Ok, its been a few weeks now & here is what has happened:

• The sale of holiday accommodation (timeshare) is quite intermittent (sold 2 in the first week, but none since)

• Very little interest in Computer aid services

• Mandy has given up doing herbalife (it probably works, but not for Mandy), so in an effort to recover some of our costs, she is selling her stock on Ebay. Herbalife are very snotty about the whole thing (threats of disciplinary action, etc). But we need to do some sums & see if we can make more money selling on ebay (buyer pays shipping costs) verses selling back to Herbalife (we pay shipping plus a 10% “penalty” (HL seems very profit driven))… its a known guaranteed loss verses a possible break-even on ebay…At least the stuff sells well on ebay… with lots of interest. I wonder why these pyramid ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H MLM companies are so afraid of the internet?

• Wonders for windows has generated about the same interest as the holidays, the ROI is quite high, but overall turnover is so low, that this could not become a viable business in its own right. Mandy will probably need to look at some other venture that can actually generate a reasonable income.

• Total Learning: another pyramid ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H MLM company, but it is a lot more like a real business - selling quality educational books & CDROMS for kids and adults. This is generating a similar (or greater) income than Computer Aid. Since Mandy has always been a bit fickle, she now doesn’t want to pursue this any more. Sigh. Anyway, TL are also scared of the internet & anything new, so all consultants are banned from even mentioning TL on the internet, in case their website happens to eclipse TL’s own website, and they decide to compete against TL… how ignorant…

The summary is: ebay is like all sales businesses, you will only do well if you are a good saleperson. Me and Mandy are not good at sales, (But I seem to be fairly good at spinning the marketing BS, so Ebay might do well for us, as long as we get a good mix of products.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 8:15 PM EDT

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Had a small business call about problems with email & internet (after they upgraded their computer system).

Tried to copy all their outlook express (OE) emails & folders using the export/import function… but to no avail (I think I need to brush up on my OE skills).

Eventually used the winxp “system settings migration” wizard, to copy everything over…

But still no dialup connection… eventually tracked it down to a faulty modem (the modem log showed no response from the modem), so a quick swap of modems fixed everything, except for a strange error message while sending emails, but it doesn’t stop the emails from being sent, so we decided to just leave it for the moment.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 12:55 PM EDT

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Went to see a client that was having problems connecting her ADSL modem (to her laptop).

It was a new connection & she was looking to move away from dialup.

I had just started getting some flu symptoms, so I wasn’t feeling to good (which might be why I didn’t fix this problem as quickly as I would have liked).

The carrier is Optus & while running the standard modem install utility, I’d get an error message about not being able to complete the modem setup.

The client had already spent a few hours on the phone to Optus, to try to get ADSL working, but was told that there must be something wrong with her laptop, or the ADSL connection is outside of the allowable range.

Any web site would give the “IE is unable to link to the web page requested”

After some poking around, I managed to ping google.com.au, so it looked like I was onto the net… but web pages would still not work… and a short while after that, the ping would also stop working… very peculiar.

Event viewer didn’t show anything wrong, but the system seemed a bit slow…

I eventually decided that the best thing to do would be to take the laptop home & try it with my ADSL connection.

Once home, I still couldn’t get the laptop to load web pages, but the ping results were more consistent: ping would always work.

So now I focused on IE & why it wouldn’t work. The answer ended up being trivial: internet options -> connections -> lan setting -> proxy server: had some weird settings. I just disabled proxy server, & everything just worked. I reckon Optus should had been able to fix this, since they deal with ADSL customers day-in, day-out)

I did some defrag, & disabled useless “utilities” from startup, then took it back.

Now things were working better: ping worked all the time (but the modem seems to have a dodgy power connector… touching it sometimes caused it to go “offline”).

Opening any web page caused a Telstra page to appear (basically saying “I don’t recognise your username & password, so I won’t let you look at the page you want).

It turns out that the client tried to get broadband thru Telstra, but couldn’t get it to work, so she switched to Optus, with the same symptoms, so then she called me.

I rang Optus on her behalf, & found out that Telstra had not “released” the ADSL service (they were meant to do it 2 day prior, but hadn’t). Optus escalated the issue.

Rang the client a few days later & she was very happy, as the connection was fixed the day after I was there.

Posted by Computer Help as Technical at 11:50 AM EDT

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I’ve been working on ebay for a few days now… looking at different ways to sell various products… this is quite time consuming, but given the lack of clients at the moment, I might as well channel all my energy at this.

My Computer Aid ads on ebay attracted very little interest & no bids. I suspect ebay is like the local trading post… good for selling “goods” but not for selling services.

Mandy has finished setting up her web shop for “Wonders for Windows” ( http://www.wonders-for-windows.com), where she sells hand-made window decals. I’ve placed a few of her decals for auction on ebay, & they seem to be attracting a little more interest, but still no purchases.

I’ve also created an ebay shop: http://stores.ebay.com.au/Martin-Mall for all the family goods that we sell.

After some browsing around ebay, it looks like what sells best is “fashionable” items (mobile phones sell at prices that sometimes exceed RRP ! ), and items that many people feel passionate about (football, rugby, wrestling, motorsports, religion, etc), So Mandy is now drawing some footy decals (Collingwood FC) & a Holden logo. If they sell well, then it will be worth changing focus away from butterflies & fluffy animals, and towards more “commercial” interests.

I also own timeshare (boy did we waste a lot of money on that!). But the timeshare company offers special deals on last-minute vacancies… I’ve just tried offering some holiday accommodation in line with this & it seems to be generating a lot of interest (but no bids so far)… I’ll wait & see on this one. I’ts also a bit tricky, since what I’m offering is very time-limited, so I need to carefully plan the ad duration to match the timeshare deadlines, and also allow for getting payments in time…

Mandy also has some stock from a “failed” weight loss venture (herbalife). Selling the stock on ebay should hopefully recover at least some of the initial cost.

The next few weeks will show what works & what doesn’t.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 1:37 PM EDT

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