Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Fabulous Friday (12/01/06 chat)

Oh, I've used new and used before, so I'm aware that sellers try to make the head of the list and get their item first by putting it on at a low price, then whacking on a hugely inflated postage rate at the end. The sneaky little beggers.

This problem doesn't seem related to that though. For example, I now have a novel on my wish list. On the product page, it's listed as £3.70. That's Amazon's price - or at least there's nothing to indicate that it's not. No mention of any third party there.

Below that, new and used is listed as starting from £0.01. The price on the wish list is £1.59. So, unless they've plucked a new and used price haphazardly from somewhere on the new and used list, there doesn't seem to be a connection there.

If it's being sold by another third party, apart from new and used, then Amazon isn't saying so on the product page. Which seems rather underhand to me. And where the wish list price is coming from is a complete mystery as it seems to have no connection at all to any prices listed on the product page.

Other items I've recently added to my wish list show the same price discrepency between the price Amazon has listed on the product page as their price and the price on the wish list. So it's a mystery where they're getting it from. Although, not complaining too much as the wish list price is invariably much cheaper than the product page.

Got Ultraviolet on Ebay, btw! For £8. It could have been much less - there was a copy there for £4 - but that was a Buy Now and I couldn't be bothered waiting for the other auctions to end, so I paid the little bit of premium for convenience.

ETA: I've just noticed that on the product page for that novel, in the top right corner of the screen, there's a box which states 'Usually dispatched within 11 to 13 days. Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk' - so there's definitely no third party involvement in this one.

LabRat

Hm, all this snow talk!

I think it snowed once when I lived on the Gulf Coast. Maybe twice? We're talking like an inch, and the whole county SHUT DOWN. But it sounds a lot more interesting than the 'hurricane breaks' as we so deemed them in college. Those I'm still not away from on the east coast, but did we all notice the end of hurricane season passed without a hitch! But it's really ok. I don't have clothes for cold weather. I'm not even sure I know what clothes *look* like for cold weather. I was perfectly happy just getting lost in the MoMA and the museum gift shops. And it turns out the city that never sleeps finally went to bed on my way to the airport at 4something am this morning.

JD

Omigosh it's Sunday evening already

Over the last day or so, I've been sporadically cleaning my room.

Yesterday afternoon, I cleaned all of the CDs off of my floor and alphabetized them into ONE CD holder (I have 96). Then, I made sure that they had all been ripped onto my external hard drive and that I'd entered them into my CD database.

After that, I made sure my movie database was up-to-date.

I still have a couple of things to put away in the room, and I've got to rearrange my closet too.

Then comes the big project: sorting out which of my >550 books I do and don't want to keep, putting them in boxes sorted by quality of the book itself, and then having a yardsale. After that, I'm going to catalogue all the rest of the books into my book database.

Yes, I am a total geek.

Darcy, you sound just like me!

BTW, you should check out librarything.com for your books if you haven't already. Now I wish there was something similar for movies.

I've got two weeks break coming up over Christmas / New Year, and I'm planning to do my book rearranging then - I've got a couple of hundred feet of shelves and room for about 4000 books if I pack things tight, but every so often I need to cut down the herd a little, and I'm about two years behind on doing it, so there are a lot of books piled on the floor etc. Made a start in August by giving a couple of hundred video tapes to a charity shop, which let me recover some space for books, but that's just the tip of the iceberg and I need to get rid of a lot more.

Well, I finished cleaning. And I added an extra step in there--I catalogued/organized my cassette tapes too. And made my CD database my Music database.

Marcus, I am SO jealous of your 4000 book space! In order to get that much space for my books, I'd have to build shelves on the walls (because I still live with my family--parents and siblings, that is--and it's the only room I'm allowed to change for my own use), and I don't have the carpentry know-how, or the motivation to take the collage off of my wall of all my mementos/pictures/awards/etc.

I've only got 3 bookshelves.

First, there's the two four-foot shelves which I got two Christmases ago and stacked one on top of the other. The top four feet is mostly my binders full of music books/sheet music, Harry Potter hard backs, and various other books (such as scripture), plus my bicycle helmet and some other odds and ends.

The bottom one is full of books--mostly paper-back--stacked horizontally, two deep and three across.

My other shelf is one of only two pieces remaining of an old bedroom set my mother got when she was a teenager. It's 8 feet tall. The top shelf is all of the books I own by Orson Scott Card (my favorite author), a book of word games, and one of my Dungeons & Dragons manuals.

The next shelf down is a bunch of books that are either hardback, or larger than your average paperback, stacked horizontally from the largest at the bottom to the smallest at the top. They're stacked three across, and one deep.

The next two shelves are mostly paperbacks (I also have the rest of my D&D manuals, plus some art how-to books, shelved the regular way) stacked horizontally, THREE deep, and FOUR across.

Then, there's a cabinet at the bottom with doors on it. Inside, I have 5-7 binders of "The Secrets of the Universe."

In front of both shelves is my electronic keyboard, so I'll have to be REALLY careful when I go through and sort all those books.

I started collecting SF books when I was twelve or so and have been short of space ever since. The previous occupants of this flat had two 5 ft alcoves with shelving and thought that was a lot - when I moved in I added ten shelving units lining the walls of my office, and another two sets of shelves in my bedroom. Since then I've tucked another set of shelves onto a dead-end landing outside my bedroom, more in the bedroom, a row of cookbooks etc. on top of the fridge, and so forth. After this the next step would be to rip out some old water tanks which are no longer used from the loft space, and put book shelves in the space that would free, but we had squirrels get in there a couple of years ago so I've decided not to risk it - which means I'll have to start giving books away. It's not a problem - there's a lot of stuff I've bought just to have something to read at lunch time, many of which will never be read again - but I need to find time and willpower to do it.

To keep track of book collections on a Mac I use Bookpedia and DVDpedia. Readerware is another one, that works with Macs, Windows and linux. Both of them can use cuecat barcode readers and you can enter the books and DVDs that way.

I just use a home-made MSAcess database--more customizable that way, and I can justify spending hours cataloguing my books by hand. :p

Not to mention, it's been so long since I've seen some of them, I need to go through them and actually LOOK at the titles and stuff to remember if I've read them or not.

Almost friday again!

Thank goodness! I ran out of things to fill up the hours at work at 9:30 this morning, finished the book I was reading at lunch, and didn't feel like writing so I've just been listening to my MP3 player for the last two hours!