From Santa’s Sack O’ Crap, 25 December:

2 Sanford PhD mechanical pencils [$17.58]
1 LG Bluetooth Stereo Headset HBS-250 [$117.99]
1 Belkin Zipper Case for XM Xpress [$19.99]
1 GFM Digital Camera and Camcorder [$179.99]
1 Décor Digital Picture Frame [$69.99]

Total crap: $405.54

Total price: $3 (plus $5 shipping)

You just can’t beat it.

And yes, I scored some of my own.

This is Ché Guevara’s granddaughter Lydia, with a literal Bandolier of Carrots, which she did not get from Woot.

This image of Lydia Guevara, twenty-four, will be appearing in a PETA campaign in South America.

(Found at Armed and Dangerous, where Eric S. Raymond has some highly-appropriate commentary on the subject.)

(Swiped from eminent Wooter and Photoshopper “glasswindow”.)

Their fifth-anniversary promotion is even more devious than usual.

Today’s item is a real-life replica of the infamous Woot-Off Lights that appear on the screen during the infamous Woot-Off. (It runs on a couple of LED bulbs and plugs into any convenient, or inconvenient, USB port.) The price is $3 (plus $5 shipping), about what you’d spend for a Bag O’Crap, were they being offered.

But here’s the twist: one out of every ten buyers of the lights will be sent an actual Browsing of Castoffs. And the selection is randomized as follows: if the last digit of your order number matches the last digit before the decimal point of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at closing Monday, in addition to the crappy lights, you get crap.

Historically, a 10-percent chance is better than I’ve been getting when vying for a Battery of Clamshells. The trick, though, is actually to get the lights in the first place: it took about twenty minutes to get the order through, albeit without the usual system glitches.

(Disclosure: I already have a set of these damn lights.)

Oh, wait. No, it doesn’t.

Come to think of it, neither does this.

I got through a Woot-Off without actually buying anything. (Okay, I came close once.)

Didn’t even try for the Barrage of Criticism.

The blessed fog of forgetfulness has settled over most of the therapy sessions I had in the late 1980s, though I haven’t yet cleared out all the memories about that one afternoon with the Holtzman inkblots, ostensibly an improvement over the workaday Rorschachs. Think “frustration coming to a sudden boil” — and a story very much like the story of this T-shirt design at Woot:

The irony could’ve killed him, if the boredom didn’t get him first. Here he was, a “snowman” in a “snow globe” full of “snow”, and he’d never touched real snow in his life. He’d never know how it feels on his plastic skin. He’d never construct a stalwart snow fort, or whiz a lethal snowball through the air, or catch the lacy flakes on his tongue. All he could do was watch it fall. And wonder. And wish someone would come by and shake his globe, just so he could pretend for a moment that a blizzard raged around him as powerful as the one inside him.

The mere fact that I could see something like that in an amorphous blob of whatever suggested, to me and maybe to the therapist, that I was seriously screwed.

This does not mean, incidentally, that I am today frivolously screwed.

Lynn figures that free calendars are pretty much worth the price:

I don’t expect free calendars to be especially attractive. My dentist always gives out free calendars that have photos of perfectly manicured formal gardens. Pretty but very boring. All the pictures look the same. I’ve never taken one. Some people say, “Why would you pay for a calendar when you can get them for free?” I say, why settle for free calendars when, for around 10 to 15 dollars you can have art on your wall all year?

Like, maybe, Art Frahm.

I’ve seen this issue addressed only once: in 2007, Woot sold a vast number of “Crappy Calendars” — that’s how they were billed — and during the following year issued Replacement Art which you could print out and then paste over the “pretty but very boring” picture in the original product.

Me, I’m waiting for my insurance man to cough up the usual Photos of Classic Cars calendar, as he has the past three years — or, lacking that, I’ll dig through the archives for a 1981 calendar. Calendar buffs will note that 2009 follows the same pattern as 1981, except that REO Speedwagon isn’t on the radio every 45 minutes.

My gaming credentials are nil, but one day I picked up a fairly-spendy Razer Copperhead mouse, which is now the official pointing device of my work box. (One advantage of being in IT: we get to customize our machines in any way that doesn’t actually impair production.) It was a delight, its price notwithstanding, and I decided that next time I caught one on Woot, I would buy another.

Well, I didn’t catch a Copperhead, but I did snag a Diamondback 3G, which apparently is the next model down, and it’s been pressed into service on my desktop at home. These are fabulous meece, and I am not about to mention that Trini has been telling me so for more than a year now.

For my third Woot Bag O’Crap, this is the take (prices where not known set to arbitrary $5):

1 Lowepro Ridge 10 Digital Camera Bag [$10.00]
4 iGo Universal Auto Power Adapter (not including tips) [$119.96]
1 Wristlinx X33X1F 2-Way Radio Wrist Watch (set of two) [$44.95]
1 Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum Porcelain Hinged Box [$9.99]
1 OEM Dell (by ATI) TV PCI card with DVI and S-Video Output (used, does not include VGA) [$5.00]
1 Mystery auto power cord with 5-female connector [$5.00]
1 Kodak Rechargeable Digital Camera Battery KLIC-7003 [$29.95]

Total $224.85

(Previous crap here and here. More crap revelations at BagsOfCrap.com.)

