Tbux.com: blah blah rant

After my blog post on May 8th, which was mirrored on the There Voice, I was happy to see KittenKat publish a response there. It really shows how there are two sides to every story, and although the whole thing may come off as airing dirty laundry in public, the alternative of gossip and rumors seems worse to me.

I don't want to make a big deal out of it and publish anything else on the matter in the There Voice, but since this is my blog, and blogs are by nature somewhat self-indulgent, I thought I would make some sort of response here to Kittenkat's response. So if you are actually here reading my blog, indulge me for a minute...

First, kittenkat says I completely stopped responding to emails from her. This is true...she says I glosses over that fact, but I don't think I did. She sent me an email saying "if you're using a bot, stop. If you aren't using a bot, then leave some sales request for others". I wasn't prepared to do that, so I simply didn't answer her emails. It was only a couple of emails! By responding, all I would do is give myself less time to get my own system up and running. KittenKat also implies that it hurt her personally that I didn't respond...and I don't think she is making that up or anything, but at the same time...well, kittenkat and I used to IM sometimes or email, but I've always felt that the only time she would ever contact me was to ask me a question about how to do something in 3ds Max or gmax or to quiz me about how my imvu credits selling site worked and how to use the IMVU payment gateway. Not that she wasn't nice and chatty, and I'm sure she's busy and all, but it doesn't really feel like friendship or a warm, personal relationship when she only contacts me to ask me for information to help her set up her competing business(es). I feel a little bad saying that but...I can't help how I feel.

Kittenkat also says that sellers complained that they wanted to claim sales requests but couldn't because of my bot. They may have had a hard time claiming sales requests, but it was actually easier for them with the bot then against jinx the human being! The thing that made it harder wasn't the bot, but the fact that email was broken so nobody was getting notified that there was a request. Otherwise, anyone sitting right there at their computer would have had a very good chance of getting the request before the bot did. I even turned the bot off at times and watched requests sit there for hours without being claimed. Actually, for a long time there were hundreds of unclaimed requests, because nobody wanted to claim the smaller transactions.

People say a bot is unfair, but just what is and is not unfair? There was no rule against a bot. Before I claimed most of the requests, Viv did. I don't think Viv had a bot, but somehow she was faster than me EVEN IF I was right there at the computer with the proper web page open. How did she do that??? Was that fair? If someone had a boyfriend that was a night owl and claimed requests on their behalf while they were sleeping, would that be fair? Is using your boyfriend to claim requests somehow more "fair" than using a bot?

But ultimately, is it fair to the people trying to sell their ThereBucks TO tbux.com? For years, people asked to join tbux.com as a seller and were denied. Instead, to sell their ThereBucks through tbux.com they would have to go through the "submit a request and wait for someone to claim it and email you" process. There were many more sellers than there were members of tbux.com. Is it fair to THEM to try to make things as fair as possible for the much smaller number of people who are actually allowed to be members, when it inconveniences them to have to wait to be contacted, sometimes for hours? (Or never, as was the case with the smaller transactions for so long.) And who wants a version of "fair" that involves everyone wasting more of their time?

Kittenkat says people were forced, because of me, to sit up until all hours of the night trying to claim sales requests and they couldn't because of my bot. First of all, this is simply not true. My bot would check for sales an average of every ten minutes. Anyone sitting at their computer and checking for requests say...every five minutes...would have had a better chance of getting a request than the bot. And anyway...for TWO YEARS I was sitting at my computer trying to do exactly what she says these people were "forced" to do. Tbux.com has something like 20 sellers now...are they all "forced" to sit up late at night trying to claim requests against each other now???? I think their odds with the bot were better! "Fair" is just completely stupid when it involves everyone wasting their time equally, and then the people selling to the site wasting their time as well.

Kittenkat says she wanted to claim some requests and couldn't,but she just let it go until others complained. BUT...for almost the entire time I was using a bot, there were smaller requests just sitting there. Hundreds of them that no-one claimed! Let's be honest here...people were complaining that they couldn't get the "good" requests, because there were loads and loads of the smaller ones that aren't worth as much, just waiting to be claimed. (Note: kittenkat also recently made a rule that sales requests must be claimed in order, so you aren't allowed to skip over a smaller request, so this doesn't happen any more. That rule should have been made long before, although you can always just ignore the smaller request hoping someone else will claim it until you are "forced" to claim it by an arrival of a larger request.)

To say that what I did was unfair is to discount the much greater number of people who benefited from what I did. My bot allowed faster service for hundreds of people, while maybe two tbuxers lost out on a few larger transactions because they weren't willing to dedicate as much time to it as I had.

There wasn't any rule against using a bot. I've had one person say to me "there was a rule and you just disregarded it", but actually there was no such rule until my last few days on the site.

Oh and finally...Kittenkat says that adding more members to the tbux.com site doesn't add more competition as I "suggest" in my original posting/article, because everyone is able to sell all of their ThereBucks. That's true...the economy of There is strong and so resellers are always able to sell out...however adding more sellers makes the flow of ThereBucks less even, and so sometimes you could end up with 10 sellers selling at once, which makes things harder for the sellers. If you are competing against 9 other people to sell your ThereBucks, it is going to take you that much longer to sell out, and so you are going to have to worry about whether you have any transactions to fill or not for that much longer of a time period. If all the ThereBucks flow through a smaller number of people, it really smooths things out. Trust me, I sold more ThereBucks than anyone through tbux.com for years. It can make the difference between selling out in a couple of hours, or a couple of days.

Wow! A secret message from your teeth!

About a month or so ago, after eating at the Tonga Room and playing the "...in bed" game with the usual end-of-meal fortune cookies (read your fortune cookie out loud and then add "...in bed" to the end of whatever it says) I decided it would be a Really Great Idea to have fortune cookies after every meal.

Only eating at restaurants that serve fortune cookies would have been one way to do this, but I don't think my bf would have liked being restricted to eating at chinese takeout joints and cheesy tiki bars, so instead I ordered a case of fortune cookies on amazon. Soon we were tormenting restaurant and bar staff up and down the peninsula with our silly reindeer games.

