... Too late. Its all gone! WhooosH!!!!

....



or *did* he???

Tried a separate thread, no results, gonna give it one more shot.

We got the entire Harry Potter collection for Christmas. On Blu-Ray.

Not one machine in our house will run a Blu-Ray disc; even the player built into our tv reminded us every time we stuck a disc in 'Blu-Ray is not supported'. We both suck at video games and so the newest gaming machine (only one, I think) in the house is a PS2. The DVD player we bought when the one built into the tv crapped out will not recognize a Blu-Ray disc; we tried with a disc that we got in a DVD comes with the Blu-Ray set. The Harry Potter set is still in its shrinkwrap, but for some reason Amazon has refused to accept it as a trade-in.

The thing is we really, really want this collection, but on DVD. If anyone's willing to swap, great! If anyone's willing to swap but would like something else thrown in from our side to sweeten the deal, we can talk. Hell, if anyone will give me a decent price on a full DVD set (used is FINE if the discs all work!!!) we can attempt to buy, though trading is our first choice since we're a fixed-income household (the reason we never bought the DVD set ourselves).

I'm putting this post on email notify, and I try to check my email at least 3 times a week.

You do realize BluRay is a completely different kind of technology, and will not play in anything that is not expressly designed to play BluRay discs? Requires a different operating system, and a different laser/reader thingy, as compared to a standard old dvd.

BluRay players are cheaper and cheaper these days.

yes, she does. Her point was she doesn't have one. any iirc from the previous thread, has no interest in getting one.

Grav, part of the problem is in fact the differing tech and cross-incompatibility.

Giving it a quick casual Google search shows me that even a not-quite-bottom-of-the-line Blu-Ray player goes for at least 10% of my ENTIRE monthly (fixed) income, and that's before the nearly 50% of my monthly income that goes straight to rent and utilities. And there's no guarantee it would be compatible with any of our other machines, including the only TV we own (the one with the dead built-in DVD player). My sweetie is also on a fixed income not much larger than mine and is by nature so non-materialistic that gift shopping for him is now "And what website would you like a gift card for this time?" because there's not much physical stuff he wants.

Getting a new DVD player was easy and under $50. Getting it hooked up and functioning took two and a half hours, three technicians' opinions, and a set of photos from a demonstration by the one of those three techs who actually understood what I was asking. If the built-in player in the TV was not Blu-Ray compatible, it's possible none of the wiring in that particular TV is.

PS3 was suggested on the other thread but appears to be even more expensive than a dedicated Blu-Ray player, and with my hands getting arthritic and my sweetie's increasing difficulty coping with things like on-the-spot decision making, concentration, and his own response to frustration, video games are pretty well right out so it's not like a PS3 would get used for its original purpose. And so I shall continue to hope that someday someone gets the set on DVD but wanted it on Blu-Ray and remembers me sniveling about the formats!

I'm not a contributing member on ANY other forum anywhere any more. I don't use Ebay because of PayPal--I tried to do my Christmas shopping using that combo as I had for several years, but a few years back I tried to log in on PP only to get an email stating that until I sent them a scan of my driver's license, ORIGINAL Social Security card, AND a utility bill with my name and addy on it, I could not transfer funds from my PP-verified decade-old bank account (only one I've had since 2004, still ticking along just fine) into my online PP account. They did NOT offer any guarantee of who would see or have access to the information they demanded, and so I left my PP account sitting with like $2 in it. There aren't many online retailers I trust, particularly when it comes to electronics that I understand poorly at best. So my Internet footprint is pretty tiny--Hell, my Twitter account is basically to keep updated on musicians' tour schedules and only has 2 non-famous people on it out of like 13 I follow total. My options for swapping out this set are pretty limited. I'm actually contemplating checking with the local pawnshop...if I can find a day when I won't ask the owner's wife if her brother is still in jail for identity theft and credit fraud because that could get...awkward.

Maybe you could create a gofundme page to buy yourselves the regular set, noting that the original set will be donated to your local children's hospital or similar?

I will keep the "crowdfunding" option in mind!

As for donation, I'm not sure there's a children's hospital in this state. My county has one and only one hospital, and as far as I know the college city up the road 50 miles or so has two to serve its entire county.

