The Blog of Xangis

FindMUD.com just turned one year old today.

It’s not exactly the biggest of my sites, but it does get about 3700 pageviews a month and is growing slowly but steadily. It also just recently topped 350 MUD listings.

I’ve been sick to death of eBay for a long time, but since they were pretty much “the only game in town”, I put up with their bullshit.  Today was the last straw when I found that they restricted shipping charges in the “lots of 101 to 500 books” category to a maximum of $20.00.  They’re obviously clueless idiots — after all, how in the HELL are you going to ship 500 books for $20 or less?  Not possible.

I’ve listed my lot of 129 Star Trek books on eBid, hopefully I’ll get some takers.  The audience is smaller, the site is smaller, but they’re a lot more user-friendly and the site doesn’t fill me with rage like eBay does.

Here’s the link

Today I posted the 200th work of fiction on fictionclassics.com, thanks mainly to Jack London’s short stories.

On August 7th, I posted about how Washington Mutual was trying to fail. It looks like they did, and in a hurry:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080926/ap_on_bi_ge/washington_mutual_future

I’ve just released a new Mini-LP called “Positronic Empire“. It’s a collection of 8 experimental electronic instrumentals inspired by Asimov’s Robots/Empire/Foundation series.

Today I posted the 150th work of fiction on fictionclassics.com. I haven’t been spending much time on the site, but over the past few months I’ve been gradually/occasionally posting material.

So up until today I had a Washington Mutual credit card. I’ve had it since around
2000, when it was issued by Providian to an irresponsible kid with well below
average credit. Well, this kid behaved and maintained good standing on his $500
credit card well enough that 8 years later it was a $10,500 credit card. Even so,
the interest rate was crappy and it had an annual fee.

Since then I’ve managed to improve my credit enough that my main cards are all at
fixed rates under 10%. So, what would I need a 17% card for? Well, nothing.
So when the annual fee renewal came around this year, I called WaMu to request that
it be removed because I’d just cancel the card otherwise. Their representative
tells me that they can’t remove it since it’s ‘part of the terms of the card’. I
was thinking, “Well buddy, it looks like we need to renegotiate the terms.” Instead
they offered me a few percent lower rate, which was still half a percent higher than
my worst card. Instead of convincing them to cancel the fee I had them cancel the card, which
forced them to cancel the fee.

What would you rather have? Zero dollars and a customer you can generate income
from, or zero dollars and one less customer?

Obviously it makes sense to cut as many customers loose as possible, even though you
could keep those customers and earn a nice profit by readjusting the terms on which
you deal with those customers.

Some business just can’t compete, I guess.

Stock symbol: WM
Commonsense action: Strong sell.

So I play Dark Age of Camelot once in a while (usually two months out of each year since 2005).

One of my characters just achieved extreme champion level status:

In addition to my last few synthesizer acquisitions I’ve picked up a Roland U-220 with two expansion cards and a Kawai K1m. I can’t take more than a few steps without tripping over a keyboard.

I’ve just broken the 100-work mark on Fictionclassics.com. The site’s been up for 67 weeks, so I’ve average 1.5 works per week.

The site doesn’t get much traffic, but it is fun to work on now and then.