Why was it so long?  Easy, I did something that I’m never, never, never, never going to do again.  Recarpet a house that I’m living in.  It looks good now that it’s done, but boy is it a lot of work.  It was almost equivalent to moving to a new house.  The only thing missing was the drive to the new location.  Everything had to be moved out of every room that is carpeted, including my office.  It’s a lot of work when you’ve lived in the place for 8 years.

Things are almost back to normal now.  Almost everything is set-up.  All that’s really left is unpacking the box that contains all of my desk stuff (pens, hole punch, etc.).  I also still need to haul away the trash.  It’s amazing how much junk accumulates over the years.

One nice side effect at least is my new office.  Since I had to tear down my desk along with everything else, I took the opportunity to set it back up in another room.  It’s going to take a little getting used to since few of the things I’m used to having on hand are still in the other room.  I have a lot more space and I was able to set up one of my bookcases that had been in the garage, so I think the plusses will outweigh the minuses.

My friend code is 0087-2707-0051

Set-up was super easy for me since I was already accepting IPN notifications from PayPal on purchases. E-Junkie send out the sales info in the same format. All that it took was a slight modification to the check for valid transaction method. This also ends up being really convenient if you add other payment processors. They translate the notifications from google checkout or whoever into the same IPN like notifications. So you only have to support one system for use with multiple processors.

Another feature I really like about E-Junkie is that you can use it with PayPal Pro. Turning on the option lets you take credit cards without you’re customers having to see PayPal. Some people still have an aversion to PayPal over their early years and this can help easy their anxiety. When a customer pays with a credit card, they’re taken to a secure page with a form for all of the info. Everything is then taken care of for you. You don’t have to worry about setting up the certificate, the form, or the communication with PayPal. Once the card clears, you’re server is pinged just like any other transaction.

Pros:

• Easy to switch over to.
• Global and per item coupons
• I like the lightbox style cart on my pages. It helps hide that I’m using an external service.
• PayPal Pro option
• Easy integration with other payment processors like Google Checkout.
• User never sees PayPal for credit card transaction, only if they choose to pay with PayPal.
• Can easily do an affiliates program.
• Cheap, only $5/month for less then 10 skus.
• Can handle taxes and VAT collection, you’re responsible for submission

Cons:

• The credit card info entry form is on their site with PayPal Pro. The URL might scare some people.
• The credit card info entry form isn’t customizable. Point one wouldn’t be as bad if you could customize the page to look like your site. They claim that it’s coming, but I haven’t seen anything on it yet.
• Coupon support could be a little more robust. I wanted an option to lock codes to either specific emails (crossgrade offers) or to a domain (offer to people with apple.com email addresses). They say it isn’t possible due to not having the email address until check out and that they can’t ask for it earlier due to Google Checkout’s terms of service.
• They don’t send back some registration info, like the user’s address, in the registration post for downloaded items. They only send them if it’s a good that’s being shipped, even if the user enters the info in the form. Not a huge deal, but it would be nice to see where paid users are located for things like localization.
• The sales logs could be a bit more robust. I’m not sure exactly what I want here, but it feels like something is missing. They’re on about the same level as PayPal’s history which I’ve never been a huge fan of either.

Overall, it’s well worth the $5/month that it costs for the service. I might consider going with something like the Potion Store sometime in the future to have more control. But for now, the easy set-up and configuration of E-Junkie wins out.

Update: One more Pro to add. Customer service has been quick to respond and helpful when emailing them. Today was a good example. I ran into an issue that appeared to be a fairly decent bug. I thought there was a loss of sales data when a sku was deleted. The Cyndicate-EagleFiler bundle no longer showed up in my sales logs. I emailed emailed support and heard back from Robin heard back from Robin an hour or two later saying that it was fixed. Fortunately, it appears that it was simply a display error and not a loss of data. The issue was handles right away and all of the bundle sales showed up when I checked the log later in the night.

Full disclosure: The above ejunkie links are affiliates links. If you follow these links and sign up with e-junkie I will get a commission. The commissions aren’t huge, but a few of them would cover my monthly cost. Free e-junkie would be even better then $5/month e-junkie. =)

Only one huge problem. It’s scheduled to happen on either Tuesday or Wednesday any where between 8 am and 5 pm. Great. Thanks for narrowing the window down to only 18 hours. It makes it really easy to have everything off for the 5 minute outage. I’d be really pissed if I didn’t have all of my equipment on larger size UPS units. Might be time to get a the house on a back-up generator.

It’s been estimated that if a ban isn’t kept in place, that states are looking at taxing access in the 17-20% range. This could cripple availability to poor and lower income people giving a further disadvantage when it comes to information, education, lower pricing, and income opportunities. The internet is also our best example of interstate commerce on an individual level. Almost everything done on it crosses state lines in one way or the other. It’s really one of the few types of issues that should be controlled by the feds and not the state governments.

UPDATE: Congressional Quarterly is now reporting that the house passed a watered down, 4 year version of the the tax ban. The Senate has yet to pass anything. If we can get the Senate to pass the permanent ban, the conference committee may have the opportunity to favor the Senate version of the bill. So there’s still hope. Passing the 4 year ban will probably be more difficult in it due to the number of Senators pushing for the permanent ban. Hopefully Harry Reed will cave in on this issue like he has on so many other (and more important) issues since becoming president pro tempore of the Senate.

Update: The site is moved now and redirects set up. The end the result should look seamless to you. I’ve also upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 and as such now have valid Atom 1.0 feeds. You can get the atom feed from http://crookedspin.com/feed/atom/. I’d encourage everyone to use it since the atom spec is a lot nicer then the RSS spec.

I got my hands on my very own Wii today after 2 months of everyone being sold out around me. Wii Code is 5139 7829 8111 5558.

Over the last 3 days I’ve had to move everything that isn’t a couch, desk, or large entertainment center into my garage or jam it into a closet. Now all of the remaining furniture has been piled into the center of each room and everything that isn’t a wall is covered in plastic. If they had covered up the walls I’d be bubble boy.

The best part (so far) of all of this was when I came home today. They were supposed to paint the bedrooms first so that I could set up my bed and sit in my office tonight. Well, they didn’t. They painted all of the baseboards first and won’t be doing the bedroom walls until tomorrow now. He swears will be done tomorrow, we’ll see.

MarioKart DS is also the first game that has WiFi play built in.  Set up was simple and hooked right into my existing network with no issues. I haven’t had a chance to try it out though.  The Nintendo servers have been getting slammed and are having issues.  Not really surprising for the first day.  I did get my friend code set up.  It is:

116023
594595

Time to get more stuff unlocked.  Hopefully the online play with be running smoother in a bit.