At this point I'm sorely tempted to ask at the next gem club meeting if any of the fossils even know what Blu-Ray is (I'd guess...knowing our fossils...maybe a third) or whether any of the youngers have a player.

The worst part is this was a Christmas gift from my sweetie's mother, who knows he loves HP (she bought him several of the hardbacks over the years too) but forgot we're fixed-income technological troglodytes. They went almost 20 years without even speaking, so complaining to her about a gift seems like just a bad idea, ya know?

We're also already looking at major electronics replacement costs this year.

My desktop tower (which was a gift) was refurbished when I got it, and that'll be 4 years ago in July. It's still working well, but I doubt when I finally have zero functionality in XP that it'll take well to updating the OS. Apparently desktop tower CPUs are almost extinct in the wild, so I may have to try to find a laptop that will run a terabyte external drive!

My terabyte external drive, where my writings and an archive of over 150,000 digital photos are stored, is like 6 years old now. I need to buy a new one and have the local shop clone over all the info, because my machine probably wouldn't like having 2 huge externals plugged in, considering if I forget and leave the current external hooked up, my tower (which has an 80-gig hard drive) locks up very early in the startup process. This requires a power-strip hard restart, so I try very hard to avoid it. Regardless, my external hard drive is getting quite old. It was $160 when I bought it to replace the $120 one that broke down like a month after I bought that. I'm hoping prices are WAY down.

My sweetie's desktop tower is like 6 or 7 years old and starting to give him trouble. Weirdly, the TEN-YEAR-OLD f*kking printer works just great for him! He bought the computer new and it was more than a month's rent on our apartment. He's also looking to go laptop due to the scarcity online of people selling reliable desktops.

My neighbor's the worst--he's gotta replace a Mac laptop that's older than our acquaintance (I've known him since late 2008 or so) with a warped battery (again) and body case. That will also mean an expensive new OS and security program update. And he HATES everything Microsoft or compatible with a vivid and profanity-riddled passion, so there's no talking him back to a cheap little Dell laptop or some such.

I can't do much for the menfolk, and since I may already be staring down an SSI audit, trying to (illegally--I'm on SSI) save up money would be very poorly timed.

It look like a flat screen monitor. It is the entire desktop inside that screen. Desktop towers were long ago replaced by what is also called All-In-One. A very functional system goes for as little as $350 - from computer companies with better integrity. Its CD-rom may even be Blu-ray.

All-in-One options suck as if any part breaks, the whole thing needs to be repaired/replaced.

Mom&Popdigr gave $29 for their BluRay player, and it has wi-fi. It hooked up with one wire, ok, two if you count the electrical plug. Took all of thirty seconds.

It was statements like this

that made (and make) me think she does not understand the situation as well as she (or us) might.

And I hereby admit that I may not understand the problem, hell, I'm not even sure there is a problem, so, I'm out.

Carry on.

I don't understand the problem either, but blu-ray players are $40 with free shipping on ebay.

If you have a 30 year old tv though, hooking it up might be a pain. And the cables may not be included.

Also, you can get a non-flatscreen TV at a pawn shop for less than $40, and PayPal did not ask anyone for a scan of their personal documents.

But none of that is relevant. UT has the right of it when it comes to Snakeadelic, and there is a reason she keeps ignoring his question.

She also ignored my PM.

I know *sigh*

so, the biggest part of the deal is that her TV has a limited number of inputs. Old inputs. I'm guessing from my conversations with her that the tv has the jacks for rca style bayonet plugs, and they're for composite input, not component input. finding a bluray player with composite OUT is the tricky part. sure, bluray players are cheap, but she can't also afford a new display/tv.

hdmi out, no help, component, no help... that's the snag.

Did UT (presumably Undertoad?) ask a question on my original thread that I lost track of and that I failed to answer? I checked this one and did not see any posts from Undertoad after mine about swapping out the movie set, but several before then discussing an unrelated situation with other users.

I had hoped to be doing a better job of appropriate socializing, but from my seat it looks as if I have missed something major.

Missing Bruce's PM is totally on me. I am terrible at remembering to check that little corner of the screen for notifications.

