Currency Converter: There is a great web site I use all the time. The site is simple to use. It says "I want to convert ______" (you select the currency and amount) to "_____ type of currency". You then click on "perform currency conversion" and it's done. Go to http://www.xe.net/ucc. I use this all the time when I want to figure English pounds or Canadian dollars to U.S. dollars.

Paula in NJ

Translating Foreign Web Sites: Our SS member from Italy... I believe his name is Pierluigi ... has a beautiful web site. It's written in Italian of course. I don't read this language, at all well, so I used the Babel Fish web site to translate it. Here is the site if you think you might ever need it. It translates Spanish, Russian, Italian, French and German. All you do is place the URL address of a web site you'd like to change... and it transforms all the text into the language you want.

http://www.babelfish.com/Translations.shtml

Garnette in Lewisburg, PA

Mini Show Manners:

I have an "open table". Most of the things I sell (except for the very expensive items) are out in the open for people to touch, pick up, play with, and look at the price without having to ask. I think that this is very good for business and makes it more fun for the customers but it does have it's down side. I will skip shoplifting and price tag switching because that's stating the obvious. Some of the things I sell such as perfume bottles with tops or small delicate pieces are in small plastic containers. Don't open them without asking. The seller may prefer to open it themselves so that if the stopper to the perfume gets lost you won't be publicly beaten :-)

Don't block a table conversing with friends. I may get flak for this one, but sellers and buyers have about 6 hours to shop or make a profit. Blocking a table prevents customers from buying which annoys both the customers and the sellers. If you want to talk to friends go outside the sales room or in a corner out of people's way.

Be patient. If there's a line to pay, please wait your turn. If I'm helping a customer, I don't like being interrupted because not only is it rude, but I lose my train of thought (not hard these days), and it's unfair to the other customers. It's especially important not to interrupt while the seller is adding up a sale.

Don't ask for a discount. I give my "speech" which makes people very sorry they asked. The speech covers topics such as the expense and time involved doing a show. My prices are fair. If you go into a department store, do you ask the manager for a discount? If you ask for a senior citizen discount I will point to my husband and ask if he should charge extra because he's a senior citizen (I refuse to accept being a senior citizen).

Kids - I will put my 2 cents in about kids here as I saw another discussion going on this topic. I have on occasion given a kid my "look" which usually sends them running or have asked them to stop attempting to break something. I've also said the same thing to adults. What I have for sale on my table are not samples, it's the merchandise that other people will buy. Most of the pieces I sell are not intended for young children. A number of shows have children's tables with things appropriate for kids and at a price they can afford which is a great idea. That way they can truly participate.

The above comments are common sense. There are no special rules for shows.

Shows are a lot of fun. You get to meet with other people with the same interest as you. You get to see wonderful miniatures. You get the glorious feeling of guilt at having gone overboard. And you get to bring home neat stuff to enjoy for many years.

Carol, S P Miniatures

AOL: For those of you having trouble with AOL.5, this is a pertinent article you may find enlightening.
http://windowsmagazine.com/columns/explorer/2000/02.htm

It is a column that appears in Windows magazine currently on the market.

Renee

Selling online -- not necessarily on eBay!

My 2 cents for what it's worth:

- -- when you buy online, you are always suspicious if you don't receive you goods in a timely matter....but if you are dealing with a known entity from one of our many lists, you shouldn't be. Reputations are *everything* for dealers -- and mean more than their actual product, don't you think! So there isn't a dealer alive who would go out to purposely hurt their precious reputation!

- -- Some dealers have other full-time jobs, so if a family crisis or other life calamity gets in the way of the smooth operation of their deliveries, you can expect delays.

- -- Some dealers do lots of shows and workshops and therefore they have less time to spend on filling orders than you would like.

- -- Sometime a dealer runs out of a certain material or item, waits for their supplier to re-stock, or finds out that they no longer carry the item. Then the dealer is forced to find a new supplier...these things get in the way of prompt deliveries too!

- -- If you write to your slow dealer, try not to be hostile on the *first go around*...any or all of the above could have happened. If you get a reasonably prompt response, just be patient. Sometimes my parcels have been held up in Customs. I sent a box of baggies to Australia and it took one and half months, only to arrive, box badly mangled up by the customs agents! I have also had several orders go totally MIA!

Roz Weitzman in Toronto

EBay Tips: To the folks having trouble locating minis on eBay. On the home page click on Browse at the top, then look for Dolls and choose House Miniatures. Once you get to the minis, then you can use the search feature about an inch or so down on the right side of the page. Be sure to put a check mark in the box that says search only in Dolls, House miniatures.

About the feedback issue, I both sell and buy on eBay. Selling is mostly to support my purchases of minis but I must say it is very gratifying when folks email me back to say they like something I made. The easiest way for me to leave feed back is first choose "My EBay" and login then go to your "Bidding Watching" page. Then when you are in, there is button near the top that says "Feedback Forum". Scroll down till you see the list that offers 6 ways to use the forum. Click on #2 and it will bring up all of the transactions you have bought or sold in for the last 60 days. If you do this each time you receive a package in the mail or send something out then first of all you wouldn't forget to leave anyone feedback and secondly it works as a way to see what you are still waiting to get or to send out.

