Recently I started what I hope will be a weekly tradition of watching “House” with a couple of friends. In setting up this arrangement I think I broke all of my rules of social protocol.

My first rule is never invite yourself over. This rule originated when I went to my friends birthday party and one of the neighborhood kids, who wasn’t invited, invited himself (don’t ask me which one, I’ll never tell). I don’t know that I have ever suggested to someone that we get together at their house before. I think I broke this rule out of sheer social desperation. I really don’t do much of anything outside of work and school because . . . work and school.

Broken rule two involves not burping loud enough in public so that anyone can hear you. I believe this rule can be attributed to my mother’s influence, although her official rule was something like “Don’t Burp in Public Ever!1!l(Exclamation Point in All Caps)”. Technically I haven’t broken this rule yet, but I plan to.

It turns out that I only really have two rules for social interaction; no wonder I had to invite myself over.

. . . Well, you might.

Well, my book sold on ebay and I only ended up getting about $25 dollars less than the first time it sold. I have already been paid and things are good.

It looks like I will lose about $50 because I had to relist my textbook on ebay. I received the negative feedback from the original buyer yesterday (if you want them to pay they don’t respond, but negative feedback is a real motivator). I am not at all displeased with it. The buyer wrote in effect that I said I would resell the book if he didn’t pay. So people will see his feedback and hopefully think something like, “Of course he will resell it if you don’t pay, why did you win the auction if you weren’t going to pay?”

The auction for my textbook ends in about an hour, I will let you know how it turns out.

Okay, so I’ve had my iPhone for a little over a week now and I’d like to share some of my impressions and my wishlist. The iPhone has been awesome. The user interface is very intuitive. I have fun every time I use the phone.

For example, I love having my phone and music in one package. When you’re listening to a song on the iPhone and receive a call, the music fades out for the duration of the call and resumes when the call is over. I also like that the earphones have a built-in button that allows you to skip songs. The iPod functionality on the iPhone is awesome. More memory to store music and movies would be nice, but 8GB is managable. The coverflow functionality that lets you browse your music library by album art is super cool.

I’ve owned several PDAs and I have to say that the iPhones web browser is the most useful one I’ve used. It’s actually somewhat practical to browse the web on it. The wifi on the phone works really well and is much faster than the Edge. The Edge network is slow, but still useful when on the go.

The two big things I wish the iPhone had is the Flash plugin for the web browser and copy and paste functionality. There are many websites that don’t work without Flash. I think Apple would be smart to add it. The fact that you can’t copy and paste is a bit annoying. Sometimes I want to send an email with someone’s phone number that I have stored on the phone. I would be nice to be able to copy it and paste it into the email.

In short, the iPhone is a really cool piece of technology. It has a great design and functionality all in a small package.

I recently put a Macroeconomics book up for sale on ebay. I expected to get about $50 out of it, which was fine with me, even though the book cost over $100 (some money is better than no money right?). I was afraid no one would bid on the auction because the semester had already started and I was afraid that everyone had bought books already. It turns out that the book ended up getting bid up to $73. I was excited, the buyer contacted me, things were good. Another email from the buyer. This time he tells me that he has an assignment due in class the next week and that if I can’t get the book to him fast enough he will have to buy one from the bookstore. I check his ZIP code, anticipation surging through my body. Yes! He lives in California. Priority mail should make it in two days. I decided to look up the rate for overnighting the book. It is only going to cost me about $5 more than originally anticipated. I want to make this sale, so I offer to overnight the book at no extra cost. I send an email. No response. I send another email pleading for a response, because if there was danger in selling my book as late as I did the first time, surely I am past the point of no return now. No response. I tried everything to get rid of the book, second chance offers, personal emails to interested parties. Nothing worked. I relisted the book today and I have almost no hope of selling it to anyone. I left a negative feedback for the original buyer. Now all I can do is wait for the backlash that always comes when you leave a negative feedback, no matter how justified it was. I am feeling far to vindictive, so I should probably end this narrative.

Well, I finally got myself an iPhone. I have had it for about a day now and it is great. In fact, I am writing this post on it right now.

grep -iran Osama world | Afghanistan

I received a new iPod Nano for my recent birthday, and I gotta tell you, this thing rocks. Mine is only four gigabytes, but it can hold a whole Harry Potter book, Lord of the Rings 2 the extended version, and several songs, and still have over a gigabyte of free space. When I first saw the new nano I thought it would be incredibly annoying to watch a movie on it. I was wrong and I beg your forgiveness. The picture is so clear that when you watch it, it is just like watching a TV from across the room. If you are in the market for an iPod and you don’t plan on keeping your entire dvd and music collections on it, I would advise you to get a nano. Not only are they incredibly small and easy to take anywhere, you can get an 8GB nano from a trusted ebay powerseller for about $150. Consider it, it will put the spring back in your step.

This morning I woke up at 5 to study. I didn’t have a test or anything, but I figured that it was the best time to study because there is no distractions. I found this to be one of the best study sessions I’ve had in awhile and I found it really productive. On top of that I always feel like I get more out of my day when I wake up early and do something than when I sleep in. I’m more of a morning thinker than a night thinker. When I study for tests I always wake up early.