If my actions and attitudes are causing discord and conflict, please tell me and I will deactivate my account to avoid future incidents. I did NOT become a member here with the intent of annoying people who have a great deal more experience in many areas and widely differing knowledge bases from my own.

UT has asked you at least twice now in other threads to "Tell us about your SSRI experiences." That's the question being referred to.

Nobody is asking you to leave.

And I'm pretty sure no one wants you to.;)

I was just curious how/if you've worked through your issues medically. I was on them for nearly two decades myself.

I don't take SSRI drugs. Paxil damn near killed me--it ripped up my guts so badly I lost 12 pounds in 18 days. I called someone for medical help when I realized I'd been asleep on the couch, waking only to take meds and attend body functions, for three days waiting to feel better. Antidepressants do not do well for me because my major psych issue is anxiety, not depression. I know people for whom they have worked very well, and people for whom they are total poison, so I maintain no bias against them for anyone but me.

For the last 18 years, the only drug to successfully help with my anxiety has been Diazepam (generic for Valium). I am also in routine one-on-one therapy with a multiply-licensed counselor, who I am actually seeing tomorrow. The person who prescribes me Valium is a different provider (who I see next on 3-7 to explain my recent increased usage, but who refilled my 'scrip 5 weeks before that appointment on my word that it was needed). I am aware that my access to this drug is becoming a very rare case, and am passionately grateful that the prescriber I've worked with on that for like six or seven years now has taken the time to learn that I am not an abuse risk.

There are days when I become so anxious or situationally depressed that I feel I am a danger to myself when left with unfettered access to certain meds. On those days I hand those meds to someone I trust with my life. I do not ask where they are kept, but they are kept until I declare that I am once again trustworthy. All my providers know this, and I make no secret of it in ordinary conversations because the way to dispel myths about mental health is to speak honestly and openly about mental health.

When my therapist called earlier today with a reminder of my appointment tomorrow, I told her about the "after 9 years on SSI you must now prove you are still disabled" paperwork I recently received from Social Security. She burst out laughing at the thought of me being considered able to work, and asked me to bring the paperwork so she could put her professional opinion in writing. I am a VERY LUCKY person to have such support.

As far as leaving, I felt there was a strong chance that I had made and missed some kind of severe social gaffe (probably multiple times). My life history does NOT include a whole lot of social groups explaining why I was suddenly unwelcome, and so my volunteering to leave if it would be for the benefit of the forum came from those memories.

I have the gem club, you guys, 2 life partners, and about a dozen people I consider family (I am genetically related to exactly 1 of them). That is my social interaction circle. I do not make friends easily. It took me 25 years to find the gem club a/k/a My People, and 3 years lurking (and reading the ENTIRE IotD archive, every single post) to decide to join here. I may be underinformed and a raving jerk sometimes, but I really would like to be told if I cause problems. If I'm not told what I did wrong, I can't teach myself not to do it again!

If you have missed this thread, you might find it interesting. You fit in better here than you might imagine. :)

Agreed. Thanks for sharing.


It's wild how certain families of drugs work differently on different brains. Paxil was my SSRI of choice all that time. It worked really well for what it needed to do to me in my 30s, but by the end of my 40s it was no longer appropriate, and I was probably on it for a few years too long.

No no, I didn't mean to imply you should leave or had been inappropriate. It's only that sometimes mental health problems involve a denial of mental health problems, and sometimes the brain gets so hooked on a single solution to a problem, that it will go through a surprising amount of irrational gymnastics to reject any other solution. I was suspecting this might apply to both Blu-Ray box sets, and medical treatment. :)

I have a fair amount of experience with various mental health issues in both myself and my extended family, so I am not unsympathetic. We're an Oxcarbazepine and Lithium Orotate family, ourselves.

what CF said -we're bemused by your apparent unwillingness to work with any of the solutions/workaround presented to you, and just wondering if the cause is related to other issues you may be dealing with. Then we'd maybe know better how to help. Many of us have experience with similar things. If no-one cared, no-one would answer :)

:biglaugha:lol2::mock: Social gaffe? Here? Not a chance.:rotflol: :comfort::hug:

this too. xoB is not the only one here with limited social skills..... ;) if you made a social gaffe, no-one would notice. Unless you posted spamlinks. Here you're more likely to piss people off with a nerd-gaffe. It's like nerve gas for people with stuffy noses.

just curious, what is a social gaffe? Is there meat in it?

