I wrote the “seller” – which was really just the production developer testing account – on a Saturday and told them about my mistake in purchasing their item. By Sunday evening I had a full PayPal refund and an email from customer support. I was extremely satisfied with how quickly they resolved my issue.

Then this week I got home after a late (but victorious) basketball game and found a letter from eBay. In it was a personally written apology and a $25 gift card. Very cool.

The money is already burning a hole in my pocket. Since I ended up buying the lens elsewhere I wasn’t really sure what I was going to get until yesterday when I came across this gem. Love is Hell is the only Ryan Adams record that I do not have on vinyl and have not been able to find until now. While I could never pick my favorite Adams record, this is an amazing piece of work. I will keep my eye on this auction and will probably try making my second eBay purchase if the price does not get too much higher.

On one further side note, just reading over the track listing again takes me back two years to a trip that Cam, The Business and I made up to Salem to see Ryan at the Elsinore Theatre. And as a bonus, I found a recording of the show while checking to make sure I had the date right. I did not know this amazing recording existed. Great way to kick off the weekend!

My new lens arrived last night, but I haven’t had much time to try it out. The picture above was one of the first with my new toy and captures Crusher somewhere he probably shouldn’t be. I have lots to learn with the new lens. The shot is focused more on his body than his face.

On a very exciting side note, the record in the background is the newly re-released Anodyne from Uncle Tupelo. I picked it up tonight on my way home from work and have given it a complete listen. Anodyne contains one of my all-time favorite songs, New Madrid, and many other classics from a great band. I have enjoyed this album on CD for years and finally get to experience it in all its 180-gram vinyl glory!

NERD tree makes it super-simple to browse and open files from your filesystem. I’ve mapped the nerd tree toggle command to control-c and then use “j”, “k” and “enter” to find and open the file I want to edit. You can also open the file with “i” and open it in split-screen mode.

I am still learning to work snipMate into my daily use, but when I remember to use it I love it. snipMate copies the most powerful feature from TextMate – snippets – which allows you to type a “snippet” of code, like say “input” when in an HTML file, and then it will fill out the input tag for you. You then can tab to each of the parts of the code that you need to fill out.

Today I downloaded and installed NERD commenter and matchit. Commenter makes it easier to add comments and comment out code for easy testing and matchit extends vim’s ‘%’ operator and makes it possible open and close HTML tags and much more.

I have also been developing on a few different machines and needed a way to keep my plugins and .vimrc file in sync. I decided it would be easy enough to create a git repo at github for my ~/.vim directory to easily share plugins and settings across machines. Feel free to check out the plugins and settings I am using and please share any other good tips and tricks that you have found.

After deciding on the lens I needed to find a place to buy it from. I found an auction on eBay that had the lens priced lower than anywhere else I could find it and the seller had good reviews. I purchased the lens and waited the 12-13 days for the lens to arrive. After not hearing from the seller or getting my lens in the time promised I went back to eBay and found the following postscript at the bottom of the product description:

On occasion, eBay will run auctions to test various functionality on the site. This is one of those auctions. These are always titled “Test Item; Please Do Not Bid” or some variation of this. These auctions are not selling anything – they are merely tests of the site or system. Please do not bid on these auctions. Thanks for your cooperation and support!

I either bought my lens from someone at eBay testing things or from a scammer. Either way, I don’t think I am getting my lens. I haven’t tried too hard yet, but have not been successful at getting my money back from the auction.

This morning I tried to find the lens on eBay from a different seller at the same great price, but was unsuccessful. I went ahead and purchased the lens from Amazon and should have it by the end of the week.

I received many non tech related gifts, but tonight I wanted to write about two gifts that were given to the electronic enthusiast in me.

My parents gave me a pair of winter gloves that allow me to still use my iPhone when worn. The gloves have tiny metallic nubs that allow me touch, tap and swipe on the phone while keeping warm in the winter. My mom saw these gloves featured on the Today Show and they are a great replacement to my previous iPhone gloves – a pair of knit gloves with the finger tips cut off (or rather not knit closed). I have only used the gloves sporadically so far, but with the temperatures here dropping am going to start using them fulltime.

My father-in-law, also known an P1 around these parts of the internet, gave me an Eye-fi with Geolocation. An Eye-fi is a special type of memory card for cameras that has built in wi-fi. When you snap a picture and are in range of a wi-fi network the card knows about, the eye-fi card will send the image to the Eye-fi servers. From there, I have the picture sent on to Flickr. I have all the pictures marked as private on Flickr so you don’t save to see all the bad ones I take. In addition to sending to Flickr, the Eye-fi is also set up to download the photos and import into iPhoto for me. I no longer have to ever worry about syncing the photos off the camera with my computer. The Eye-fi also geocodes each picture when it can. I haven’t had amazing success with this feature yet, but it seems to work pretty good. It knew the location of the photos when I took them at my parents house, but can’t get the location of my apartment. I am hoping the reason for that is not an error in the way I set up the Eye-fi.

Also, while it isn’t exactly tech, my parents gave me the first two seasons of Burn Notice, a show about a quirky spy trying to get back into the CIA by finding who burned him. It is one of my family’s favorite shows, but I hadn’t seen it yet. Since getting home, Rachel and I have been on a tear to watch every episode. It’s a great show and getting me ready for my favorite spy drama/comedy – Chuck.