We had a lot of fun and I highly recommend to anyone that they try fortune cookies after every meal...they go great with italian food, spanish, french...why should asian cuisine get all the fortune-telling goodness? Then I had the brilliant idea to dip the cookies in chocolate. OMG...not only do fortune cookies go great with every kind of cuisine, they are to-die-for when dipped in chocolate! Really, once you try one dipped in chocolate, a non-chocolate-dipped cookie will just seem naked. I tried white chocolate, milk chocolate and dark chocolate, and I'd recommend you stick with just dark chocolate. It definitely has the best taste/contrast with the delicately orange-flavored cookie, and besides...it has more anti-oxidants.

Usually the "...in bed" game works great and is pretty hysterical after some wine or a few cocktails. Check these out...

"Today is a great day for learning something new...in bed"

"Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change...in bed."

"You are almost there...in bed."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year...in bed."

"You are careful and systematic in your business arrangements...in bed."

Sometimes they can seem a little more disturbing, like...

"Working with children has a miraculous effect on your spirits...in bed."

And occasionally they are just plain weird (even if you don't add "in bed" on the end such as...

"Wow! A secret message from your teeth!"

I want to know what opiate someone was smoking when they wrote that one. And...can I have some?

And another question: What do I do once I've gone through all 400 fortune cookies in the case?
I think in the name of progress, I will have to start making my own cookies from scratch. Just think, I can even write my own fortunes that way. That should add a new level of interest to the "...in bed" game!

Once again an IMVU VIP

Okay, I am a VIP, I'm not, now I am...I can't keep track. I emailed the *exclusive VIP only* email address to enquire about why I lost my VIP status and it was four days until someone got back to me. I can once again be all snobby with "VIP" on my homepage and by my forum posts. Maybe I will get some hatemail or some more people begging for credits because of it!

I received a very nice email from a "Lisa" at IMVU who gave me my status back until June 21, so all is right with the world again, but I have to wonder what the big deal is with having an *exclusive VIP only* email address to contact IMVU at if it takes four days for someone to get back to you. I guess it could take even longer using a different contact address???

Pig Worship

Totally cute pic, eh? A few months ago an ex-bf of mine was writing me a letter and drinking some wine. Halfway through the letter and the wine, he decided calling would be better. What followed was a phone conversation basically about how he regretted pushing me away and not wanting to possibly restart our relationship until he found out I was dating someone else, plus he had a dream about me, which made him feel he definitely DID want to explore any possibility that might have still been between us. In other words, typical guy stuff.

That didn't happen. I mean I'm dating a really amazing guy who lives right across the bay from me, why would I want to "explore the possibilities" with someone who lives 3000 miles away and isn't even really sure what they want and that I often have a hard time talking to without getting in a fight?

The letter that sparked that phonecall never arrived as promised, but today I received a small parcel in the mail that contained a note letting me know that he was cutting ties with his past and I wouldn't be hearing from him again but he hoped I'd have much happiness in life, and that he had destroyed all of the letter except for this drawing, which he thought summed up the spirit of the letter as he intended it better than the actual words ever could.

Admittedly, although I find this guy's behavior a bit flakey, the picture made tears well up in my eyes. The scan doesn't really capture it that well and some of the color is pretty inaccurate, but I think - like the original it is scanned from - it still conveys more meaning than a thousand words ever could. I think I'm going to have the original framed.

IMVU Headquarters: Sneak Attack!

Heheh...today is Friday and I knew if I emailed Matt at IMVU and said I was going to show up at IMVU today he'd be like "it's a bad day to do that, don't come." Fridays are never, ever good for Matt in my experience. BUT I had something that needed to be delivered asap, so I cancelled with my personal trainer and just showed up at IMVU. Surprise!!! ;)

IMVU has 45 employees now! I used to know everyone that worked there, at least until they had about 12 - 15 employees. Now it's just a sea of faces I don't know. Wow. I think I stole some of Will-the-CEO-with-the-charismatic-smile's face-time with Matt, but Will was really polite about it and said he liked my hair, then I said "hi" to Clare, who looked very harried and like she was afraid I was going to yell at her about something, then I pestered Dusty about Shoutouts and found out he's not even the person who wrote the code for them so I've been pestering the wrong person all these months and Dusty has just been soooo nice about it. I waived to the always-on-the-phone Ari, caught a few glimpses of the elusive Eric, moved out of the way of a bunch of people I've never seen before in my life, and got to see some reallllly cool stuff Marcus is working on. Marcus Rulez!!!! Well, he used some products of mine in the new registration pages without asking me, but other than that he rules.

Sadly, I forgot my camera. I guess I have to go back again soon. Any guesses ahead of time which employees will or won't actually let me post pics of them in my blog?

Excuse: Pruning IMBOOB

Ugghhh...this whole week has been putting out fires. I had all these creative plans but so far I've had to do all this stuff that isn't my idea of how I'd like to spend my time, like going through the imboob forums and removing thousands of threads, thousands of posts, and banning hundreds of accounts and dozens of IP addresses. Now imboob seems to be pretty spam and pr0n free, but I'm not sure it's actually set to allow any new signups at this time.

In case you don't know, imboob is the forum that supports the Boobinator. The Boobinator is a program you run alongside the IMVU client which allows you to save outfits and change them with one click. If you've ever tried to put on a totally different outfit/look in IMVU without using the Boobinator...I'd be surprised if you weren't thinking to yourself "this is a royal pain in the arse." Well, you don't need to do that...just use the Boobinator. You can download it from the top of the forum. I don't link directly to it because the download link changes for every new version.

I'm NOT an IMVU VIP

Well, that was quick. After reading the IMVU forums VIP section I decided paying for "VIP" status was really not worth it, and I cancelled my subscription. I seem to be totally removed from the program now...Immediately. Shouldn't I have gotten 30 days or until the end of this month or something? Sheesh, that's not fair! This program is not-quite-ready-for-prime-time.

Bundles are a great value...it's like they have to entice you anew each time. But VIP? Once they have your subscription I guess they figure they can just sit back and rake in the automated payments from you each month. The worst part is that bundles and VIP bonuses overlap from what I have seen. So you might get something like "Britany's Barber Chair" with some credits as this great bundle, and then you get the barber chair with the VIP package as well. So you're paying for it twice, but it's not like you have an extra one to give away or something.

Hmmm...I wonder...VIPs get special animations...did they take my animations away now even though I paid for the month? Or...do I get to keep the animations I paid for? Or...what? I can't even post in the VIP forums to ask about that, because I don't have my status any more.