Recent Woot contest:

Show us a label for a wine marketed by another tech or web company.

I’m not quite sure this met the strictest standards for entry, but it was my favorite:

Although you really should see the whole thing in its full glory.

One item I would never have expected in a Woot-Off is a water heater, fercryingoutloud, but there it was, a little twenty-pound box that hangs on the wall and promises to keep you warm in the shower.

I wasn’t in the market — I’d replaced the water heater here last year — but I did pay attention to this little blurb in larger-than-fine print:

Not recommended in climates where average ground water temperature is less than 60°F. This unit draws 80 amps, please check your service panel for compatibility.

My gas water tank, of course, draws no amps. I concluded that this thing could melt down my 100-amp wiring in no time if I persist in such antisocial activities as turning on the lights. And what about that ground-water temperature? This document [link goes to PDF file] from the Office of Scientific & Technical Information had a tidy little map of such things, used for heat-pump analysis, and it appears the southern half of Oklahoma has a ground-water temperature averaging 62°F; the 57°F line more or less bisects Kansas. Florida and south Texas get into the 70s, while much of the Rust Belt is in the upper 40s and low 50s. Obviously this gizmo isn’t for everyone, though they did sell fifty of them in about twelve minutes. Inexplicably, there were buyers in Nebraska and South Dakota, way out of the 60-degree range; perhaps they’re buying them as backup systems.

Received in the ol’ inbox:

Thank you for your purchase.

Your order number [redacted] for 3 Random Crap has been received by Woot on 11/20/2008 and your credit card has been charged $8.00.

Which, for the uninitiated, is $1 per Crap plus $5 shipping.

(Previously-received crap here and here. Explanation of What It All Means here.)

When you get an account at Woot, you’re offered (perfunctorily) their newsletter, which comes out basically when they get around to it. And the edition that arrived last night came with this bit of whimsy:

WOOT, INC. INTERNAL EMAIL
STAFF EYES ONLY

Attention Woot employees –

We are now entering the final phase of preparations for the Woot-Off planned for midnight tonight. This is when we depart from our usual deal-a-day model and sell one product after another, offering a new deal as soon as the previous one sells out. For some reason, Woot members like [insert user name here] continue to have high expectations for this event. We must make every effort to ensure that they feel disappointed and betrayed.

It never occurred to me, given Woot’s propensity to yank their customers’ chains, that this meant they were actually going to have a Woot-Off. But they were, and they did.

Now I’m worried about this bit, not even concealed in this actual product listing:

Friday, 4:20 PM
Jason T.: Pretty good Woot-Off, I guess.
Matthew N.: Well, I’m steppin’ out, y’all. Somebody get that Saitek P2600 Rumble Force with FPS Gamepad, would ya? Talk to you dirtbags on Monday, most likely.

Had it been any time other than 4:20, I’d have to believe they were going to stretch this thing to two and a half freaking days.

I have grumbled at length about the dumber members of our customer base, who by the usual reckoning bring in 15 percent of the revenue and cause 85 percent of the extra work.

This ratio holds for pretty much any form of commerce, I suspect, but I have reason to believe that this particular goober fighting with Woot is also one of the goobers we must endure — the level of doofusness is that high:

Millard is mad at deal-a-day site Woot because he bought a black iPod from them and it came with white headphones. He demands black headphones.

Millard does not care that Apple only makes white ones (unless you’re getting special U2 iPods, which this wasn’t). Now he wants Woot to pay for the black headphones he was “forced” to buy so they would match. It was very important to both him and his daughter, for whom the iPod was a birthday gift, that the headphones and iPod matched.

It evidently wasn’t very important to him to look at the farging picture on the page offering the iPod; had he clicked on the picture he would have seen exactly what phones were offered. This is a standard Woot procedure. But hey, that would have required effort (to learn how Woot works) and initiative (to go beyond “I Want”), neither of which is characteristic of these, um, characters.

Hey, it’s worked for Woot. Founder Matt Rutledge explains:

Tens of thousands of folks signed up in the first month or two Woot was established, many to observe the expected other shoe to drop and laugh at the victims. However, in month two we passed 5,000 actual customers who bought something and it started to become fun to participate (in between the server crashes). Incredibly the crude we’ll-do-this-as-a-hobby store that we set up off to the side of our wholesale business was gaining attention and traction. The NY Times and bunches of other media dropped in and things really picked up from there.

Then again, Firefox (2.0.0.16) still apparently considers Woot slightly disreputable: the word spelled that way triggers the spellcheck alarm. This doesn’t happen with “w00t!”

On occasion, Woot has offered items from the Razer line of meece, and I bought one as a backup for home use: whichever failed first, the Logitech that travels with the notebook or the Microsoft on the big box, would be duly replaced by the Razer. Neither of them has given me the slightest bit of grief, but the Microsoft mouse on the work box eventually ground its innards into slag, and Trini fished a mouse out of somewhere or other to fill in. “It’s probably not too good,” she said, and she was being generous; it was terrible, and nowhere on the applet to set its double-click speed was there a setting at which it was happy.