Snakeadelic, straight up. You're doing fine here. Seriously.

Well, there can be meat in a social gaffe...dropping food on a celebrity at a party would be considered a gaffe. I'm pretty sure that's the right spelling; if you take off the 'e' at the end I think it's a giant hook used to pull in particularly large fish on commercial boats. Laughing so hard you spit a bunch of half-chewed meat on someone would also be a social gaffe, so yeah, meat could be a factor. :)

And thank you all for both tolerance and reassurance.

Clod, the big problem with Blu-Ray is cost. I think between the two of us we get about $1500 a month, and my sweetie has a payee and must keep receipts and do monthly budget paperwork. It's worth it because the payee is legally responsible for making sure our rent and utilities are paid on time (the bill goes to them, not us), which is a huge relief since we both have occasional memory problems. We're already looking at replacing 2 computers, plus I need to buy a new external drive and pay the local shop to clone the old one onto it before I lose my several thousand pages of creative writing and a photo archive that's over 150,000 images. The external drive will be cheap; the shop help not so much. My tower, however, was not new 4 years ago when my dad up and gave it to me, and it only has an 80-gig hard drive. The fact that it won't even complete startup with my terabyte external connected leads me to suspect it doesn't have the power to copy that much data over even in small bursts. The terabyte drive is rapidly approaching 60% full, and I have over 2,000 images still on my big camera that I need to add to the burden.

Our TV is a "what can we afford" from K-Mart that we bought when our old wide-body developed a severe screen discoloration. That had been, we were warned, the LAST wide-body TV our area stores were stocking. The pawnshop does NOT have the ability to test big electronics--not enough space to arrange the store so the outlets would be accessible--and they do not offer any return or guarantee of functionality on anything. Plus, watching Forensic Files or some such and realizing they were profiling the brother of one of the married-couple owners for identity theft and credit fraud has made the notion of keeping a straight face in that place...unlikely.

Maybe once all the ancient computing equipment (my tower is the second-youngest device in the house behind my sweetie's gotta-replace-the-failing-tablet from last year) is dealt with we can look around for Blu-Ray compatible entertainment electronics, but we'll have to get a ride to the next county north to find a store big enough to carry those electronics. Our K-Mart is the only store in town with major electronics, and it is smaller than both of the grocery stores flanking it. Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy are all a 50-mile one-way, and neither of us trust our luck with electronics enough to order big ones online.

So maybe eventually we trade the Blu-Ray Potter set, or maybe eventually we buy the DVD version and regift the Blu-Ray, or maybe we eventually switch out the entertainment system for something a little less 2010-style. Only time will tell.

That's a big problem in pawn shops, since extension cords are simply unavailable in this day and age. They simply cannot be bought.

I don't like spam, canned or electronic :) I try to only post links I've safely taken my browser to see, and I try to run them through TinyURL to avoid driving people even crazier.

As for a nerd-gaffe, if I KNOW that I KNOW my source material, I'll make a definitive statement. If I have uncertainty, I am more likely to ask questions than pretend to know. The less I lie, sneak, and fake it online, the less my brain has to work to remember who knows what. I'm pretty good with a couple of fandoms, pretty good with gems and geology, and REALLY good with zoology, taxonomy, and domestic animals.

And I used to know a guy who, a decade later, still reminisced about the good old days in his Navy boot camp when he could do the tear gas room as required (mask on, then mask off) and then sneak back in unmasked and hang out in the gas for about ten minutes. He said it was the only time his sinuses were ever clear for more than an hour. Probably shouldn't have settled in Seattle, poor guy--it took more than 5 years here at 4200 or so feet above sea level to get the Seattle mildew and mold out of my sweetie's sinuses. He hardly snores at all any more, and when I met him he snored so bad I was the only girl he'd dated in several YEARS who would even try to sleep over.