Happy Solar-powered Mother's Day

Last Sunday was Mother's Day, at least here in the U.S., and while many people probably gave their mom flowers and/or took her out for Sunday Brunch, I got my mom a Solio Universal Hybrid Solar Charger.
The Solio is soooo cool. You fan out the petals in the sun, and charge it up...something like 8-10 hours later it has enough juice to charge up two devices, like your camera and your cell phone or your ipod and your blackberry. Not only great if you are off hiking somewhere, but it also holds a charge for a year so you could store it for emergencies (you can still listen to and recharge your iPod if there is a blackout!) And just think of the electricity you are saving. Just don't forget to unplug your now-uneeded and old-fashioned charger from the wall, as they use electricity even when they aren't charging anything. I got it for her because I wanted one myself and I thought I'd live vicariously through her until I actually do get my own. AND, I think she'll actually use it...you know, my mom recycles and doesn't leave the water running, drives a Prius and goes hiking, etc.

I'm cuckoo for solar powered anything. I don't have a Solio yet, but I have solar powered x-mas lights (which you can find on eBay) - and they might be a bit hard to use on an indoor tree, but they work great out on a balcony...even if you don't have full-sun and even on cloudy days. That sun is powerful stuff, man!

Thank you to http://jinx.tv/tbux buyers

Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick! I just wrote this whole post up and then IE decided to crash just as I was publishing it.

After posting "tbux.com: my story", and having it mirrored on the There Voice, plus emailing people who have bought/sold from me in the past, I was very pleased and all warm and fuzzy inside from the overwhelmingly positive responses I received. So, thank you to all you wonderful crazy shop-aholic and developer-type Thereians who have been soooo sweet!

I did receive a few emails that disturbed me. One member said they understood what it was like to be obsessive compulsive. What? Who?? Me??? What, just because I obsessively spent a couple of years compulsively checking sales on tbux.com? haha...okay, they have a point, but it's not all bad to be obsessive-compulsive as long as you channel those tendencies into something productive...like, not washing your hands 100x a day but maybe building up your business. I would never have been the first There developer to reach 1000 submissions if I hadn't been so obsessed with the There developer program. I wouldn't have made a living buying and selling virtual currency if I weren't obsessive.

What really did disturb me were the half dozen or so emails I received pledging to buy ThereBucks only from me, as if I were right and tbux.com were wrong. What??? I didn't know there was a right or wrong here, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. While I think the sentiment was sweet and the intentions were good, I don't really see it as me against them and I think you'd be foolish to try and choose between me and tbux.com. Discount ThereBucks are a sellers market...because there are ultimately always more people wanting to buy them than there are discounted ThereBucks available for sale. So rather than pledge fidelity to ONE reseller, I think it's far more sensible to cover all your bases.

Now, if more than one place is listed as selling at the same time, by all means buy from me! ;) I do deliver in less than ten minutes if you already belong to my club, and while we're talking about speed, you'll probably get your PayPal payments the fastest if you're selling to me, and I'm grateful for your loyalty. I just don't think anyone should limit themselves...just go for what works best for you at the time. That's what I did! :)

I'm an IMVU VIP...well, la di da!

Today I decided to join the IMVU VIP club. I was a little hesitant because it seems a bit lame to have a gold "VIP" sign by your name everywhere and a bunch of info about it on your homepage like what number your VIP account is and when you joined. I did notice you can turn that part off, though.

The reason I joined was to see if it was worth it. The IMVU site doesn't explain very well what all the benefits are (probably because they don't totally know themselves) but you get some credits every month with your membership along with some "gifts" and special animations (well, "coming soon") as well as (woohoo!) waived fees for IMVU conferences and a special section in the IMVU forums. It's only $4.99 for the first month so...what the heck? I wish I knew if I was going to get anything special this month, like the "Magic Nights" prom package or some pieces from it. I'm already experiencing some buyer's remorse. :(

Update:
Okay, the VIP forum on IMVU gives more information on what you get each month. For May you get 5,000 credits and some "animated Astro Rockets". No idea what that is, I only know it's not the prom bundle. I really don't think this VIP thing is worth it! You could order the Magic Nights bundle and for $14.99 you'd get 20,000 credits (which honestly I think is too many for that price) along with the whole prom scene including 25 pieces of furniture. That one is a good deal (maybe too good) but the VIP package? Not so much.

Petfood Recall

When my mom was here visiting, she asked me if I had been feeding my cats any of the food that was under recall by petfood manufacturers. That sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I dismissively said "oh, I only feed my cats the most natural, premium foods possible, with human-grade ingredients".

Several weeks later, after I ordered China her rabbit hutch, I was on the PetSmart website and I decided to read their recall list. Darned if I didn't have two and a half cases of Blue Buffalo catfood right in my own cupboard! That was a bit upsetting. My trainer said I should "sue their asses" because I have a cat with cancer and I'm spending thousands of dollars on her treatment while this food is poisoning her, and I did contact a lawyer that was looking for plaintiffs in a class action suit, but my bf said lawyers that file class action suits are usually a bunch of ambulance chasers and by joining their suit you'll probably get a check for $25 someday while the real payout is for the law firm.

I was kind of upset I'd been feeding my cats this food, but in the end I decided to listen to my bf and after the vet yesterday I simply took the food back to my local PetSmart. What upset me the most was that 1.) PetSmart didn't contact me to tell me they'd sold me this food and 2.) as I mentioned above, I try hard to buy my cats the highest quality catfood possible. I pay a premium price for it, and then I find out that the petfood manufacturer is getting their ingredients from the same place as a lot of brands that are much cheaper and aren't marketed as a premium food. I'm about ready to start making all my cats' food from scratch. Of course, I don't even know if China would eat that food. The vet seems to feel it's more important for her to eat something she likes rather than what is "best" for her, since she's been losing weight.

