Why and when you should use MassPay

This is a video more for people selling Therebucks TOO me and not buying FROM me. You may want to view it on YouTube (just click on the actual video after it starts) to see it at a larger size if you want to be able to read the text file demo. If you don't want to see the There pics at the beginning, just skip ahead to 3:30 in the vid. Please let me know if you still have questions about MassPay after this! :)

What's next, cats?!??

So apparently There is testing a sky neighborhood right now. Is that cool or what? I'm assuming if all goes well that this'll become a real, regular thing that anyone can use...and I know some people that are going to be sooooo excited about it! Seriously, I don't spend much time chatting with my buyers or sellers, but once in a while there is an email exchange that includes some non-Therebucks related chatter, and one of the common themes is people who are waiting for "real" sky pazzes.

Seriously, I know people who have been waiting and keeping the dream alive for YEARS and I was beginning to think they were crazy or delusional...or maybe both. Now it's becoming a reality. Yay! They must be over the moon (literally, considering they've been building up in the sky for years now anyway.)

As exciting as learning about this yesterday was, I still managed to wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, hating life, stressing out about not having my Halloween costume yet and just generally being miserable.

I perked up a little bit when I saw that Mike Wilson, CEO of There.com had retweeted my tweet regarding the space neighborhoods. This was very cool like "wow, MW knows I exist! He's following me on Twitter!" Right? But it seemed a little weird because the tweet included the URL http://jinx.tv, which almost everyone reading this post already knows is the URL for my Therebucks selling site. So it's like...the CEO of There was advertising my tbux sales. Wow, thanks Skippy!

(I probably shouldn't be soooo surprised that the CEO of There would pay attention to a Twitter account called "Therebucks":)

Then, I managed to get a pretty cool Halloween costume, and there are even some thigh-high boots on the way for it, so overall my day is looking up.

Now that we have hugs and props (and wow, props have really changed the look of things in There!) what do you think is next? Could it be cats?????

-Jinx_tv

Oh yeah, p.s. I added my first blogroll blog on the side...and it's Mike Wilson's There blog! (Hmmm...do you think he has a non-There blog?) It's pretty new so that was a nifty find. Hope it gets updated ALLLL the time. The blogroll is over on the right hand side of this page.

How I pay out Therebucks and Paypal payments away from home

This is a little longer and more rambling than I'd like, but I hope you'll find it interesting and/or useful or reassuring or something!

Was trying to post video from Sacramento

Well, I was trying to post a video using my netbook webcam with youtube's record feature telling you all about how I keep the transactions flowing out and in while I'm away from home, but everything kept freezing up about two minutes in EVERY TIME. Maybe it just means I'm too long winded!

We're about to leave to go home via Lodi (wine tasting, woohoo!) otherwise I'd try again with a shorter video. Oh well, I'll just make the video on my mac tonight or tomorrow.

Tweet Tweet, Therebucks Sellers!

Wow, Twitter is AMAZING for keeping Therebucks sellers up to date! Now if I could just get ALL sellers to follow it, I think we'd all be confident and happy! (And flowers would bloom everywhere and there'd be rainbows and puppies and kittens...)

Sellers, please do follow me on Twitter for the most up-to-date selling status!

http://twitter.com/sell_therebucks

Tweet, tweet!

All the new jinx.tv site updates

It's come to my attention that some people visiting this blog may not have the best english skills. Or it could be me not enunciating properly? If someone is a non-native english speaker, as someone who is always trying to follow the convos of people around me who are speaking another language (in my case, spanish) I can certainly sympathize with how much harder it is to understand what people are saying vs. what they've written down. For that reason, I'm going to try and post a nice balance of both written and video stuff.

Had some exciting updates on the site today. Well, exciting to me. So here's all the recent updates...

1.) added text to http://jinx.tv that tells when the last transaction took place

2.) added link to this blog to http://jinx.tv

3.) added link to my "therebucks" twitter account to http://jinx.tv (before the link only showed up when I ran out of Therebucks, now it's near the bottom of the page all the time.)

4.) added "status" link (it's in AJAX!) to http://sell.jinx.tv to help notify sellers about payment times...good for when I'm sleeping, or out of town (although I have a netbook and a fancy phone that I can do most transactions with it still causes delays) or am paying a few days late due to a MASSIVE influx of Therebucks and/or a dirty rotten scammer (knock on wood.)

5.) added link to this blog to http://sell.jinx.tv

6.) added link to my SELLER SPECIFIC Twitter account on http://sell.jinx.tv

and also...

