Perseids peter out?

So it happens that something else causes me to wake up at 4 am. Figuring I may as well take advantage of the situation, I get dressed and go outside to see what I can see of the Perseid meteor shower.

Given the light conditions here south of Houston, I see a total of two meteors over a 15-minute period. There are probably more, but the light pollution more than likely prevents me from seeing them. At any rate, it's not worth staying up for. Ah, well.

Now to try to go back and catch a few more Zs...

Cheers...

...and another one bites the dust (almost).

Despite this morning's interrrupted sleep, I had no trouble returning to bed and sleeping until after 9 am. The rest of the day seems to have passed in a flash; as I write this, it's 7:30 pm.

Most of the second half of the day was spent figuring out how to efficiently put together eBay ads for the stuff I keep putting on sale there. It's not hard to post good-looking ads - probably the most complicated part is the item description - but it's also a pain in the butt to compile all of the detail that I think helps sell the item (for a book, this would be stuff like the copyright date, page count, publisher's name, and so on).

Anyway, I ended up cobbling together a Perl script that takes its input from an HTML form, both running locally. The form allows me to select background colors, item condition, and a variety of other parameters, and then the script makes the proper choices and does some small amount of number-crunching.

One nice side effect is I get to see what the post will look like. This is a big plus, because I can proofread the result of the HTML code a lot easier than the code itself. I've also embedded a routine that figures out the postage and shipping charges for Priority Mail and book rate, thus avoiding a useless exchange of e-mail asking for and providing information about shipping charges.

The calculation also combines the shipping charge with the cost I impose for shipping materials. Since the post office provides Priority Mail packages, my cost is somewhat less, limited to the cost of bubble wrap. (My experiment shipping a book wrapped in shredded paper probably succeeded, but I want to maximize the life of the paper shredder - as it is a cheap one - by minimizing the quantity of paper that goes through it.) I figure this should eliminate mistakes on the part of the occasional buyer who can't (or won't) read the fine print and sends me only enough to cover the bid and postage.

At any rate, the one-two combo of the form page and the Perl script ought to make future posting sessions go easier. Of the stuff I posted yesterday, it's already been bid up enough to cover what I originally wanted for the whole lot.

Time to go make/eat dinner and catch up on The X Files rerun. Ta.

Cheers...