Sunday, December 25, 2005

Merry Christmas!

Here's a recent picture of the nice Christmas tree in front of my condo building. Hope everyone is having a good holiday!

Monday, December 12, 2005

The Art of Selling Stuff on Craigslist

So, believe it or not, I've never yet used eBay to buy or sell anything. Somehow dealing with shipping and faraway people that you don't know is a bit intimidating. So recently I got inspired to sell off some of my old electronics/computer stuff and decided to try using craigslist to do it.

This has a few nice benefits:

- posting an ad is free
- there is an email anonymizer which protects you from getting your information harvested by spammers
- many people are open to doing a face to face transaction for cash, and some will even come to me to do it

So far I sold my old Samsung i500 cell phone and a D-Link 802.11b card I was using in my old TiVo. I'm on the verge of selling my old DVD player and my old G4 tower.

A few tips for anyone that wants to try this out... put "cash only, local pickup" in the ad if that's what you want to do. Some people actually read the ad. Also, I started asking for a contact phone number in the ad which is another way of filtering out spammers.

Anyone that doesn't give a phone number or asks the condition of the item when it is stated in the ad can be safely ignored as a spammer. Anyone whose area code I don't recognize can be easily located using a Google search. I've gotten a few responses from places in New York, for example.