Easy! Reader

I built this popular game in Flash 8 for a brain exercise before I had ever actually played it. I did no research and when I completed the code, I played it once to test it out. I can see how it could become very addictive.

Well, I’ve slowly begun the major task of selling off a lot of the CDs I own. At one point I had over 3,000 disks, but over the years I’d sold off quite a few and gotten it down to around 1,200 as of last year. Then began the major task of ripping them all to iTunes. 54 gigabytes later…

I sold off the majority of the pedestrian stuff to the local record shops, but I held on to the really good stuff to sell on Half.com and Amazon. This weekend, I made a solid dent in the list and was floored by how many CDs I have that are worth a bunch of money (being that they are out of print, imports, etc.). Some surprises:

• Shane MacGowan & The Popes - Rock and Roll Paddy EP was selling for $59.95-89.95;
• Sonic Youth (the self-titled EP on SST) was selling for $49.98-79.99;
• the original release of the Revenge of the Nerds soundtrack was selling for $89.99;
  
• The Chameleons UK - Strip was selling for $69.95; and
• The soundtrack to Psycho Beach Party was selling for nearly $50.

My Half.com shop is pretty packed with good stuff, most of which I kept pretty reasonable. My Amazon “z-Shop” has some interesting stuff in it as well (more of the import singles, etc.). For those interested in what’s out there:

• A slew of import singles from Ben Fold Five, Placebo, Portishead, Space and Skunk Anansie;
• some autographed disks from Goo Goo Dolls, Meat Beat Manifesto and Alec Empire (of Atari Teenage Riot); and
• assorted They Might Be Giants, Pixies, XTC, Komeda, and others.

There’s also a lot of miscellaneous exotica stuff like the Beat at Cinecitta CDs, Vampyros Lesbos, The Sound Gallery, etc. I love it all, but am trying to make room for a new office and need the shelf space.

If any of that is to your liking, enjoy, whether you buy from me or not. Also, I still have a lot of rare stuff I couldn’t find listings for on Half or Amazon. Do you know anywhere else I could look to sell them (apart form eBay… it takes way too long to list an item)?

I got an email the other day from Steven Mading, a developer at the BioMagnetic Resonance Bank at the University of Wisconsin. In it, he shared his experience using jsTrace and, with his permission, I’m sharing it with all of you:

I just thought I’d give a quick thank you to you for the little jsTrace JavaScript utility you made available online. I found it from a Google search and it was exactly what I needed.

It really helped me a lot. I had a problem with some widgets on an HTML form that had a lot of JavaScript hooks (things like onblur, onclick, onfocus, etc). The events were occurring in a weird order and I couldn’t trace what was happening. Using the standard alert() function was useless because making an alert window POP up caused the events to be different and changed the relevant behavior (since onfocus and onblur were a relevant part of the behavior, popping up a window changes the focus and invalidates the debugging information when what I’m trying to do is figure out why the focus changes aren’t happening the way I expect.)

Your jsTrace allowed me to figure out the problem (which, as it turns out, was that when I clicked on Widget B, I was calling BOTH the onclick for Widget B and the onblur for Widget A, but not always in a predictable order). So once I knew that was happening, I was able to redesign my code to work either way and thus fix the bug.

Again, thank you for making this tool publicly available.

I love it when things work out like that. It makes it all worthwhile.

Have you had an experience with using jsTrace that you’d like to share? Do you use it or any other scripts we’ve built often? Are any of the user enhancement scripts in use on production websites? Let us know your thoughts, good or bad.