allankintz.com

I’ve been on eBay for what feels like an eternity… but what in reality is about 10 years. I’ve got a feedback rating of 315 – 100% positive. I don’t think I’ve ever had a negative feedback, ever. Though I think I may have had one neutral from some douche who didn’t know what he was doing – but that was a long time ago.

I wouldn’t say I buy and sell a lot… but I know where to look when I want something or have something to get rid of. I’ve applied a lot of common sense and logic to my auctions – both buying and selling.

Frankly, I only deal in Buy it Now offers – when both buying and selling. I don’t care too much about getting absolute top dollar for my sales so I will usually look up completed listings and see what things have been actually selling for and then compare those for current listings waiting to sell. Then I undercut all of them by a few $$. Bam, item sold.

I have a good example from yesterday. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I recently purchased a battery pack for my iPhone. IMO, it was crap. I just wasn’t satisfied. So I used it for my trip and planned to get rid of it when I got home. Got around to listing it last night.

I think I had the auction up around 6pm. They’re like $80 new… decided on $50 with free shipping (this is another thing I like using – include shipping – people like that).

Woke up this morning and it was sold already. Awesome. Since I keep a stash of padded bubble envelopes, I packed it up, printed a label, and dropped it in the outgoing mailbox at work. Done.

Listed to sold to mailed in about 14 hours. I’ll take it.

Sure, I could have probably squeezed out a few more $$ – but honestly when I sell on eBay it is more to get things out of the house than to make a huge profit. If I can give someone a good deal, while picking up a few $$ in the process, lucky them. Hopefully this guy likes his case more than I did.

This is just something that has been bothering me ever since I got into cars. Just want to vent a bit and share some info.

First thing is first: Camber is not the devil.

When I put my adjustable camber bolts on the front of my car and requested alignment at -2° camber up front you could have sworn the guys at the shop (Kent Brown Toyota in this case) thought I was absolutely insane. “Are you sure?” Yes. “You’re going to get a lot of tire wear.” No, I’m not, just do it.

Look… a little camber never hurt anyone. Hell, even up to something like -3° is probably fine. As long as you’re not going crazy with it – your tires will be OK… one on condition.

The rest of your alignment needs to be in spec – and most importantly: toe.

Toe is which direction your wheel is pointing when the car is “straight” – towards the inside or outside of your car. Pointing to the inside is toe “in” – the outside is toe “out.” Any out of spec toe settings can destroy your tires in a relatively short period of time. This is ridiculously accelerated if you have some sort of “custom” camber setting.

Say you have -2° of camber and something like 1° of toe “in” (assuming spec is something like +/- .2°)… you will end up chewing up the inside of your tire pretty quick. Not in like a couple weeks or anything – but it will significantly shorten the life of your tires – especially along the inside edge – very uneven wear.

Your best friend in all of this is an alignment as close to factory specs as possible. Your tires will thank you. And if you’re into any sort of performance or modification – don’t be afraid of a little negative camber – no matter what the shop tells you.

If you want to know a bit more about alignment, check out this Tire Rack article.

Note: I’m not a mechanic. I just play one on the internet. I don’t guarantee this info is accurate – so you should also research stuff on your own. Hopefully it’s at least partially correct.

Most feedback… for anything at all… is negative. People like to complain. If things are going well, no one thinks about it. If things are going badly – we’ve got problems.

So in a minor bid to change that a little, here is a little positive feedback in terms of “word of mouth.”

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I recently had to deal with Progressive with regard to my insurance policy continuing to skyrocket (up to $1028 for 6 months if I renewed straight up – for 2 cars, 2 clean drivers – crazy). After an ordeal of calling up and essentially “complaining” about my policy continuing to climb, they worked with me to start essentially a new policy with all of the same info – which saved me something like $240/six months. And even beyond that – the payments are now every month (instead of 5 on and 1 off) so that’s spread out further, thus making the payment even lower. Suffice to say I’m going from what would have been about $212/mo to $130/mo.

Anyway… after the new policy started and I made the first deposit payment, my online policy kept reminding me to submit proof of my security system and such for the discount. Uh whaaa? The guy that setup my new policy assured me everything would transfer and I’d be good to go.

Well I emailed Progressive again and basically said “I was told this… and it says this.” That was last night.

Got a reply this morning confirming that I’m set. Nothing to mail/fax in or prove. The policy is ready to go and I’m all done with having to fight for a lower rate (for now).

So nothing big. But it’s nice to contact someone about something you think is a problem and then are assured that it is actually OK in the end and you don’t have to worry about it. So thank you, Progressive. You are still showing me that you’d like to keep my business (even though I had to essentially call and ask if you still wanted it after you kept jacking my rates up).