I’m half way through this O’Reilly book and it is inspiring. I can tell you from experience that looking at well designed code is a real pleasure. This book is a collection of essays about computer code. Most of the essays do a great job at taking a particular piece of code and explaining something about that code that makes it stand out as beautiful for one reason or another. If you care about the craft of creating computer programs you will probably enjoy this book. This book had me hooked immediately when it’s first essay was by none other than Brian Kernighan.

Here is a summary of what I learned from my latest sales on Ebay. All of these items below are obvious to most people I think.

1. Make sure you have those neat little USPS flat rate boxes.
2. Make sure things fit in those neat little USPS flat rate boxes.
3. I need a postal scale.
4. The APC machine at the post office is slow, although not as slow as waiting in the line behind the group of people who need a passport.
5. Use reserve pricing so you don’t sell things for one penny. If you ignore this rule double check the price of shipping. Doh!

And last but not least … “People will buy almost anything.”