Linda Gibeault

Problems with eBay:

If the seller has a history of good feedback and you're having a problem it's possible the person has gotten ill or has a family crisis. You can leave negative feedback but that's fairly drastic and you should wait until you're certain that you've been cheated. I remember some poor woman who suddenly got a lot of negative feedback after having an excellent record and it turned out that she was rushed to the hospital with a serious illness. She was banned from Ebay and was heartbroken over it.

As a seller, I've run into problems collecting from winners and one trick I use is to request their user information. You will be sent their address and phone number via email . I never have used the information, but the reason why I do it is that the person will also receive an email that tells them that you are requesting information about them. This essentially sends a message to the seller that you mean business. You can of course try to call or write to them. You can find how to do this at http://pages.ebay.com/help/buyerguide/user-other.html

Hopefully, they have given accurate information and if they haven't you can report them to eBay.

Another thing you can try is to leave neutral feedback commenting that you have been trying to reach her/him. The down side to this is that you can only leave one comment per auction and you will be unable to leave negative feedback.

One thing I have done is to put in the subject line of the email I send "Ebay auction #.... final notice before negative feedback is left". That will get their attention.

You can also look up recent winners of the person's auctions and ask them if they're having problems with the seller. This will give you an idea if just maybe your auction slipped through the cracks or the seller is having a general problem. Maybe the seller is running too many auctions simultaneously and is not keeping track of things.

Lastly, feedback is not always accurate. Both sellers and buyers are reluctant to leave negative feedback for fear of retaliation. Frequently, if you see negative feedback for a seller, that seller has also left negative feedback for the buyer and vice versa. I had been threatened with retaliation on several occasions from auction winners when I pursued them for payment.

Carol, S P Miniatures

Pictures on eBay: I use http://www.honesty.com to host my images. There are several free sites available. But before storing your images you will need to have an image editor. With this photos can be resized. I use Microsoft Photo Editor.

Dianne

Saving jpg graphics: I have the Sony Mavica with floppies. Love it for web images and mini printouts.  For larger sized print outs there are better higher resolution cameras which others have already mentioned.

But just wanted to add this:  Anytime you load a jpg image in an image editor and then do a "save as" you will degrade the quality of the image due to the jpg compressed format designed for web images.

To transfer the jpgs to another floppy or hard drive it is best to "copy" the file directly from floppy to other destination via the windows file manager process rather than using an image editor to "save as."

Also when editing jpgs, don't repeatedly load, edit, save, close out the program and then at a later date repeat because reloading and resaving previously "save as" jpgs causes the quality to decline.  It is ok to do multiple saves in one session as long as you're still "editing the original" not reloading and resaving previously saved jpg files.

For printed output saving the jpgs as tif files or the editors' native format like psp for paint shop pro will give better, clearer "printed" output. jpg was designed specially for compressed internet web images, and although it is the standard for the digital cameras, its compression format has its own set of challenges when doing a lot of re-editing and when using jpg for printed output.

Also... if your image editor allows you to individually set the jpg compression format....experiment...with each image.  I use Paint Shop Pro which allows you to see the actual quality at different compression levels and boy is there a big difference from each image to the next one. One image will be great with 40 percent compression, and the next one will be terrible and will need maybe a 25 percent or less compression to look good.

Wilma Kinder

Digital Images: An excellent course of action where digital cameras are concerned is to get the biggest, baddest, most expensive piece of equipment you can possibly afford. Most of the decent cameras are relatively easy to use. If you want the convenience of digital photos, there is a learning curve that is important. The more you understand about digital images the better quality you will be able to produce.

I find that the Olympus line of cameras is quite good (I used to research and purchase all such equipment for the IT department I worked in), and they have several models that are well priced for what they can do.

The key to getting a good quality image is to use an appropriately high resolution. I know in the camera I have (Olympus 300d) I could choose to take and store 150 medium quality images or 40 high quality images. Superficially, the difference was that the medium quality image was 600 x 400 pixels and the high quality was 1024 x 760 (one was smaller than the other). It was hard to see the quality difference at first. That comes when you try to resize the image. Since the high quality file is storing more information about the image, you can manipulate the image with less loss of quality.

When taking photos to post on a web site, you can archive those large files and use a copy to make the image to post. There are lots of tricks to reduce file size (for faster loading time and stuff) but still maintain a standard of quality. If you want a good picture of a mini, take it at high resolution then open the file in an image editor and crop and resize to really feature the item. You may find that some gentle manipulation of the brightness and contrast can improve an image as well. You can also improve (to a limited extent)focus and color values.

Pardon the long winded post, but it is my absolute pet peeve to shop on a site with bad images of the goods. Nothing makes me close the browser faster.