At the oncologist yesterday, China weighed exactly the same as last visit! That isn't as good as gaining weight, but it's much better than losing. I think my rabbit hutch idea was a good one, if only I could find a way to keep Rodney's naughty paws out from between the bars. The other night I thought the hutch door was closed but it must not have been...he managed to get in the hutch, eat all the special food, and then throw it back up. Gooooo Rodney! Man, he's getting fat, too. :(

Here is a typical bill from the vet for China:

Chemo: Doxorubicin / MI..........101.46
Chemo: Doxorubicin Bundle
Catheter: IV set up & placement...54.90
Cbc: In House Machine.............47.50
Chem: Bun & Creatinine............18.84
Chemo Premedication...............48.00
Chemo Set Up/Haz Disposal.........16.90
Consultation: Brief Exam..........46.00
Out Patient Care..................34.31
Rad Tx Stt........................10.50
_________________________________378.41

Wheeee! At least it's cheaper than a human. I had a five minute consultation with a nurse practitioner the other day and it was $135.

Excuse: Spontaneous Rebooting

Monday morning I was, for the first time recently, doing some development work in Photoshop before going to the gym. Not just monitoring sales or doing customer service stuff or making banner ads...I was making actual "stuff" when my computer decided to spontaneously reboot. Again. It started doing this a while back, but this is the first time I've lost work because of it. So, I started out doing "work" and ended up using Panda ActiveScan and removing a couple USB devices that could have possibly been causing the driver failure (I hope.)

I'd like to say I got a bunch of work done later in the day, but I know I didn't. I'm not 100% sure what I was doing that afternoon, but Monday evenings are salsa class and this was the first day of the new session. Oooooh...I feel soooo bad I got my bf to play hooky for the last class of the previous session. This new class had some much more experienced people in it and it's bigger so we didn't get to dance with each other pretty much the whole time. I had guys trying all their much more advanced moves on me (butterfly? wth?) and he had women expecting him to lead them in moves he had no clue how to do. At the end of the hour he seemed pretty unhappy, but nothing a trip to Iberia Restaurant and four glasses of sangria (I hear Iberia uses something like six kinds of alcohol in it...would you like some wine mixed with your hard liquor?) couldn't almost completely reverse. We were feeling no pain. In fact, I'd say that fourth glass of sangria wasn't the best idea. I'd like to blame the bartender for that one...he poured it for us after the bill was paid. Of course that was in response to my "quiero mas sangria!" But...he didn't have to actually listen to me! I say all kinds of crazy stuff in foreign languages - some of which even makes sense, apparently - when I'm drinking.

Still feeling guilty (on top of being hung-over) for the hooky debacle, the next morning I ordered our instructor's salsa lesson dvd. She said you only need it if you're struggling in the class. Well, Monday evening we started struggling!

Excuse: Entertaining Clients

Well, not MY clients, my bf's, and it's more like they were entertaining us. But anyway...Thursday was the day we did what I wanted to do, watching campy sci-fi b-movies and lesbian burlesque, so I'm thinking "okay, on Friday we do his have dinner with clients thing" which sounds about as exciting to me as "let's go have a three hour meeting".

I'm happy to say it was actually fun. His clients are interesting characters. Other than me wearing red and everyone else wearing beige I felt like I fit in fine, although if I come up in conversations in the future I may be referred to as "the peyote girl" (don't ask!) It was enjoyable enough that I think we are actually going to invite them somewhere in a couple of weeks.

We went to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, which was kind of cool because, since I'm a vegetarian, we wouldn't have normally gone to. That place is okay...at least they have a portobello mushroom dish. They served me a salad with bacon in it after obviously going to great lengths to try and give me the one without bacon in it, and I ate a few bacon bits before realizing so...ew! For dessert we had the warm apple crumb tart, which was really not the greatest. If you go there, you should probably have the carmelized banana cream pie.

Saturday we went to brunch at Saint Micheal's Alley. I didn't see an alley, so not sure what the name is all about, but the Blue Monkey pancakes are really amazing and the mimosas are pretty great, too. Oh, and the strawberry bread pudding comes with the most amazing sauce. Definitely the best food we had this weekend. I know we'll be back.

Then Saturday evening we went out again...can you say "get me a stomach pump, please"? We went to Mistral, which was my first ever trip to Redwood Shores. Now I know where Electronic Arts and Oracle are...because we passed them when we missed our turn and got a little lost. Well, not lost exactly...I don't think you can get lost in Redwood Shores because everything doubles back on itself eventually. We had the wild mushroom streudel, which was okay but I think filo was the wrong choice for a crust, and for an entree I had the scallops...every once in a while I will eat a scallop or four, you know? They are practically plants anyway...they don't even have a nervous system. Hey...don't look at me like that! Sheesh. For dessert we had the blood orange cheesecake, which was pretty good. That place is somewhat nice, with a view of the water and some of Redwood Shores prefab townhomes and generic office buildings, and they have a fireplace, too.

Haha...you didn't know this was going to be a restaurant review, did you?

China in the rabbit hutch

Click to Play

China seems to like the hutch, but the food? Not so much. I have to shut her in not to keep her in but to keep Rodney out.

Excuse: Lesbian Burlesque

Last night we went to the Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland for their Thursday night Thrillville show, which was showing Barbarella and included a show by the Twilight Vixen Revue, an all-lesbian burlesque troupe.

It's funny people's perceptions of things. I think if you say there is going to be a show by a burlesque troupe, you may think of 80 year old, plump white-haired grannies telling you about what it was like "back in the day" when stripping was an art and not about shaking your money maker in someone's face for a dollar, while twirling a tired old feather boa and wearing too much rouge. But once you add "lesbian" at the beginning, and especially knowing you are in the Bay Area, home to such venerable institutions as the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre as well as loads of colleges and a thriving, liberal gay culture, and because "lesbian burlesque" somehow conjures the same reaction as, say, "women's prison" (sounds sexy!) you end up with something perceived entirely differently.

So what could be better than some cheesy 1968 sci-fi-comedy-cult-classic movie along with a little burlesque on a Thursday night? We thought we were clever showing up a half hour early. Haha...shows what we know! We're lucky we got to sit together towards the back of the theater, and we didn't even get a table so we had to balance pizza and wine on our laps. The movie was actually funnier/better than expected, at least *I* thought so. My bf, who enjoys fine restaurants, live jazz, golfing, etc. said something about "I'm going to need some more wine to get through this" and then later something about how we should plan a trip to Las Vegas if we want to see some good burlesque. I think he had fun, there were some definite laugh-out-loud moments, and the audience comments were rather amusing sometimes...but I'm not sure how many b-movies or how much campy burlesque he'd like to sit through in the future. Oh my...and I wanted us to go to the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show!

