When you sign up for an account, you get to purchase credits. And then you use these credits to make bids on items you want. But your bid is not a specific amount. Every time you make a bid on a product, the current price of the item goes up by one cent. The other difference to a normal auction is that every time someone makes a bid, the remaining time for that particular auction is extended. So there’s no chance to make the winning bid in the dying split-second. Once you’ve made a bid, you have to hope that no one else makes a bid before time runs out. If that does happen, you get to buy the product for the current bid price. Of course you’ve already paid for each bid that you made, and every bid costs you R5. No problem, you think. I make a few bids, and with the super-cheap price of the product, I still save money. Well, not entirely. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you find a nice laptop on the website that you want. Bidding starts at one cent. You make a bid to raise it to two cents. You’ve already spent R5. But 50 other people also want this laptop, and they each, in turn, make a bid, bringing the bid price to just over 50 cents. Collectively more than R250 have already been spent. What makes things worse is that the website allows you to set up an “auto-bid” mechanism. You define what the maximum is you want to spend, and then the website will bid for you when you’re not the highest bidder. So you enable that feature, and so do the 50 others. And so a frenzy of automatic bidding starts.

Let’s skip ahead to when someone wins the auction. Let’s say the laptop gets sold for R100. Considering that each cent represents a bid, the R100 represents 10,000 bids. Multiply this by R5, and you end up with R50,000. Yup, Smokoo just made R50,000 by selling a laptop for R100. If you distribute this amount over the 50 bidders, each person will have spent an average of R1,000, but 49 of them will go home empty-handed. Nice, huh?

So, what we have here is, in some ways, a scam. You’re getting products dirt cheap, sure, but loads of other people are paying and not receiving anything. Granted, they are doing this willingly and knowingly, but it’s still not right. Added to that, this whole process resembles gambling quite closely. You’re continually spending money for something that you might not get. And if you get really fixated on a particular product, you will spend more and more money on bids, only for someone else to eventually end up with the item. Not nice. And if you do get the item, you know that a large part of the cost of it was subsidised by all the other bidders. So in essence it’s a bit like the Lotto, and like playing slot-machines. People invest more and more money, until they either win, or they give up before that point. Quite sad, really.

Do you agree that this whole concept is at least a little morally corrupt?

• Circles: sharing content with only certain people and not others is much easier than on Facebook.
• It’s lightweight, and much faster than Facebook (in terms of page loading times).
• The ability to follow someone without having to be “Friends” with them.
• No apps (yup, I *hate* apps on Facebooks).
• No ads.

After waiting for a few weeks, I’ve upgraded my phone to an Android. It’s been great fun so far. My favourite apps at the moment are Angry Birds, Bebbled, GalaxIR, Gem Miner, JuiceDefender, StumbleUpon, Todo.txt Touch, and WhatsApp. Particularly I want to highlight WhatsApp. Basically it’s a replacement for SMS. It pulls your contact list and shows you everyone who is also using WhatsApp. You can then start chats with these people, and you get automatically notified when you have a new message. And you don’t even need to have WhatsApp open for that! Very cool. I use the StumbleUpon app mainly for finding more apps (which is a new feature they’ve recently added). Todo.txt Touch is a cool way to keep an up-to-date todo list. It synchronizes with DropBox, which allows you to edit the list on any other device or computer as well (as long as it’s DropBox enabled). JuiceDefender is also very useful. It disables unneeded services while you’re not using the phone, thereby extending your battery life. You can even set how aggressive the app will be at saving on power.

I’m still contemplating whether I want to start a 365-day photo project. I would limit it to my phone camera, and I would have to edit and submit the photo from the phone itself. It’s looking quite likely that I will take on this challenge, but I haven’t made my final decision yet.

That’s it for this week. Hope you have a week full of awesome challenges!

Some people were surprised that I would quit without having something else lined up first. But somehow I didn’t think about it like that when I made my decision. And I guess now it spurs me on even more to find something else that I’m going to love. I need to find an outlet for my passion again.

In other news…

I watched “The Next Three Days” on Friday and it left a deep impression. The movie was very heavy in its mood and atmosphere. For me it was easy to identify with the main character, so I guess that’s why it affected me so much. But the movie was very good, and I would recommend it anyone able to handle such a heavy, serious topic. Oh, the topic… when John Brennan’s wife is falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to a life in jail, John decides to break her out (after having exhausted all other avenues, of course). It’s the story of what kind of a person John has to become to be able to pull it off. And it ain’t pretty. Good performances by Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks.

I’ve recently decided to upgrade to an Android phone. I’ve been thinking about it for months, and am now going ahead. Which handset? The excellent Samsung Galaxy S. But, wait, there’s a problem. Not a single outlet (of my network) in Gauteng has stock of the phone. Very frustrating… I’ve placed my order, but I might have to wait 2 weeks or more. *sigh*

Anne and I are really enjoying “The Middle” lately. The pilot was just mildly amusing, but from the second episode onwards it had me hooked. Very cool series. As is “White Collar”. We started watching that on a recommendation, and like it tremendously.

Otherwise things are status quo.

I’ll start with my new years resolutions. Yes, plural. They are, in no particular order:

• Drink 3 glasses of water every day
• Write a blog post every week
• Read through the entire Bible (again)
• Launch the web application I’ve been working on & get at least 100 users to sign up
• Get closer to my ideal weight

That’s reasonable, don’t you think? Last year I kept about half of the resolutions I made, which is not too shabby. I’m aiming to keep even more this year.

If you also made some resolutions for 2011 (please share in the comments below!), I wish you good luck in sticking to them! I’ve found it to be a great challenge with valuable insights when the year comes to an end.

Right, let’s start with the most obvious question. Does the whole movie take place inside a dream? At the end of Inception we see the spinning top, but we don’t know if it falls over. In my opinion, if the movie had continued, it wouldn’t have fallen over. Cobb was still in a dream. And don’t worry, I have some “evidence”.

1. When Arthur explains the totem to Ariadne, he says its purpose is to help you make sure you’re not in someone else’s dream. But what if you’re in your own dream? In that case the totem would be useless. So even though Cobb’s totem falls over at one point in the movie, it only means he’s not in someone else’s dream.
2. The fact that Cobb’s totem was originally Mal’s, kind of invalidates the concept. Cobb is not the only one who knows how his totem is weighted. And so it makes the totem less trustworthy in my opinion.
3. In the scene where Cobb is chased through the streets, he escapes through a passage that closes in on him. To me that sounds like a dream. And then Saito appears out of nowhere. It seems a bit unlikely that he would follow Cobb to another continent…

Of course this is not proof. The end could just as well be reality. But personally I think there’s more that suggests he’s still in a dream.

The next question, if we assume Cobb is still in a dream, is what the dream means, or what reality is even like. And that’s much more tricky to answer. I have two theories, but one could come up with tons more:

1. Mal was indeed correct, and she’s moved on to reality, while Cobb still remains in his dream.
2. Near the end of the movie, Cobb says his life is full of guilt. Either his wife killed herself in reality, and he blames himself, or something else happened that he feels really guilty about, and Mal killing herself has replaced that guilt in his dreams.

This is all very speculative. What are your theories?

So… Windows allows me to choose between “Restart Later”, and… “Restart Later”. In that case, I think I’ll restart later.

I ask myself: if I don’t really have a choice, why even ask that question? It’s kind of like the “You can have it in any colour as long as it’s black” mentality. Nice going, Microsoft!