The owners of the store do not allow people to bring in their own extension cords, citing "the risk of causing another patron to trip and get injured"--I actually heard them tell someone that with my own ears--and their 'store policy' of no tests, no guarantees. All I've ever bought there so far is DVDs, which they leave in the cases because they're right next to the cash register for easy supervision, and my black leather floor-length coat that I wear for armor when I'm out in the woods and such.

The problem's not the availability of extension cords, it's that the owners have a jackass 'tude :( and the town's so small they're the only pawn shop. We're big enough for 4 grocery stores, 2 liquor stores, a number of bars I haven't bothered to count, and the county's biggest hospital, but only 1 pawn shop.

There's another place that CLAIMS to be a pawn shop, but all they have is pawned jewelry and retail-priced guns, ammo, and shooting accessories. They don't accept or sell electronics. This difficulty in buying locally is 1 down side of non-urban living.

As a pawnbroker I can tell you , that shop has two things.

- extension cords to test things they actually want to test

- bullshit lines to quickly turn away people who want to bring in low-profit piece of shit electronic items that nobody actually wants

There are certain really high-value items that have great value if they just power on, and no value if they don't. Corded tools, for example. Are you going to not take a nice $1000 mitre saw because you didn't have a $1.99 extension cord? No, you're going to FIND a way to plug it in, turn it on, and get your profit.

The shop is under no obligation to tell anyone the truth. You should expect many polite lies out of a pawn shop.

Lastly if you have eBay you have the largest pawn shop ever under your fingertips no matter where you live.

Well, I have personal issues with eBay, but I know people with accounts and sometimes if the timing's right I can get them money before something sells, or pay them back later.

I'm 100% sure that at least half of what I've heard the owners say in that place was, in fact, BS intended to keep the store clear of layabouts and wishful thinkers. Also, ever since that thing with the wife's brother, I don't trust them at all and I am not sure I should be trusted not to say anything tacky about it. Here's the Cliff Notes version...

Shop owner's wife hears me & neighbor talking about how excited we were to get to see Queensryche. Wife says her brother (by name) is now part of the band, and since they suddenly had this like 30-year-old stranger on guitar instead of whoever replaced Chris DeGarmo, we think "meh, maybe plausible but she's probably got the band name wrong." Couple years later, I'm up late one night and have Forensic Files or some other true-crime summary series running. They start talking about a case involving identity theft, credit card fraud, and a man (same name pawnshop lady gave as her brother, first and last) involved with "a singer and band very famous in the 1980s metal scene". Then they show a pic of the now-incarcerated suspect and yup, younger-than-the-band guitarist it is. I now have paranoid suspicions about the two times since then that my bank has been forced to reissue all customer credit and debit cards--not because the bank was hacked, but because it's their policy to cancel and reissue all cards if a local business gets hacked.

So between "your brother was ON TV for being an identity thief and purveyor of credit card fraud" and "Jesus you guys lie to your customers a lot", I'm not entirely...confident...in my own verbal filters. Other than my coat, all I bought there on virtually every trip was DVDs, and now we're down to a few that are either impossible to find used and a few that we were sure we already had.

I have bought fun stuff off eBay in the past, and been outbid on a few really awesome things (I wanted that radio-controlled, walking & roaring on command Godzilla toy just to see the cats react). When circumstances allow I'll doubtless find something else there someday that I simply MUST have (like the $13 Invader Zim theme picture disc vinyl).

Maybe someday I'll get brave enough to contact PayPal about what it will take to re-activate my account functionality. The problem I and several of my acquaintances had with their 'infrequent shopper' information demands is that they cut us off completely from adding money to our PP accounts by the only means routinely available--shifting money from our PayPal-verified checking accounts to our PayPal accounts. We could do literally anything else, but we had nothing to sell to earn PayPal money and our friends and families tend to be as broke as we are. I tried logging in 2 years after they demanded the information I did not wish to give them in the form they said they required and although my login info all still worked, my account was still locked to adding money via my checking account, so I guess I might attempt a new account someday. Especially since someone hacked the 16-year-old (not kidding) Hotmail addy attached and I had to let my Hotmail account die because it wouldn't even let me back in.

For the record, the Harry Potter problem has been solved :D. Awesomely!