Excuse: Today is my day off?

I was walking to the gym yesterday when a DHL truck stops right in front of me, in the middle of the street. It's my "regular" DHL guy...of course I kind of know all the delivery drivers: I was a prisoner in my own apartment for so long I've gotten used to ordering just about anything online. Name something and I've probably found/ordered it online. So this guy says "hey, I have a package for you! I'll just leave it outside your door, okay?"

So, I get home from the gym and there is no package but a little while later the doorbell rings and it's him. "Oh, you're home already...you're fast!" he says. "I was at the gym but I didn't do any cardio today" say I. WTH? Why did I just tell my DHL guy I didn't do cardio? "Oh, you work out?" he says. "What gym? Oh, that's my gym, too! I skip cardio all the time because this route is like cardio, it has more stairs than any of the other routes."

Okay, so this guy goes to my gym. WHY OH WHY do I keep confessing to people who work out at my gym that I didn't do cardio? I think I really need to do my cardio today. My idea was that skipping cardio would give me more time to clean and cleaning is like doing cardio anyway. However, I didn't actually clean anything. I didn't do much of anything yesterday. I watched a movie about the life of Ron Jeremy...woo! I'm happy to report that he has more products cluttering his bathroom counter than I do. Thanks, Ron, for making me feel like maybe my bathroom counter isn't that cluttered after all.

Excuse: Salsa vs. Sangria

Mondays are normally salsa class night, but this Monday we were naughty, naughty hookey playing, sangria drinking, tapas eating fools! We went to Menlo Park to sit at the bar at Iberia Restaurant and change the television from sports to Spongebob Squarepants when the bartender wasn't looking. It's a nice place. The Yelp reviews call it the closest thing in the Bay Area to being in a tapas bar/restaurant in Spain. If you like weird meat dishes, it's a great place to go, but as a vegetarian I thought it was pretty tasty, too. The sangria was especially good, I'd go back there again just for that.

I realized yesterday (Tuesday) that my bf and I spent nearly 8 hours together Monday evening. That is practically a standard workday! No wonder I don't get much done sometimes. Haha...but c'mon...we have to enjoy life while we can, right?

tbux.com: my story

Recently, I was removed as a member/seller from the site tbux.com. I had been selling ThereBucks there for 3 1/2 years. I was also removed from all the related clubs on There.com. I get tired of secrets and gossip and I thought I'd just talk honestly here about why this happened, at least from my point of view.

Tbux.com has maybe a dozen members...I don't know, recently the numbers changed after being the same for years...and those members have the privledge of listing themselves as selling ThereBucks on the site. Anyone else with ThereBucks to sell can put in a sell request, which generates an email that goes out to all the tbux members (although the email part was broken for quite a while) letting them know someone was selling and they can all race to "claim" the transaction. Whoever claims it first then has the right to email the potential seller and ask them to send the ThereBucks.

In my opinion, this system is very inefficient. Also, smaller sales requests require a lot of work for a very small amount of profit, and it wastes the time of anyone who is trying to claim the request but doesn't get there first. It also wastes the time of the person looking to sell, as they have to wait to see who claims their request to be able to send their ThereBucks somewhere and then receive a PayPal payment.

Honestly, if I were setting up the site I would have just claimed all the sale requests myself, instead of having all the sellers squabble over them or selectively only claim the larger transactions or whatever. Of course, I never would have said that while I was a member of the site, because if that suggestion was actually taken seriously I'd never have been able to claim any requests myself.

Another inefficiency is simply the number of sellers on the site. Recently even more sellers were added, so if you are a member-seller you have to compete with other member-sellers for sales. The more sellers they add, the more they have to compete with each other and the more uneven the sales and the longer it takes each of them to sell out the ThereBucks they have. Also, the site doesn't really tell you how much they are selling or take note when a larger transaction comes in, so they need to build a lot of padding into the amount they are selling or risk not being able to fill the orders received, which is always a hassle.

I don't mean to bash tbux.com. I sold there for over 3 1/2 years and it's been the best thing out there for that whole time and has helped me make a living. I'm only pointing out the flaws that bothered me more and more over time but certainly not enough to leave the site or even really complain about it. Kittenkat runs the site and asks almost nothing from the other members, and it's been great selling there and I think she was really visionary to build it in the first place back in 2003.

Rather than complain about the limitations of the site, I simply tried to adapt. I wanted to claim as many sales requests as possible, so I set up primitive systems to help me claim them before any other tbuxer. I kept a laptop right next to my bed, I set an audible alert for sales emails, and I really never went anywhere or had a life because I didn't want to miss a single sale. Seriously, I was afraid to go to the store and run errands because I didn't want to miss a big sale that might make the difference in whether I could pay rent or bills that month. I bought a treadmill so I could exercise without leaving my apartment. I was obsessed, and I was really good at claiming the sales. My day would be ruined if someone else managed to claim one. And of course, they probably wouldn't bother if it was a smaller transaction, those they would sometimes just leave for me. I never thought that was right and never did it myself until finally I saw Kittenkat herself blatantly do it, so then I decided I was justified in doing it without guilt.

I was pretty miserable having no life, my biggest thrill being claiming sales requests on tbux.com before anyone else, so I decided I needed to automate the process. It took me about a year to find someone to do this for me, but I ended up with a really great system that even might occassionally pass a turing test. I was soooo happy! It wasn't foolproof, this system of mine, because it was still possible for someone else to be there at the right time and claim a request before me, but it did a better job than I did and I could sleep soundly at night or go get my hair done in San Francisco, go on dates, find a boyfriend, work out at a real gym, go away somewhere overnight etc. My quality of life improved about 1000%, and I believe it was better for those selling to me as well, since they didn't have to wait for their transactions to be claimed, or only had to wait maybe 15 minutes no matter what time of night or day.

Okay, so far so good, but obviously things didn't remain that way or I wouldn't be writing this right now. After more than a year of automated bliss, at least one member of the tbux.com site complained that they suspected I was using a bot and it wasn't fair and was in fact immoral. I was contacted and asked that, if I was in fact automating the process, I stop immediately and if I wasn't that I leave some transactions for other members, and eventually an email was sent out to members of the site informing us that using a 'bot was now against the rules. Well, I don't want to break the rules, but I also have gotten quite used to actually having a life, so following this new rule meant to me that...

