Things are happening that I can't write about, which is annoying. The only things I can write about are boring. And then every once in a while it happens that I don't want to be googled by somebody. Not that it would change a thing if I remove my page, because Google has that nasty cache, but it still feels safer to do it anyway. I need a pseudonym or something.

There's this seller on eBay who always times his auctions so that all of them are ending at the same time, at 7:00pm CET. I came across him yesterday, when I wanted to get one of the CDs he was offering. And then something happened that has never happened to me before. I placed a bid at 6:59:45. Usually the eBay server takes about 1-2 seconds to respond. In this case, the eBay server did not respond for more than 15 seconds. In fact, it responded at 7:00:03, and instead of telling me whether I had won the item or not won the item, it told me that the auction was over and I could no longer place a bid.

The most frustrating thing about the whole story was that my bid would have been $20 above the winning bid.

My guess is that so many auctions ended at that time, with so many people placing bids in the last 10-20 seconds, that the servers were overloaded and didn't respond. On the other hand, if that is true, then the seller is a very stupid person for timing his auctions in this manner. I don't know how many other people were locked out like I was, but on that item alone he could have made twice as much money as he did, just by letting his auction end one minute later.

Last year I got a guitar plectrum that may or may not have been Ira Kaplan's. Today I got one that was most definitely his.

The gig was once again brilliant, the kind of experience that you gladly travel 700 miles for.