So I brought forth the Razer, from their Copperhead line in “Anarchy Red.” It is a fearsomely precise device, and its capabilities as a pointer are well beyond my ability to point with it — it comes with five preset “profiles,” depending on your needs, and I wound up taking one of the slower ones. If this sounds to you like driving an Indy car to Burger King, well, so be it, but I’d rather have a good product that’s not being stressed rather than an inferior product that’s being worked beyond its design capacity. If you’re a Serious Gamer, which I am not, your mileage may vary.

Finally, a way to justify that webcam you’ve been wanting:

Woot fan captures burglary on webcam. It seems that Joshua “Chowda” Chiarini set up his webcam to participate in Woot TV, the unofficial (but appreciated) nightly webcast produced by and for Woot fans. The next day, he came home to his apartment to find a lot of his gadgets and whatnot missing. He consulted Woot TV’s archived footage from his webcam to find that an unknown woman had burglarized his apartment. The thief was arrested the next day and almost all of the items were recovered. And just think: if Chowda wasn’t a Woot fan, his stuff would still be missing and a burglar would still be prowling Providence.

As for the burglar, I’d be happy to see her tied inside a large bag of crap. And not the good kind, either.

As I type this, Woot is selling condoms. The product description must be seen to be believed.

Woot.com appears to be down today: there’s no response from any of the three regular sales channels, and their spot on the front page of Yahoo! Shopping is blank.

I blame screaming monkeys.

Update, 10 am: They’re back. No explanation so far.

The next-to-next-to-last item on this week’s Woot-Off was a Logitech Brazilian Office Internet Keyboard, which sold for the princely sum of 19 cents. (This being Woot, of course, there’s the usual $5 shipping charge.) The obvious question for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere is “What’s the difference from a ‘regular’ — by which we mean ‘our’ — keyboard?”

This isn’t quite the answer, but I liked it anyway:

So, this keyboard only has keys along a narrow strip in the center, right?

Actually, this is the layout I will encounter. (I bought three, which I plan to merge into the corporate keyboard stock just to see if anyone notices. Seldom do I get to pull a prank that costs as little as $5.57.)

Well, not really. On the other hand, my budget might take a beating: yes, folks, it’s another Woot-Off.

The best I can hope for is that I’ve already bought all this crap once before and don’t have to do it again.

Contents of my most recent Bag O’Crap:

6 2Wire PC Port Phoneline 10Mbps USB Adapter [$144.00]
1 MGM Grand “EFX” Plastic Dragon w/Castle Figurine [$5.00]
1 “Flying Thing” #7 — Monstermobile [$0.49]
1 GI Joe Dog Tag/Bracelet set [$2.27]
1 Elgee Water Blaster [$0.29]
3 Faded Glory Pink Butterfly Luggage Tags [$11.64]
1 Tenba D-Series Prodigital Cable Management/Accessory Organizer Set [$19.99]

Total $183.68

Previous crap here. Other recipients have listed their, um, items at BagsOfCrap.com.

This thread showed up on Woot:

Is there an easy way to figure out what I’ve spent in woots?

I think it would be an interesting number for me. Any idea who has spent the most? If you can’t divulge that info, how about what the most spent has been?

I am quite certain I am not the one who has spent the most, inasmuch as I have purchased only 41 woots (albeit some in quantities up to three); a couple of years ago, Woot reported that someone had bought 338 items and someone else had spent $16,286.

Just the same, I sat down with a spreadsheet, and eventually came to the truth of the matter: in one year, and not including shipping (41 x 5 = $205), I’ve managed to spend $1,289.59. Six dollars of that went for Bags O’ Crap.

Damn, but that’s a lot of wootage. I should point out here that at least $250 of this was spent on stuff for other people, for which I was subsequently reimbursed.

Addendum: I bought one of their damn calendars, so add another 87 cents.

I’m having one. Ain’t life grand?

(Should this prove unduly mystifying, an explanation awaits. I will point out only that 4,500 of these were sold in seventy-five seconds.)

I always found this “Celebrate Diversity” T-shirt amusing, mostly because it hews to the actual definition of the word, as distinguished from the Officially Sanctioned Version that prevails in academia and certain political circles. And besides, I like guns. As one-time Presidential candidate Patrick Layton Paulsen once pointed out, “Who knows when you’re walking down the street and you’ll spot a moose?”

Or perhaps a pirate, which covers 8.33 percent of this T-shirt sold by Woot for about an hour and a half this morning. This is the graphic thereupon:

It’s just a matter of time before you see these symbols everywhere, so commit them to memory now.

And right now, it’s time for a Woot-Off. Time to kiss my budget goodbye.

(Photo swiped from Mat.)

We got us a Woot-Off. (Lord have mercy on my MasterCard.)

Update, 7 pm: Well, that didn’t last long. (I spent a total of $13. Fortunately, I missed the 37-inch Vizio LCD TV for $519.99.)