iden­tity

Ok, this one is going to be a little long. And strange. And interesting.

We’ll get to the moral of the story first:

don’t trust any­thing that looks too good to be true

Ok, now that’s out of the way… I almost bought a new laptop. Check that… I appar­ently have bought a nonex­is­tant laptop. Con­fused? So am I, but a things came into focus pretty quickly.

Now for those of you who are won­der­ing, yes, I already have a new laptop. But I’m not sure if this is really the right one for me (all that will become more appar­ent when I pub­lish the review I’ve been work­ing on). Anyway, in a fit of tem­po­rary insan­ity, I went onto ebay look­ing for the other brand of tablet PC that I’ve been inter­ested in: the Toshiba m200. My thought process was: if I can find one for cheap, I’ll buy it, test drive it and keep the laptop I like better.

I found one with great specs and a low price. Really great specs and real low price. Like a couple hun­dred dol­lars lower price. And I bought it.

Then, as soon as the auc­tion was over, sanity kicked in. Like the type of sanity that says, “Wow, this laptop is really under­priced con­sid­er­ing it’s got an 80gb hard drive and a gig of memory.” The same voice of reason that says “Hmmm, and I didn’t know that they made this model with a 1.8gHz processor.” And yes, the same voice of reason that says “That’s because it was never man­u­fac­tured with a 1.8gHz processor.”

At that point, I started to notice a few things

• The unit was under­val­ued by about $600 street
• The seller sell­ing it had no pre­vi­ous ebay record
• In fact, the seller joined the day they put it on sale
• The unit had impos­si­ble specs
• The seller wants to be paid by direct deposit into a check­ing account

So my spider sense is going gang­busters at this point scream­ing “FRAUD!”

At the same time, my fundi­men­tal belief in people is saying “It isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a fraud. It could be she got some super secret spe­cial unit that she’s selling.”

Spider sense won out. I wanted to learn more abut the seller. I did a query on her (I say her becuase it was a female screen name) and learned a few things. “Mary_D.” (the name’s been abrievated to pro­tect the inno­cent) hailed from Agawam, MA. And since her screen name was a full name I decided to make a white pages search for her. And sure enough, I came up with a “Mary D.” in Agawam, MA. So for a moment I thought this person might be legit.

But I decided to dig a little deeper and requested her full con­tact info from EBay. And that’s when I noticed that the White Pages phone number and the Ebay phone number were dif­fer­ent. Not just a little dif­fer­ent. Like 10 states dif­fer­ent. “Mary_D.”’s phone was apprently located in Iowa (thanks to an inter­net area code search). So I e-mailed the seller and stated that before I paid we’d need to talk live on the phone and that she should send me a phone number to con­tact her at. I also con­tacted ebay and told them that some­thing fishy was going on.

I then took one fur­ther step and called the White Pages “Mary D.”, a very nice lady in Agawam, MA. This woman was an e-mail seller, but con­firmed that she never sold a laptop to me (nor had she ever pos­sessed that type of laptop). And it was at that moment that my sus­pi­cions (which really had gone way past sus­pi­cions by this time) were con­firmed. Some­one had spoofed Mary’s iden­tity and tried to make a quick score on Ebay. She/he might have gotten away with it to if it wasn’t for that pesky dog and … oh wait, dif­fer­ent story. They prob­a­bly would have gotten away with it if they hadn’t posted the wrong specs for the unit. Or let it go for so cheap.

And I’m stupid for ini­tally falling for it. I was so blinded by price that I missed a couple clear warn­ing signs.

On the plus side, I did notice them (some­one else might not have). Both Mary and I have con­tacted Ebay. And I sure as hell am not paying for that computer.

On a side note, it’s a strange thing to inform some­one that they’re iden­tity has been stolen. I’ve known people that this has hap­pened to in the past. Every­one involved ends up feel­ing vul­ner­a­ble and kinda dirty (in a weird way). Plus this type of con­ver­sa­tion is just awk­ward (“Hi you don’t know me but some­one using your name sold me a non exis­tant laptop”).

So there you go. I’ve already given you the moral of all of this. As to whether or not I’m going to get the Toshiba to com­pare, I’m not sure. Either way, I’m not get­ting that model (or going to be blinded by this type of deal).

I’m sit­ting in my car wait­ing for a bakery to open so I can buy some good­ies for Jenny & company.

As far as Chicago goes, god. l have so much to do. It’s really scary. On the short list, l have to find an apart­ment. Some­times, I just don’t know where to start. One thing at a time, right?

hand­writ­ing

this is my first at writ­ing a blog with hand­writ­ing alone. I’m start­ing to get the hang of how to write this by hand. I’m not sure if this is all that much faster than writ­ing it by hand, still this is pretty cool.

nerd­vana

The acer is here. It’s cool. I’ve already had to rein­stall the entire friggin’ system once. But that was due to Microsoft, not nec­es­sar­ily the tablet.

I don’t have enough of an opin­ion on it yet to really say if I’m going to keep it. There are aspects of it that I really like. There are others I’m not so sure about.

Right now I just want to get the system stable and set up. Once that’s done I’ll be able to really see what it can do.

On thing that has changed already is the wall­pa­per on the com­puter desktop… It came equiped with a pic­ture of some buff guy “diving” out of my screen. All and all pretty homo­erotic. In fact Jenny’s first com­ment about the machine was “you’re not keep­ing the wall­pa­per are you? *snicker* *snicker*.”

coming today… i can feel it

I think it’s coming today. I even brought a car­ry­ing case in for it. I fully admit that I’ve lost it over this laptop/tablet, but I haven’t embraced the techno geek side of my per­son­al­ity in a while :-).

Yes­ter­day I got the oppor­tu­nity to work out with a Wu Shu team from Tian­jin Uni­ver­sity, China. They are vist­ing at RIT. I have mixed feel­ings about Wu Shu and mar­tial arts in China right now. Basi­cally, since the 60’s or so there has been a big move­ment by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment to take the Mar­tial Arts, neuter the mar­tial out of them and turn them into more per­for­mance arts. Since I study the Chi­nese Arts more for the mar­tial this doesn’t sit well with me. The gen­eral feel­ing in the broad com­mu­nity is that the best Chi­nese mas­ters left China years ago. Either way, watch­ing the team in action was great. And I was taught a short Bagua form (that had little to no mar­tial application… big surprise).

At the end of the work out (which was open to the public) the team’s coach came over and invited me to come to Tian­jin Uni­ver­sity in order to study Wu Shu. I politely thanked him, “shei shei,” (through the trans­la­tor) and declined. Before I get a swelled head I should note that he extended this offer to a number of par­tic­i­pants. But if I was ten years younger and not going to Chicago I might have con­sid­ered the offer.

It’s wierd when you find your­self saying “if I was ten years younger.”

Acer Update

Looks like I might have been wrong. So far noth­ing. I even visted shipping/recieving. Noth­ing. No love. Woe is me.

sooo close

The Acer still isn’t here, but my refur­bished Tung­sten T and Palm Key­board came in. I ordered both the day before the laptop so I was hoping this was a sign that it would be in today. No luck so far :-(.

The Tung­sten is great and I think this is going to help me a lot with pub­lish­ing meet­ing notes. I’ve had a Palm of one sort or another for the last seven years or so and I don’t know how I lived with­out them.

i’ve lost it

I keep walk­ing back and forth in front of kodak.com mail sta­tion hoping that the Acer will mag­i­cally appear there. While I want it to come today, I have a feel­ing I won’t see it until tomor­row. Uggg… the sus­pense is killing me!

And of course I’m build­ing this up way too much for myself. I’m just afraid it’s going to suck.