deals a couple years back, but their products and prices haven’t been as good lately, in my opinion.

Anyway, once in a while they have a random “bag of crap” sale, in which they sell miscellaneous junk that they couldn’t get rid of during their regular sales. The contents in their bags of crap range from merchandise with “Woot” logos to rumored excellent valuable products that some claim to be as good as a TV (which I highly doubt, but anyway, I want to try my luck).

This time, they did something a little different than they did with their previous bag of crap sales. Instead of making a single random bag of crap $1 and giving buyers the option of buying 1, 2, or 3, they made it $3 and only allowed the purchase of one. I guess this was done, because most people who purchased these in the past bought three due to the flat $5 shipping charge and the low additional cost of the next two items.

When I get my bag of crap, I’ll make sure to post pictures of what I got
Hopefully, I’ll have a firsthand experience in confirming the rumors of awesome “crap” items people claim to receive. I should, however, understand that I shouldn’t be too disappointed if my three items are really crappy.