Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Happy Birthday Stef! (And a Nice Word About Ubid)

Today is my lovely wife's birthday.  (Perhaps I'm biased, but she does not look a day older than when we met, some 19 years ago.)  She loves electronic gadgets, so this year I bought her a 2go PC SL10 for what amounts to a huge discount from ubid.com.   We haven't gotten it yet, but it has shipped.

For a brief time, I wondered if we would get it at all.  

Ubid suffered a denial of service attack on the day that particular auction was scheduled to end.  As a result I was unable to access the site to check the auction or up my bid if needed.  The end time came and went, and I was left to wonder if I had won or not.  About 2 AM an email came to me saying I had won for a ridiculous 50% of retail price.  Considering the DOS attack, and the fact that another email from ubid said that auctions running during the DOS would be extended by 24 hours, I wondered if they would honor the price.  It could certainly be argued that the auction was invalidated by the DOS, and that the prices were artificially low.  These items were actually being shipped from ubid itself, so they certainly had the leeway to do what they wanted.  Today, I got notification that the item had shipped at the auction price.  Hats off to ubid for going the "happy customer" route in this case.  Perhaps I'm biased because I got a good deal.  Perhaps I'm biased because my wife will be happy.  Probably a little of both.

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