7.) Created the http://twitter.com/sell_therebucks account and even made a first post to it!

So, things are looking good. I figure it's like when my cat had cancer...things can feel a little overwhelming sometimes, but if you do just a LITTLE bit every day, before you know it you've accomplished a lot.

Oh, I'm so dumb though. I wanted to email all past buyers so I went into my database and extracted out the 13,500 rows of data containing avatar buy Therebucks transactions, and then I put them in a Google Docs spreadsheet (although to complicate things, a table can only hold 10,000 rows), sorted it alphabetically by name and then removed all the dupe names...BY HAND. Yes, it took hours.

Okay, so then I wanted to do the same thing again with the sellers list, which is shorter...less than 5,000 rows of data but still quite a task. I had sorted alphabetically and then extracted duplicates up to the letter "C" when I thought to myself "I wonder if there is a spreadsheet function that can remove duplicate lines." So I googled it and...there IS and it's really EASY! Basically I just had to add "=UNIQUE(A2:A4110)" to a data cell and that's IT. It was so quick and easy...think of all those hours I wasted because I didn't do that simple google search earlier!

The only downside was that afterwards I realized it was case sensitive, so if someone had submitted requests that said for instance, "JohnSmith", "johnsmith", "Johnsmith" and "JoHnSmItH", they probably got an email from me for EACH spelling variation. Consider that your punishment for inconsistency! :P I guess I'll have to go back over the file now and check for those caps dupes.

Anyway, I guess I better go eat some freshly baked bread and then practice Rock Band Beatles (cuz we're making everyone do it at our Halloween party and I want to make sure we know how it works first. Hey, maybe I can be just a teeny bit better than most everyone else, too!)

See you in There!

Reasons you may not get Therebucks in 3 minutes

Over 95% of all buyers receive their Therebucks from http://jinx.tv within 3 minutes, but then there are the few transactions that don't. Usually the reasons why are easy to fix, or even better...prevent! So here's what you can do to make sure you get the Therebucks you bought in 3 minutes or less...

wth? Transaction records missing?

Argh, I thought I was almost caught up paying people for Therebucks when I realized something weird happened and I had no record from There of anyone who sent me Therebucks on the 16th or 17th. I thought "wow, that's so weird that no-one who created transactions on the 16 & 17th actually sent any ThereBucks..." and that's when I started to think maybe something was wrong, but meanwhile it means I did pay some transactions out of order and I've paid people from the 18th and 19th and skipped over others. The good news is I paid at least a dozen people today, but the ones who sent Therebucks during BOTH those time periods may be awfully confused, and others may be pretty bummed out about the additional delay. I will be sending those PayPal payments asap though, and I'm really sorry about that since I always try to be fair and pay in order.

Meanwhile, I made a new video of reasons why a small percentage of transactions from those BUYING Therebucks don't get paid in 3 mins and what you can do to prevent it from happening to you...it's uploading to YouTube now and I'll put it up here when it's done.

What's going on with selling Therebucks?

Yeah, inquiring minds want to know why it's taking a few days to pay sellers sometimes, so here ya go...

I'm starting a blog just for my Therebucks buyers/sellers

Well, the title says it all. I want to give Therebucks buyers and sellers some reassurance that everything is okay, I've been around for a while, I'm a real person, I'm safe to deal with, etc.

My name is Laura Knights, but my There avatar name is Jinx_tv and I've been selling Therebucks for I guess about six years as I write this. The first time I ever "sold" Therebucks was actually in exchange for enough frequent flier miles for a ticket from New Hampshire all the way to Silicon Valley to attend the first ever There Real Life Gathering (and yes I have the tshirt to prove it...and the tiki mug and the mousepad...)

After that, I was not only creating content like crazy for There (I was the first member with over 1000 items in their catalog) but I did some contract work for There and eventually moved to Silicon Valley.

Of course then I mostly stopped developing content, although I keep wanting to start up again. It just seems to take so much time, but I do love doing it. Meanwhile I am still selling Therebucks, but most of them are resales...in other words, other avatars who may be developers or just members who are cleaning out their virtual closets and have extra tbux from garage sales and auctions, sell their tbucks to me and then I pass them on to people who want to buy them...for a small profit. Seriously, it is a small profit. It's about 10% before PayPal fees, but it's more like 5 or 6% after that and even less (much less) when I get chargebacks.

But anyway, that's my little story just to get this blog rollin'!