1. I would either have no life once again, or I would keep my life but lose at least half the money I was making or more from ThereBucks reselling, plus if I go back to the "no life" option I'll probably just look like a 'bot anyway...I'd probably get told to stop claiming so many of them even if it's manually, because other members have decided it's not fair. Too me this is really silly, and it means that each time a sale request came in, I'd have to go to the sale request page and evaluate whether it was appropriate for me to claim that particular request or not. Maybe wait 15 minutes to see if someone else would like to claim it instead so I don't get chastised again. What a big waste of my time! Plus, it's just not...well...who is going to voluntarily take a cut in income like that, especially without a cut in time spent on the activity, at least without a fight? Or...who is going to take a cut in quality of life like that, especially after spending a year trying to automate the process in the first place?

2. I still felt the whole claiming of requests by some random person manually was inefficient, and it seemed like a step back in quality of service for the people that "we" bought from.

So I sent an indignant email back to Kittenkat, not admitting to using a 'bot, but protesting that I hadn't done anything wrong. She still wanted me to stop using the 'bot, so I simply stopped responding to her emails. I didn't know what else to do, and it seemed like the best way to buy time while I set up a new system. Eventually, she kicked me off the tbux.com site, and so I started up my own site...it wasn't really what I wanted to do, the whole thing made me really sad, but it seemed like far and away the best option.

The silver lining is that now I can run a ThereBucks selling site the way *I* want, and fix the little things that have bugged me over the years. I can claim sales requests instantly, I can pay buyers within ten minutes, people can see how much is for sale and I don't sell more than I have. I'm actually starting to get excited about it, because I think it's a good system and people have actually been using it! So thanks, and if you haven't tried it yet, it's at http://jinx.tv/tbux

Well, glad we have that all sorted! Be sure to read the above with the thought that this is just *my* side of the story, and each person involved is sure to have their own version.

See you in There! (or IMVU, or somewhere.)

Excuse: I'm being efficient

Most mornings I spend two hours at the gym. One hour is for weights with my trainer and one hour is cardio on the eliptical trainer or maybe the treadmill. I'm a little bored with it and this morning I decided that it would be a more productive and efficient use of my time to go home and clean and do laundry instead of that second hour. Besides...who would know? So, I'm at the Grocery Outlet buying water (oh, okay and a Haagan Das bar...) when this guy behind me in line says "done at the gym already?" WTF??? I'm so busted! Some guy from the gym recognized me and started a conversation with me. It was kind of cool actually because 1.) he's been working out for 30 years so he probably knows a thing or ten and 2.) even though I have been going to the same gym 3-5 days a week for over a year, I can count on one hand how many people I even say "hello" to, and now I might have to start counting on two hands!

Oh, Regina Spektor's "Fidelity" was playing at the gym this morning. It is REALLY not good gym music, and although I love her the other people around me were like "oh, ugh, what is this crap?" It shows, though, that she is now officially popular. Just don't try to pump iron to the following lyrics:

And suppose I never met you
Suppose we never fell in love
Suppose I never ever let you kiss me so sweet and so soft

Excuse: I stink!

This weekend has been long and yet at times relaxing. It started Friday evening when we went to The Stinking Rose and then took a tour around the city via Equinox, meant to dance at Milagros but ended up elsewhere making our servers find out their fortune...in bed. Finally, Sunday was a day of mostly inspiring reading but also some purge cleaning.

Thursday I saw the movie Tsotsi, and I decided I liked it so much I had to get the soundtrack, plus while I was at it the soundtrack to Shortbus, a movie I like more the more I think about it (the bonus stuff on the dvd was really interesting, and helped me like the movie more.) I also got an album by Mika (Life in Cartoon Motion), which was recommended on the Shortbus website. So I'm really liking all my new music, plus the Tsotsi dvd had a cool music video on it so I tried my hand at ripping one track to an iPod sized video using CloneDVDMobile and it seems to have come out great!

Friday was The Stinking Rose. I wanted to go there because it's famous. Any time you read an article on garlic in a food or gourmet magazine or a book talks about it, it's always "there is even a restaurant where everything has garlic in it, even the icecream!" and they are referring to The Stinking Rose. It didn't get very good reviews on Yelp, so I was prepared to not like it very much, so I would have to say it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be! The restaurant is rather pretty, especially on the outside - I guess it has to be, to be in North Beach and entice people away from all the other gorgeous-on-the-outside restaurants there. We ordered the roasted garlic cloves in olive oil and butter (Bagna Calda) to start and it was delicious on our bread (and everything else I put it on, much to the amusement/alarm of my bf) and then the Garlic Swiss Chard Fontina Fondue as an appetizer. The menu isn't very vegetarian friendly, so we then just split the Garlic Gorgonzola Neon Ravioli. My bf isn't vegetarian, so I guess he could have gotten Midwestern Corn Fed Beef with Garlic Mashed Potatoes (um, corn fed? why would someone brag about that? isn't that kind of the default? Now, if it was grass-fed, free-range, that would be something to brag about...but don't get me started with big agribusiness and government subsidy ranting!) but it's nice to split dishes so we don't end up wasting so much food.

The wine tasted like it was watered down, but we each had two glasses anyway. We didn't eat dessert there because the only garlic dessert was the icecream, and the icecream was from Gilroy, and we were in Gilroy last week eating garlic icecream which (false advertising!!!) is actually made in Santa Cruz. So we started wandering up and down the street looking for a dessert place. The people watching was fun (and nice revenge for being watched ourselves through the window of the Stinking Rose) but eventually we decided we'd rather go to Equinox, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt Regency.

At Equinox, we ordered some dessert I don't even remember clearly along with a couple glasses of port, which I am not usually a big fan of, but for once the sweetness of it was tasty. Maybe that's what happens after you eat a pound of garlic. As we were eating our non-memorable dessert, we noticed a lime wedge on the window ledge. The seating area of the restaurant is always turning in a big circle, but the center and the windows remain in place. So this lime wedge started heading towards us. Then we saw a strawberry with a grape on top of it coming 'round the bend, so my bf gave me a blueberry and I put that on top of the grape (since I was closer to it). Then, more lime wedges came around and eventually a wine cork with a butter ball on top. My naughty bf handed me a sprig of mint from our dessert and I garnished the butterball with it and we collapsed with laughter. After that more stuff came around...eventually messages on napkin pieces..."Help", "SOS" and finally "I need money!" Then...nothing. So, we had some irish coffees and left. Without the view and some amusing mystery people putting stuff on the window ledge, it would have been a pretty boring restaurant.