Should I give this guy negative feedback?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GEERTOP-1-pe...MAAOSwio1ZmuhD

I bought one of his tents because I wanted a very small lightweight tent. It came without poles (which I expected and is a weight saving feature) and it also came without the pictured orange (or any color) rain fly. A tent is essentially worthless without a rain fly. Rain has a habit of falling through screening, like the roof of the inner tent I did get.

Please tell me if it's reasonable to give him negative feedback for being deceptive. I've never given negative feedback before.

I will have the option to return the inner tent at my expense, I'm sure, but I don't see why I should have to pay a penny when he was deceptive. I just want my rain fly.

did you contact him about it? If not, do that first

Yes. Waiting for a response. I am just wondering what the next step is when he tells me to return it. I'd be willing to return it if he sends a prepaid shipping label at his expense.

so if/when he says you need to pay return shipping, tell him that and if he won't then yes, leave negative feedback. Maybe once you have your refund. Or open up a complaint with ebay. Beest did that and it was pretty effective

Why in the world would you order from a seller in Israel, with so much negative and neutral feedback, who is described as drop shipping from sources in the US (including Amazon)?

Do you just like playing Russian Roulette?

It's right in his feedback that others have had to go to eBay, through the resolution procedure, to get restitution from this seller.

Good luck.

...hopefully he'll just ship you the rain fly

hmm... the listing has now been removed....

99.6% is an excellent rating

The listing still appears for me, monster.

UT, I've said somewhere in here before that I don't use sellers below 99.8% without scrutinizing EVERYTHING. If the seller is drop shipping, that 99.6% rating actually belongs to the shippers. The eBay seller could be worthless if anything goes wrong. Middlemen often bail on customers. I hope that's not the case here.

Did you notice that in the seller's positive feedback there's no item descriptions, only the feedback narrative? Is that something sellers can elect to do?

I dunno.

The item description is

GEERTOP 1-person 3-season 20D Ultralight Backpacking Tent For Camping Hiking NOT

There's the confusion. The word "NOT" means that the entire rest of the description is negated. And it was in all caps! You received, as accurately described, something that was NOT a GEERTOP 1-person 3-season 20D Ultralight Backpacking Tent For Camping Hiking. Judgement for seller.

I did wonder about that "NOT" but when I went back to look again, listing was "removed" Sexo's may be archived? anyhoo, I refound (I think) by searching keywords, and the description here clearly implies to me that the fly is part of the deal.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GEERTOP-1-pe...MAAOSwio1ZmuhD

Au contraire monstaire,

The title is:

It says tent. There's nothing about a fly in there.

One of the images includes the instructions for ordering:

The narrative repeats the instructions with an admonishment:

This was more than enough to make asking questions before buying prudent as to whether it's for only one component of a described system; or, the entire system.

Again, the listing is for a tent and NOT a fly + tent. Glatt's best shot at challenging the description may be in the "3-season" part of it. Is the tent really 3-season without the fly?

hmm thanks, That did not come up for me, but I'm having a whole shitload of crappy computer/interweb issues tonight. Seeing that, I'm inclined to agree. But the original link is still showing as removed for me :/ I give up. I suggest you contact as not happy and if no response, leave negative feedback to the effect of misleading product description....? And maybe see what Ebay mediation has to say about it

sorry

This seller has 45,663 items listed (gee, do ya think he might be drop shipping?). I'm sure a few titles and descriptions ended up being hack jobs.

:dedhorse:

It may be a dead horse to you but certainly not to glatt.

If you read more carefully you would see I've been trying to get back on topic to help glatt, and then you could deduce that the dead horse pertained to the drift blaming him for his situation rather than the predicament. But then what would you have to be snarky about?


so a final attempt, glatt.... I think sexobon is right having seen that descriptive image he posted that didn't come up for me at the link you provided, he could easily claim that the product was as advertised. And the whole "NOT" thing is odd.

That said, it's extremely misleading and the worded description does seem to imply a fly is included rather than being an optional extra, so I think it is worth threatening bringing ebay in if you don't get satisfaction dealing with the seller directly. And definitely leave negative feedback if the seller does not refund with shipping.

A picture of beating a dead horse is clearly a shot at sexo, and a pretty piss poor way of getting the thing back on track. Try to put what you're thinking in your post for we clairvoyant deprived.