Thriller, and a few other of his songs that I can’t name were really good songs.  I guess I do like the pop genre the best out of all the genres out there.  Other than what I’ve heard from his court trial a few years ago, I didn’t really pay much attention to him.

Last night I learned of his death while watching the Fox news Glenn Beck program. 

Shortly after hearing about his confirmed death, my father suggested we list some of our dolls on ebay of Michael Jackson.  About 5 minutes after listing a set of the Superstar of the 80′s series dolls (4 of them) in the original unopened boxes, someone hit the buy it now for $650.  Its quite amazing to me how people will pay this, but now we are that much richer   I think my father said he paid 10 bucks for the set in the 80s is a really great turnaround compared to the bank.  Anyways, since I have listed several other memorabilia, and it was going hot for the first 3 hours and now the excitement is gone and the market is flooded, so I guess I won’t be getting outrageous profits anymore from his stuff, but I’m still quite happy.  Looking back on this, I have learned that most buyers buy collectables on adrenline caused by death of the doll’s character.

Anyways, thats all I have to say on this topic   I’m trying to decide on what my next blog topic will be.  I’m guessing it is going to be something on ubuntu xen administration since that is my next major project

Anyways, I have a short rant about the bookstore on campus.  As you probably know, most bookstores for colleges are a huge ripoff operation focused at making maximum profit because they know they can do that and get away with it.  Anyways, I thought I’d just talk a little bit about my experience every semester and what I started doing this semester to fix the problems that I’ve noticed.

The first semester I came here, I wasn’t sure about what books I needed until the final week, so I figured that I would get them from the bookstore.  That semester, I know I spent close to 500 dollars.  That is just outrageous for a mere 4 books.  Pretty sad, isn’t it?

After that semester, I began planning ahead and finding my book titles / isbn numbers out ahead of time.  The bookstore isn’t very helpful with this either.  The bookstore hates to post the book picture on their online store, so I end up always going to the bookstore about a week before class with a pen and paper to write down everything I need.  This works fine unless the professor hasn’t yet decided on the book they wish to use.  I’ve found that the bookstore also hates ordering books early, so they rarely have all of the books until the first day of class  (even when the professor ordered them ahead of time).

Unfortunately, the first semester I took this approach, I ended up spending top dollar on 2 books in the bookstore 4 days after the first day of classes, I also waited in line for a solid hour, something I rarely do because I plan ahead to avoid it.  I have learned that professors don’t really expect students to have the books until a week into the semester.

After that semester, I took a slightly revised approach: look on the professor’s site for the isbn, etc ahead of time, and use the bookstore as an aid on the last day before classes.  For the past few semesters, this has worked out really well for figuring out what I have to get.  I then normally go on ebay / amazon and pay for 2-3 day shipping guarantees.  This hasn’t failed me yet, and the longest a book ever took to get to me was 4 days into the semester.  It was also about 75% cheaper than a bookstore only option.

One word of warning with buying books online, normally online books are cheaper and can sometimes come as an international edition.  The international edition is normally the same as the edition in the bookstore, but normally paperback and smaller.  There are always 2 versions of a book, an international cheap copy for third world countries, then the US version which is expensive and sold in the US.  Using the internet, you usually can find an international copy that is located in the US so shipping is still fairly fast.

I haven’t had an issue for international editions that I’ve been able to get, but I still watch out for online homework keys.  These are normally packaged with bookstore books.  Unfortunately, I have found out that when you have to have these keys separately, they end up being as much as the book in the bookstore with the key.  So, if I know about online homework (I usually have a clue on the first day of class or bookstore “bundles”), I will wait for the first day of class to verify that before I get a book and get suckered into buying a key from the book publisher’s website.