Fuming

The last couple of days have been really unproductive which is slightly frustrating. Despite good intentions to make the most of this first week whilst classes are still getting started, I haven't really done so. Plans to get organised through buying folders, writing up notes, buying textbooks and looking at Masters applications have all been replaced by playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64. I definitely need to become more productive and manage my time better. At the moment procastination is a bit of speciality. It doesn't help that the weekend is full of hockey and entertaining so I should have done my weeks notes today or yesterday rather than doing nothing. I am still struggling with choosing my modules too so slightly concerned. Econometrics today reminded me how much I dislike the econometrics side of economics, I think a lot of this is caused by the fact that the course last year which ultimately introduced us to the topic was taught very poorly and thus it gave everyone a very negative outlook on it. Need to try and gain some enthusiasm for it, not just for this module but also for later life as I imagine it is quite important for research projects.

Today I received some news that makes me rather sad. The school of Economics and Finance which is currently based on the Scores in the most magnificent building is to be moved to North Street. I have loved attending lectures, tutorials and visiting my tutors at the building because it is such a brilliant location and picturesque. I remember vividly in April 2005 sitting in F2 at the open day talk for economics and looking out of the window over the North Sea to the Old Course and Leuchars and deciding this was the university for me. As well as that they have some lovely bluebells that come into season every May and are extremely nice. So I am very cross about all this as I hate change. Tomorrows job is to go and take some photos of the building and the views from it and post them here.

The 5000 syringe pens arrived today which is fairly exciting but now it is time to sell them. I am selling them substantially cheaper than competitors as well as including a free refill pen and pens of a higher quality. Something I have found on eBay is that selling the same good cheaper isn't always enough - buyers are most definitely not rational and that can prove to be quite difficult. I remember selling poker visors a month or so ago and I was selling the exact same item as someone else but a) had a higher rating b) he was shipping from the USA c) mine was 25% cheaper. Despite all this, he sold something like 1o visors in a week and I sold none. Why? I don't know - I spent an hour trying to find out, changed my item title, changed my categories, tweaked P&P and other things. Result? Didn't work but a month on I am starting to sell a few of them. eBay market place research has recently switched to terapeak.com and some of the features it has are incredible for sellers. For example I am going to be selling syringe pens so just typing that into the search box will come back with some really useful statistics - total sales, biggest sellers, average price etc. I find looking at biggest sellers the most useful as it gives you an idea of what sort of revenue one can achieve over what sort of time. So for syringe pens over the last 90 days, have a look at the table attached. Pretty cool although having looked up the data on myself for cereal, I am not convinced of its accuracy. Nevertheless seeing that someone is turning over £200k a month selling iPod is pretty damn impressive.

Today was spent pretty much hungover and tired just moping about and doing packaging. Tomorrow I am going to potter down to the Dunhill at about 8am and try and get some snaps of the golfers as apparently there are some big names teeing off from about then. It should also get me out of bed and hopefully the weather will be good. I'm going to blog tomorrow about my current dilemma of what to do regarding post offices and which one to choose in St Andrews following the closure of the main one. Until then.