Well, my luck with the new MacBook began to run out a little over a week ago, now. I wasn’t quite experiencing the “random” shutdown problem that a lot of MacBook owners are seeing, but my MacBook would shut down without warning when it was running off of battery power and the battery life fell too low. I tried recalibrating my battery, and resetting the Power Management Unit, but sometime last night the battery finally gave up the ghost. When I plugged the MacBook in this morning, it could no longer recharge the battery — there was a big ugly “X” there on the screen for the battery indicator.

So I dropped the MacBook off at my local store, and described the problem. They shouldn’t need to send it off to be repaired, but we’ll at least have to wait for a new battery to arrive. I hope that that’s all that it is.

I just went to CNN.com and this caught my eye:

Hussein listened silently to the witness. But he lost his temper when one of the lawyers described Kurdish guerrillas, known here as peshmargas, as freedom fighters.

“You are agents of Iran and Zionism. We will crush your heads,” Hussein shouted.

The story does not report whether Saddam was squinting through his pinched-together thumb and index finger when he made this threat.

I’ve just completed my first sale on eBay, and it went really well. I sold my old Palm Zire 31 handheld, which I replaced with a Palm T|X last Christmas. The buyer paid me earlier this morning, and I’ve just dropped the package off at the post office.

The item sold for $51.07. I added on $6.21 handling fees to cover the cost of the box and packing peanuts. The priority mail postage is estimated at $7.20 (for a weight of 2 lbs. 8 oz.) And the buyer requested shipping insurance, which was estimated to be $2.30. So the total cost to the customer was $66.78.

Now to figure out how much I netted on the sale. I had to pay for the box and packing peanuts, so knock off that $6.21. That is, I didn’t “build in” any profit there. The actual cost for postage was $5.30 (a bit less than eBay’s estimate), and insurance was $2.30. I spent another 50 cents for delivery confirmation. PayPal took their cut of the transaction, which was $2.24. And eBay charged me $1.20 for the listing, plus another $2.09 for their cut of the sale (ugh!).

So (if I did my math correctly) my net on the sale was $46.94. Not too bad, considering that the Zire has just been sitting around collecting dust for the last eight months. The next time around, I need to figure out if there’s any way to reduce the middle man (eBay and PayPal) fees a bit — those two combined ate up over $5 of my profit. I’m guessing there’s no easy way to avoid that, though. I’ve read that some eBay sellers will pad their handling fees to account for things like that, but that seems a little dishonest to me. I need to think about that some more.