Saturday we were planning to go to our salsa instructor's dance fieldtrip at Milagros for Cinco de Mayo. However, Saturday wasn't just Cinco de Mayo, it was also the day of some big boxing match with Oscar De La Hoya. Not being a boxing fan, the guy to me is just a way to remember how to order my beans without lard en espanol, but hundreds of rowdy, drunken Milagros patrons seem to think otherwise. Even my bf; since he didn't get to watch the fight he's getting it on PPV next weekend.

Since Milagros was ablsolutely packed with drunk revelers and we didn't think it would be very easy to salsa to the mariachi band playing La Cucaracha and the service is usually bad there anyway, we decided to go to what is normally our Monday night restaurant, A Tavola. We sat at the bar and ordered wine and appetizers, and it would have felt just like a Monday night except it was a different bartender. We asked her why they weren't showing the fight, and she said "maybe because it's our last night". What????? It seems A Tavola is closing and then "remodelling" to become part of Milagros. Wahhhhh! But A Tavola has better food, better wine, better service and better decor! Life is so not fair! The only good part is that at least we got to be there on their last night.

Lately we have been - well okay, *I* have been - carrying around fortune cookies so we can read them after our meals. Our chances of being in a chinese, vietnamese, tiki bar or other fortune-cookie-serving restaurant are pretty small, so we have to bring our own little nuggets of future-divulging goodness. It's pretty fun, and lucky for us when we give one to our server and my bf says "and you have to play the in-bed game", they actually know what he is talking about. At least they have so far. The bartender at A Tavola was cool about it and so was the woman at Savvy Cellar, where we went next since Milagros was still totally packed with drunken revellers.

At Savvy Cellar, at least we look familiar to them I think. So when we called behind the bar from my cel phone and asked for one particular server to come over to give her a fortune cookie, she wasn't too like "omg, I think these people are crazy stalkers". In fact, she read her fortune to all I dunno...ten people in the place? So that's cool. Oh, and the wine...that place has amazing wine...really, really it does. I may start getting wine there for home use instead of BevMo or (hahaha) Grocery Outlet.

I may have broken some rule about how long a blog post should be, so let me just (wheeeee) slide on over to Sunday here and say that it was a very productive "idea" day. I've been reading a book that just came out that is called something like "The Four Hour Work Week", and it has some great ideas about efficiency and thinking outside the box and I found it very inspiring both business-wise and cleaning-my-patio-wise. And...that's all for now. Time to get ready for the gym and then ready for the arrival (finally) of the Rabbit Hutch! Then...what will happen after class tonight? No Monday night A Tavola! Wahhhhh!

Excuse: Hot Fuzz!

Did I mention I hate cleaning? I'm trying to remove mildew from my shower and it mostly worked but I think I stripped some grout off at the same time. Cleaning is the least rewarding thing. It's like making gingerbread houses...you put all this work into it and it's only temporary.

Yesterday started out very stressful. I almost didn't go to the gym because I thought I was going to be so busy. Then I just did weights and no cardio, because I thought what's one hour out of my day? Then I found out what I thought I HAD to do, I actually was not ABLE to do, so I spent my afternoon cleaning and doing laundry. Oh wait, that's not all I did...I did some Photoshop work...woohoo! I don't need excuses for yesterday because I did some real work beyond my basic monitoring of sales and customer service and the like.

So the fun part...we went to see Hot Fuzz. Honestly that movie was not as good/funny as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty good and relatively funny. There were only I think five people in the theater including ourselves, and it didn't look like there was much of anyone in any of the other theaters, either. It's rather sad. All of Redwood City is rather dead most of the time, even though they have this nice new downtown area. Fridays and Saturdays are a bit better, but Sundays are so bad we often go to Palo Alto instead - everything that is actually open that day will be closed by 7pm in RWC. Mondays are almost as bad, with places like Angelica's and the wine bar we like being closed...fortunately we found a quiet bar in one of RWC's nicer restaurants is open, and the bartender is cool, so we go there. This was a Wednesday, though, shouldn't things start picking up by then? I've thought of moving to Palo Alto...it's not a bad idea if I can find something right near the town center. I think that might scare the IMVU employees, though!

After the movie, we went to Mandaloun for a light dinner, and of course some wine. Visually, that is probably my favorite RWC restaurant, but food and wine-wise the menu is rather boring. At least they have a fireplace.

Oh! I almost forgot! Last night my bf brought me a magazine from SouthWest Airlines. It has a really long article on virtual worlds in it, well Second Life actually, and even features a Second Life avatar on the front cover. I haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting. Oh, and I found it online if you'd like to read it too.

Excuse: I can't juggle

I just moved my blog over from the IMVU blog, which is somewhat limiting and hard to understand and had some sort of caching problem (which Dusty said they didn't know about and were going to file a bug on) to my blogger blog, which I set up in December when I was taking a class on vlogging and podcasting. It's very easy to use and now I'm a bit inspired to maybe do some actual podcasting, but in the meantime all the posts I carefully predated are showing up as all being from yesterday and they don't show up in the correct order anyway. I'm trying to get over that and not let it bother me because really I don't know if it makes any difference to anyone but me what order they're in, but if they show up correctly on blogger, why not in the RSS feed? More troubling is why the title text is white and the background is grey. It doesn't match the settings of the panel, the settings in my main blog OR the look in the RSS preview thingy. WTH???

I watched a movie last night called "Shortbus". That there is the epitomy of an "unrated" movie. Really sort of a porn/mainstream crossover. It's about a sex therapist who has never had an orgasm and she spends the movie searching for one in New York City. It's actually not bad, although I only know one person I would actually recommend it to. Tons of nudity and sex and some bizarre stuff I won't mention here.

So...other things I did yesterday instead of getting all the work done I should have...

