Ensight – Jeremy Wright

Okay, finally got past the issues in my previous post. How? By buying from another seller. Cost me an extra 75$ but ah well, at least the laptop’s on the way!

So, what’d I get?

This puppy.

Here’s the Sony page on it.

As always, here’s some logic behidn what I was looking for.

First, I wanted a computer with enough power to run Vista when it comes out. So a dual core was a must. 2GB of RAM was must (in this case I’ll upgrade it as soon as it gets here).

Beyond that, I was looking for some key features:

- EVDO / EDGE integration: I travel so much, that the laptop’ll practically pay for itself in not paying airport and hotel WiFi fees
- Decent graphics card: I don’t game a lot, but I wanted the option. In fact, this laptop has both a graphics card AND an onboard one. So I can use the onboard one (to save power) when I’m not gaming.
- DVD burner
- Under 5 pounds
- camera
- finger print scanner
- 100GB+ HDD

And all for under 2500$ (all in (shipping and taxes)). The problem is that while I’m partial to Vaio’s, I couldn’t actaully find a system out there that met these requirements outside of the SZ series from Sony. I looked. Several Future Shop, Best Buy’s, Staples later. Nada.

Once I get the laptop I’ll be upgrading its RAM, getting a new laptop mouse, bag and headset (this one has blue tooth, w00t!) and probably getting a docking station for it.

All in all it’ll come in around my original budget, but I’m getting a hell of a lot of machine for my buck. Fingers crossed, it’ll be here Friday or Monday.

GARRRRRH!!

Warning, useless rant ahead, who’s only purpose is to vent.

So, I find the perfect laptop on Ebay. It only ships to the US. I’m fine with that, and fairly used to it. I change my Ebay address to my US address and click Buy It Now. The seller has blocked payments from non-US registered PayPal accounts.

Okay, that’s his right, so I shoot them an email asking how to pay (to be fair, the listing said they accepted international payments, just wouldn’t ship internationally). They say Western Union. Cool, no worries.

I hop over to Western Union. Wait in line for an hour (3 people working, only one machine). Get there, and they require ID. Okay, that’s my fault. Run home and get it. Come back. Oh, they don’t take Visa. Or debit. Oh, and they can’t tell me what the total charge is since they can’t calculate exchange rates (laptop’s 1650$ US, I need to know how much to take out CDN).

Go to the bank. First bank didn’t have enough money in the machine. Second bank, I realize my daily cash withdrawal is only 1000$. So I take that out. Why not, right?

I go to Western Union’s site. Oh, I can send money from there. Oh, it’s only 500$ daily limit. Call them up. Oh, none of the agents take visa or debit. Only cash.

@#&%

I’ve sent using Visa before (3 times). Is this a new policy? No, apparently some stores used to break it, but it’s a firm policy now.

So now I’ve got the perfect damn laptop. 1000$ in cash. Lots of money on my Visa. The ability to pay via PayPal and NO WAY TO PAY FOR IT.

#@!%$@#*%#!@#!@$(!@$!@$ !@$ !@$*&#@%# @!$!@$@!$ !@$ !@$ !@$ !@$ !@$!@#$$% !!!!!!!!

Y’know?

Like one of those days where something that should be so simple (normally I pay for Ebay transactions in under 5 minutes) ends up being the biggest pain in the ass and ruining my whole day (not to mention taking up 2 HOURS of my time).

@#%#%!!!!!

I didn’t really want to jump into the whole “is it okay to pay social news editors” debate, but I’ve been getting so emails I thought it’d be easier to post a few brief thoughts than answering each person individually. Not that I don’t want to talk to people, but a body only has so much time.

First and foremost, I absolutely refuse to bet against Jason in publishing. He has too many wins, too much experience and a real knack for seeing ways of doing things differently. And that’s a winning combination that it’s always dangerous to bet against.

I totally agree with Nick Carr that this is the beginning of establishing an economic value to contributors. Also agree with TDavid’s Update that more content promoters is great for content creators.

That said, I hear what Mike Arrington is saying, in mentioning that this might not have much of an impact on Netscape or Digg:

I have a couple of observations on this. Netscape has a massively larger audience than Digg, but has absolutey failed to impact Digg growth at all. AOL placed a big bet on this product, and I imagine they want to see fast results. They aren’t getting those results. Jason’s post is a sign of desperation more than anything.

There is the question of whether or not this will fix this. Digg’s Achilles heel is that such a small group of active users drives so much of their success. However, even if those users bail to Netscape, others will certainly take their place at Digg. In my opinion, Netscape may gain some human assets and may get better story submissions, but Digg will probably continue to thrive.

Either way this is a great move. I’m not sure it’ll pay off, as there are a dozen scenarios in which this couldn’t work. But there are a few in which it could as well. And really, as an experiment, $12K/month isn’t bad at all. I’m happy to take a wait and see appraoch. It’ll certainly be interesting to watch and see if this can pull the new Netscape.com out of its tailspin.

And for the editors this is a great way to test the waters. It’s possible this paying editors bit totally won’t work. In which case the market will see that and react accordingly. After all until now we didn’t know if the value of social news sites was in the news, in the contributors or in the social. We’ll soon find out, and that in and of itself is crazy interesting to me.