Jeannette in San Jose

Digital Cameras and backing up files: Colin raised some good points about digital cameras and I'd like to add a couple of things. I use a Fuji floppy disk adapter for my memory card instead of having to use a cable to transfer my pictures from the camera to the computer. It's as convenient as having a floppy disk in the camera and since I have 2 computers, I don't have to move around a cable. One of the reasons I didn't choose the Sony Mavica was that the floppy wouldn't hold many photos and the memory card does.

I don't like to have a lot of unnecessary files on my hard drive because it slows down disk defrag and virus scans. I store any photos I might want to use in the future on one of those free webhosting sites such as Geocities or Fortune City. They do require that you have an actual webpage on their server and I make up one.

Carol, S P Miniatures

Digital Cameras: Several excellent points have been made by others, but one thing I would add, in addition to the resolution size and storage issues, is the battery type and length of use. Some digital cameras have batteries that are not rechargeable and run out fast. Other cameras have rechargeable batteries. On the Mavica I use, the battery is rechargeable and lasts me about 2.5 hours of actual "picture taking." I usually get about 30 pictures to a floppy, and take about 5 floppies in the camera bag when I travel - that's per outing, per 2.5 picture taking hours of battery life.

Storage: I store on floppies, hard drive and CD burner. One thing about floppies and CD storage is that if your hard drive crashes, and most of them eventually will, you don't have to pay a computer geek a fortune to "try to" restore and retrieve the photos.

The best digital camera to use really depends on what you will be using it for. If you are going to do 8 x 11 quality printouts, you not only need a quality megapixel digital camera, but plenty of money for the photographic paper which is still somewhat expensive! Although the megapixal cameras have really come down in price and are becoming quite affordable for many, the photo paper is still somewhat pricey.

If you are only doing web images or hard copy prints 3 x 3 inches, my husband has an Aptik "pen camera," the size of a ball point pen, with 2 AA batteries that takes 80 digital pictures transferred through a usb port on the computer that sold, after rebates, for under 100 dollars!

The really good news is that the digital cameras are coming down in price and there are a lot of good ones to select from.

Wilma

Putting people in a scene on your webpage: First you need a picture of the person. If you can get them in different poses you'll have better luck. Take the picture into a graphics program that will let you erase the background around the person. Save this file. Next you need a picture of the room the person will be placed in. Now bring the person photo into the room. I believe this is called layering in some cases. (Think of it like making a collage) where you put lots of pictures on top of each other. Now once the person is in the house, play with the size and adjust accordingly. When you are happy with what you've got, save it as a new file. Works like a charm for me.

Terri Young

Poker Table: Wanted to share how I made my own POKER TABLE, checkers, etc. for game room.... On Microsoft using the auto shapes and colors!  It was a lot of fun once I got the hang of it.... read your help file or just ask a child... really!   It was my 13 year old that showed me how to use it.... Experiment with the different sizes & shapes.  The table was about as realistic as I could get with the shapes & sizes available but it will hopefully give you an idea to go by.   This picture is the entire game set including poker table, cards, checkers and backgammon and we also sell the kits you can cut out & put together as needed for your scenes & room boxes. http://www.geocities.com/livinobx/bbgames.jpg

Lauriel

Lampshades:

1. Go to http://www.miniatures.org (NAME website)

2. Go to Tips & Projects

3. Go to Find A Project

4. Go to Lighting

5. Finds articles in mini magazines on how to make lampshades

Cindy from Indiana

Psychic Minis: If you want some web pages to whet your imagination regarding the metaphysical roombox, here are three that suggest lots more accessories. Some of these might also be of interest to people doing fairy scenes:

http://www.themagicalblend.com/faq.html

http://www.almostradio.com/earthsongs/witch.htm

http://www.wildflowerswv.com/

For anyone needing tarot cards, there are gorgeous images on the next two sites. From four to eight cards are pictured in each of many styles. I'd guess you'd have a bit of leeway in the dimensions, so long as they come to hand comfortably. You could print some tiny patterned stuff on the reverse.

http://www.pointsoflight.com/

Mary, Oregon

Old Photographs: For my Victorian dollhouse, I scanned in old family photos, reduced the size, changed them to the right shades of brown and printed them.  The family portraits on the walls in my dollhouse are actually my ancestors.

HINT:  If you are looking at a thumbnail photo, click on the photo for a higher resolution version.  Then right click on the picture and SAVE it in a directory.  Then I use Print Shop to put several pictures on a blank page. I print out a draftof the pictures and re-size until I get the sizes that I need.  Then I print them in the best quality on photo paper.

Ricki Pitzner

Books: I put the book cover in a paint program and make two copies, allowing enough space between them for the spine. This way, you have the full cover all in one piece. You can then change the back "cover" by erasing the illustration and adding more printing.

Courdee

Flaming: Anne found this interesting URL: http://songweaver.com/netiquette.html - it basically describes flaming as attacking people on a personal level. It is the difference between disagreeing with someone's opinion and countering it with your own, or attacking the person for having that opinion.

Noella