EBaying; howling after an auction

On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Dave McGuire wrote: I'd have to agree with Marvin. You don't bid early on something because you don't want to attract attention to something that might be mis-labeled or poorly described. If other people don't know what it is, and the bidding price stays low, you bid in the last 5 seconds and get it for much less that you would have had a bunch of people been after it. Myself, I go on eBinges. I might spend a couple of days pouring over ads for stuff that I've been looking for for a long time. Sometimes I buy things just to buy them; once I bought an IBM thermal printer for $.25 and paid $5.00 shipping for it. Recently I got an IBM Fortran manual for a buck or so, and the guy just sent it without payment. What else...oh yeah, I picked up a SCSI adapter for an Atari ST for $1.00, because the guy had it listed only as "SCI Adapter"...total fluke, because I myself misspelled "scsi" in the search... I'm certainly no power user of eBay (shallow pockets, too lazy to ship things), but I find that their format drives me to "snipe" things, but I look at it, as Marvin said, as a Sealed Auction way to buy. People who try to be *fair* about bidding there, when their system doesn't cater to the kind of fairness that allows everyone to have their turn to bid until the last call, just end up frustrated and disappointed. My .02, Aaron