Well, I spent a lot of time emailing. Oh, and talking on the phone, which sucks because my earbuds broke so I have to actually hold the phone up to my ear. I'm not a big fan of talking on the phone and when both people are on a cell phone it's often like "what? what? Can you hear me now?" and I don't think it's the network.

I'm just not good at juggling all the things that need to get done in life. Cleaning is a good example. I'm a bit of a slob, or at least messy. I have a lot of books and papers and not enough places to put them. Same with clothes and random things like boxes full of cd/dvd storage cases. Plus, I just don't think to do things like scrub the bathroom tiles very often. Recently I thought if I spent maybe 30 minutes cleaning every day, then eventually my place would be all clean. What I didn't factor in was the part where things get messy again and need to be cleaned AGAIN, so that 30 minutes a day of cleaning will eventually just cause you to reach some sort of half-messy status quo which is better than before but is not really "clean". Plus I still don't have enough storage space, and this is even after getting rid of tons of stuff.

Today I don't know how much actual work I'll get done because I really need to clean my bathroom, do laundry, vacuum, clean the kitchen, and run some errands like get more cat litter and bleach, and then I'll barely have time to get ready before we are going out to see "Hot Fuzz". Heheh...I am really looking forward to that movie, but otoh I am a little stressed about probably not getting anything done today work-wise. I know it's just life and that billions of people live it every day, but how do people balance income producing activities, social life, cleaning/organizing and exercise? Oh yeah, and cooking/eating a balanced diet...that has to fit in there somewhere too.

I know I'm totally whiney this morning and I know I'm hardly unique...but loads of people do all these things and I would like to know how! For a long time I mostly concentrated on work, and then I put my main focus on exercise and work fell to the side a bit and I added the cooking/eating part and work really started slipping. Then I added in the social life part and work got even worse and eating started to slip. Then I tried to add in cleaning and also get more work done...it's...so...hard! Someone either commiserate with me or explain how you do it!

Excuse: umm...my cat ate my homework?

I hate Tuesday mornings. Every Tuesday morning from 8am to 9am there is a leaf blower going right outside my window. This is a new experience since I moved to California, and I must say I just don't "get" leaf blowers. First of all, they are very noisy...they sound like a chain saw that isn't sawing anything down, and that sound drives me insane. Second of all, they simply aren't logical.

I can see the person who invented them going "yeah, we'll make this thing out of an old chainsaw (since we already cut down all the trees around here anyway) and we'll make it just blow leaves away from one area and into another, like out of Joe Schmoe's yard and into Sam Smith's yard. Then tomorrow, we'll blow those same leaves out of Sam Smith's yard and into Joe Schmoe's! Then back to Joe Schmoe's the next day! I'll never run out of work again...brilliant!" And, it is kind of brilliant. I am especially impressed that they managed to market such a stupid an inefficient idea.

Maybe there is just some weird attitude around here I don't understand. There is a woman who's job it is to wander around my gym and clean stuff all day. She doesn't seem to work very hard, but I don't blame her because I think her job sucks. She probably makes minimum wage and so y'know...she does a minimum wage amount of work. One day, she was complaining because the leaves from a tree outside kept blowing in the door. She said "I keep sweeping them outside and they blow back in." Ummmm...duh??? Leafblower mentality! Welcome to California.

Anyway, the last couple of days I don't know where all my time went, although an awful lot of it went to feeding China. Since she had lost another quarter pound at her last chemo appointment, I really need to work hard to make sure she doesn't lose any more and hopefully gains some. It gets time consuming because I have to shut her in the bathroom to keep Rodney from just eating all her high fat and extra tasty food (beef lung, yum!) Then to make it trickier, she will eat twice as much if I am actually supervising her and stiring up her food going "mmm...doesn't that look tasty? Don't you want some more?" I'm not sure actually saying it looks tasty has any affect, but stirring it up and giving it back to her will get her to eat some more. Now I've gotten extra fancy and when stirring the can of food stops working I give her something else, like veal babyfood. Of course, a whole jar of veal babyfood only has 70 calories in it, so sometimes I give her half and half instead...that has 70 calories in 2 tablespoons! Last night I gave her tuna, although that's a little low calorie and low fat. At least it's something more for her to eat.

I'm a little tired of my bathroom smelling like beef lung (it's pretty gross) so Sunday I ordered a rabbit hutch. That way I can put one of the cats in there (out on the balcony in the sun even, if it's nice) and separate them without yucking up my bathroom. I think it will be nicer for them, too. It doesn't arrive for a week, since it has to be trucked from New Jersey (there's some inefficient distribution for ya) but I can't wait.

Oh and of course Monday was salsa class night! I watched my salsa lesson dvd beforehand to figure out the whole 7-count, 8-count thing, and it's not a very good lesson, it goes on and on teaching you just the lead moves so if you are the follower you are learning basically the wrong thing and then to make it more confusing you are supposed to watch them facing you and follow along opposite. You know, like if you are doing an aerobics dvd the instructor would typically move his/her right leg and tell you to move your left, and you would mirror what they are doing, or else like our salsa teacher she would just turn to face the same direction that you are (with her back to you), but not this guy! He just faces you and expects you to reverse everything he does. Very confusing teaching style...we took a lesson from this guy in person at Club Kokomo, and he confused us then, too. But the important part....the important part is he says towards the beginning that salsa is 8-count, you just don't count the 4 or 8 because you are pausing. So it's like 1,2,3,pause,5,6,7,pause and Jinx is not crazy! So I am not as bad at salsa as I was thinking. And...class was really fun and I think I did okay but there was one guy, he's nice and fun and he is pretty good at doing the steps and has good rhythm and good leading skills, BUT last night the last time we danced he kept doing this boob graze during our "freestyle" dancing. And he didn't say anything or apologize, nor did he modify what he was doing with his arms so it didn't happen again. I mean, he must know he's doing it, right?

Oh well, whatever. I'm really enjoying salsa lessons! Our instructor is having a field trip/party/dance thing for Cinco de Mayo at a local restaurant and I really want to go, but my bf basically said last week that if we go to Monterey on the weekend we probably can't go to the Cinco de Mayo salsa thing so I had to choose. I chose Monterey, but I'm still hoping Cinco de Mayo could work out.

Today...I have just got to get some work done! After the gym I have no other plans beside feed China, so not much excuse.