WizGidget

I had three vintage motorcycles that I’ve always intended to fix up and ride again. All Yamaha’s, I had a ‘73 RD250 street bike, a ‘73 AT3 (a 125cc street/dirt bike) and a ‘77 DT100, also a street/dirt bike. The problem is they’ve been just sitting around for 20 years now because I haven’t had time to work on them. The older they get, the harder it is to find parts for them. There’s already some plastic parts that have degraded with time and need to be replaced. So, even though I’m sad to let them go, it’s time to find new homes for them.

I could have put them on E-bay, and I might have gotten a better price for them due to the auction nature, and then again maybe not. Good prices on ebay depend on having two or more people who want the item and bid against each other. That way the price floats up to what one or the other is willing to pay. If you only have one bidder, the price stays at whatever you set as the minimum bid. The problem with E-bay is that it’s more of a nationwide forum. So, if someone in New York decided they wanted one of the bikes, they’d have to figure in the transportation costs to get the motorcycle to them. I needed something more local.

In times past there might be community bulletin boards or billboards where citizens could post bills for public viewing. Even today there are often bulletin boards in some public places like grocery stores or coffee shops where people can post notices. There’s even such a place on the internet, it’s called “Craigslist”, and that’s where I decided to advertise my motorcycles.

Craigslist is a website where notices can be posted for free. There are various sub-sites that are location specific, for instance http://killeen.craigslist.org covers the Bell County area including Temple and Killeen. It has various category areas, such as Community, Personals, Housing, For Sale, Services, Jobs, and “Gigs” (short-term contract jobs). There’s even a “For Sale” subcategory for motorcycles.

The catch to Craiglist is that the ad isn’t going to be seen by people who don’t use the internet. Even among internet users, and despite Craigslist popularity, many people have not heard of or used Craigslist. Even with that caveat however there are enough people checking Craigslist that it’s fairly effective. I generally advertise my rental property on Craigslist, to good effect.

I posted the original ad May 11. As of today, May 24 (2 weeks later) I have two of the bikes sold, and the third is spoken for. One of the buyers is from Austin — outside Bell County but not too far away.

One last anecdote: last week I got a new iPhone 4 (paid for with motorcycle proceeds of course). It turns out that, you guessed it, “there’s an app for that”. There’s actually a Craigslist “app” for iPhone, which I’ve downloaded and tried out — it’s a good way to browse Craigslist postings while you’re sitting idle in your doctor’s waiting area. There is apparently an equivalent app for Android-based and probably other smartphones as well.

When you set up your backups to run on a schedule, it can be pretty much of a set-and-forget thing. Just forgetting about it probably isn’t a good idea however, because things can go wrong with the backups, and it’d be really sad if you needed to restore a file and discovered that your backups weren’t running after all. Most of the backup solutions that come with external hard drives we’ve discussed don’t really do much in terms of notification either that the backup took place or whether there were errors. Even checking the status just gives a “successful” or “failed,” where “failed” may mean the backup didn’t work at all, or it may must mean that one or two files didn’t get backed up.

My recommendation would be to check on the backups occasionally to see whether they’re working properly. This can be a bit of a challenge, because as mentioned the backup software doesn’t report much. You have to look at the logs to find out whether there were errors and also look at the external drive to see whether backup files were actually created. Sometimes it’s a good idea to manually start off the backup just to make sure it runs.

One issue with backups that I often run across is Windows file locking. For instance, I tend to have Outlook running all the time. Unfortunately Outlook locks all it’s data files when it is running, which prevents the backup application from reading the files. There may be other applications you run that also lock their data files. The solution for that is to close Outlook or whatever application has locked files before the backups run.

Another issue is file permissions. I occasionally run across this when I’ve restored files back to my computer after having re-installed Windows — the ownership of the files may not have been set correctly when the files were restored. Generally I solve this problem by browsing to the folder containing the file with permissions errors, and “take ownership” of the folder, replacing owner on “subcontainers and objects”. You can do this (be careful!) by right-clicking on the folder, pick “Properties”. In the Properties dialog window, pick the Security tab, then click the Advanced button. In the Advanced Security dialog window, pick the Owner tab, and in the “Change owner to” pane, click on the name you log in as, check the “Replace owner” checkbox, then click OK. It may ask if you’re sure — be sure before you do something like this.

There are other backup software solutions online, which I haven’t tried. Lately you’ve probably seen ads for Mozy or Carbonite, which are online backup solutions. The online solutions generally have a monthly fee (a big minus for me), but they also depend on a broadband connection. Sorry Jack, your dialup connection won’t be practical. There’s also a number of software solutions available ranging from free to fairly inexpensive, just google “windows backup software” As always, be careful about downloading and installing software. You might want to do a google search on the name of the software to see if anything scary shows up.

Next week: more about online auctions as a follow-on to the Quibids article several weeks ago.