I posted about a week ago saying I had an idea for a website that I wanted to try. That site went live today!

A Forum For Student Entrepreneurs

If you are a student interested in starting and running a small business, or if you are a person with business experience and would like to help young entrepreneurs I urge you to join and participate in the forum.

I am glad iran photoshopped those missile pictures. I like to see creative and quality photoshop work, and even if iran’s own photoshop wasn’t that great, it spurred a revival of creative photoshops by everyday people. I have seen more photoshop articles in the last few weeks than I had in a year prior, and I like it. You know what, I think iran should start using n-gage cell phones.

I just acquired a domain name that I feel has quite a bit of potential. I am going to be busy for the next couple of days but after that I will get a forum up on the site asap, and I will work on the design for the rest of the site from there. I am debating now on whether to use phpbb or vbulletin. I would love to see a recent comparison of the two, but all I can find are articles or forum debates that are to old to be relevant. If you have a recent experience with either of them I would love to hear it.

It is a .com address. It was between a three word .com and a two word .net, but the .net had longer words. The big selling point on the .com for me was that it was a name that I could brand for myself, it wasn’t just generic keywords, and I liked that. Also, it was easier to spell, and harder for someone to copy because there would be no way anyone was put an s at the end to make it plural or anything like that.

I was brainstorming today for ideas of potential sites and came up with one decent idea and one that I think could become quite large. I don’t want to give away to much information, but I would like to give social networking site-building a try. If you know anything about this kind of thing and are interested in giving me some pointers, comment and I will contact you via email.

So last night I made an offer on ebay for some brand new shirts. The offer was accepted, and there were more than 1 set available so the auction went on after I purchased mine. I paid immediately via paypal and things were good.

This morning I wake up to this email from ebay

Dear (my username and email removed),

Thank you for your bid on the following listing:

(item information here)

Unfortunately, eBay has removed this . All bids or offers on this listing have been canceled. Because the listing was ended, you no longer have any obligation to purchase this item.

Listings are removed for different reasons. For example:
- The way the item was listed may violate eBay policy.
- The sale of the item may be prohibited by eBay.
- The sale of the item may be prohibited by law.
- The removal may be part of a separate action taken by eBay that is unrelated to the listing itself.

We hope you understand that, due to privacy concerns, we’re unable to discuss the details of why this listing was ended. However, please note that the removal of this listing does not suggest that this seller’s standing in the eBay Community has been called into question.

For more information on why eBay may remove a listing, please go to:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/listing-ended.html

For information on how you can protect yourself and help ensure a positive buying experience in the future, visit:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/buyer_checklist.html

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

eBay Trust & Safety

So now ebay no longer lists this item on their site, and it isn’t even in my ebay anymore where you can normally find items you have purchased. I check my paypal account hoping the seller got word of this and refunded my money but of course that isn’t the case so I send an email to the seller explaining the situation.

The seller promptly replies that everything is fine and she will update me later tonight with the shipping details. Now you might think that everything is worked out, but ebay just completed an auction, sent us over to it’s partner paypal to transfer funds, and then ended the auction and completely removed itself from all responsibility. On ebay, there is no record at all of my purchasing or paying for these items, and I don’t see any way that ebay could help anything here. Now I used paypal so if there is any trouble I know I am protected through them, but what if I would have sent a money order when the auction ended and then ebay did this. I would have absolutely no course of action if something were to go wrong.

This transaction could still work out for me, and chances are it will, but it shouldn’t be okay for ebay to end an auction after someone has won and paid for the items. This leaves the buyer with no form of protection from ebay, and that is unacceptable.

I started a new blog today to cover the changes of my 37 gallon planted aquarium (that would be a fish tank if you are confused). I have a few articles posted already that I copied over from some forums posts of mine so go check it out!

Planted Aquarium Blog

It’s late and I haven’t posted today so I am just taking this one straight from my head to the keyboard. No planning nor editing, just two quick thoughts on the current state of the internet.

First, I really don’t like that there exist websites whose only reason for existence is to link to photoshop tutorials on other sites. I don’t have a problem with a site posting a duplicate tutorial but at least host it on your own server and take your own damn screenshots. Just put a little work into it, that is all I am asking.

Second, and lastly, I read today that reddit is updating their site to include screenshots of article submissions and to allow you to play submitted videos without leaving their site. Nifty! and it comes at a time when I am tiring of Digg.

No, I don’t want to see a video titled “Obsessed with miley cyrus?”! Oh yeah, while we are on the subject, I also don’t want to watch a video called “Miley cyrus, I can’t wait to see you”.

Thanks

I know I use a lot of bandwidth so if my isp started capping monthly bandwidth usage I would probably be hit with overage charges, but right now I think that is for the best. If bandwidth caps became common your isp would be earning a significant amount of money every month on overages, and they would like that, so they would make sure people could still download whatever large things they are downloading. Now sometimes people are downloading large things like linux distros or something similar, but a lot of large downloads are a little less legal. I think it is good for my isp to want me to continue to download or stream all kinds of content… their lawyers are better than mine.

I got my first chance to use Digg’s recommendation engine today and I have to say I am impressed. I found out that I was selected as a beta tester first by seeing a new sidebar that said something like “Popular Stories Recommended” or something to that effect. I had been seeing articles about Digg unveiling this new feature so I knew what was going on and headed straight to the upcoming stories tab which had the “beta” tag just like they said it would.

Now normally when I check the upcoming stories tab I see about 1 thing per page that I am interested in. Today, with the help of the recommendation engine, I consistently saw 2-3 things per page that I was interested in. Now you may think 2-3 things per page isn’t all that great, but I have only dugg a few stories so the engine has very little to base what I like on. I can only imagine how accurate it will become as I digg more stories. Like I said, I am very impressed and I can only see this getting better. Thumbs up digg!