The picture above was taken shortly after midnight from the roof of our apartment. We were up watching the ball drop in Times Square and heard fireworks from the park. We rushed up to the roof to catch a few minutes of the show.

I am looking forward to 2010. Rachel and I had an eventful 2009 – I am mainly talking about the move from laid-back Eugene to go-go-go NYC – and I am looking forward to a full year in the same place. There is so much to do here and I want to take advantage of that this year.

A couple months ago Rachel and I went to the Brooklyn Flea under the Brooklyn Bridge and while I was getting some food, Rachel wandered off and sampled some peanuts from a local vendor. A reporter was there doing a story on the nuts and asked Rachel her opinion and as part of his story asked Rachel her occupation. Rachel then told the reporter a little about Swap-bot and a few weeks later he contacted Rachel to get more information about the site for an article he was writing.

The article hit the streets this morning and features a picture of Rachel.

I was working from home today due to an internet issue in the office and ran across the street to pick up a copy of the paper when I heard we were in it. Rachel heard from the reporter that we were on page 10, but the copy I first bought did not have our story anywhere in the paper. Rachel then reconfirmed that we were indeed in the paper, so at lunch we went out and tried a few more stores and found the edition with the Swap-bot article at about the fifth shop we tried.

Update: After reading this post Rachel made fun of this post. She was really wanting to know if I was excited or not to find the papers with us at the fifth shop. So Rachel, yes, I was very excited to not only find us in the paper but to also have a story about our site in the paper. Who knows what it will lead to next (hint: this a P1-esque hint)?

I have wanted a DSLR camera for a few years and today I finally got one. After lots of research and careful deliberation, I chose the Canon Rebel T1i. I will now be able to take way too many photos in way too high of resolution like the one above of Crusher.

Below is my first self portrait with the new camera. If the jacket doesn’t give it away, I am pretty excited for tomorrow’s Oregon vs. Oregon State Civil War game. You can bet I will take plenty of photos of the television, JPan and the rest of the party.

DMX was actually a very useful tool that didn’t really ever catch on as much as it should have. The premise was simple: “put our ad tag on your site and we will find the highest paying ad to serve”. Seems like a dream come true for publishers, and as the publisher of Swap-bot I can confirm that it was with one exception – not everyone was on the Right Media Exchange. We had a really nice tool for handling advertisers/networks that weren’t on the Exchange, but it required manual tweaking for maximum revenue.

I’m not really sad to see DMX get shut down – Yahoo lost my sympathy when they let me and my team go after we did some great work on their “next generation” ad serving platform – but I do miss the early days of DMX. DMX hadn’t been touched for a couple years and was starting to fall apart. Swap-bot had to stop using DMX a couple weeks ago because the ad blocking tool stopped working and highly inappropriate ads were being shown.

I think real time integrations are fueling the next chapter in publisher monetization tools. Once we get all advertisers bidding on all available inventory the publisher really will be able to kill the daisy chain. Once all the supply on the internet is linked to all of the demand on the internet, publisher monetization tools will be little more than reports, ad tags and creative/brand blocking. Once you get this set up once you will never have to go back unless you want to see how large of a check you will be getting at the end of the month. Of course, this also means there will be some pretty exciting tools for advertisers, but I will save that discussion for the future.

I leave you with a video from some of DMX’s brighter days:

I planned on telling more about my job at AppNexus. We are building applications that give large buyers of internet media the tools they need to make effective buys across a wide range of inventory.

I planned on talking more about the books I was reading on my Kindle. I wanted to finish the book I am currently reading, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, before discussing it, but unfortunately it is quite long and didn’t get through it this month. I will say that book has been eye-opening so far, but hasn’t forced me into any drastic eating changes yet.

Finally, I had planned on talking more about my experiences with Google App Engine. I decided to branch out from PHP and try some other server-side languages and Python was my first new language. GAE provided a great platform to begin playing around with Python web applications because of its solid and useful APIs and because of its simple deployments. Since beginning with Python on GAE, I have strayed away and have begun working with Tornado. Tornado is really fast and runs nicely behind Nginx. I was able to bring up an application I have been playing around with on a brand new machine in about thirty minutes last night. That isn’t quite as fast as a GAE deployment, but still not too bad.

I don’t think I will be able to keep up the daily posting, but I am going to try very hard to past more often than every month. I have enjoyed sharing something different each day and receiving comments.

Here’s a teaser for what you can expect in December:

• I bought a new camera. It’s in the mail right now and should be here by the end of the week. I am not a photographer in any sense, but would like to learn.
• Rachel and I have a couple trips into Manhattan on the upcoming weekends planned. We will be doing some holiday shopping and definitely some holiday sightseeing.
• Rachel, Crusher and I are going to Kansas City for Christmas. I hope to get out to the middle of Missouri for this (and foil dinners) while we are there.
• New Year’s Eve in NYC! Expect Rachel and I to ring in the New Year from our apartment. I can’t imagine going to Times Square, but I sure enjoy watching it.