Marie-Lynn

Designed by Moshe Ben David of Yemen (now residing in Israel). Features a piece of 200-year old roman glass.(Purchased from Pasarel.com)

Hindu people will celebrate Ganesha Chaturthi on September 7th.

Okay it’s really big, like a man’s ring but I love it. Most of the jewelry I purchased in the past month from various eBay sellers cost under ten bucks! Also featured in this picture are two rings I found at a local antique market. The pinky ring appears to be written in tibetan or thai. Origin of the flower ring is unknown. (Sources: Green nail polish is L’Oreal Bijou Gems in B Strong. Ganesha ring is from eThaiMarket on eBay.

I am truly impressed by this antique enamel on copper Uzbek ring featuring a blessing (in arabic/persian/urdu?). I have three pictures of it in my Flickr with a bit more info.

An adorable Chinese wind-up toy spotted at an antique stand. This dealer also had Mao watches that move and some cute Parisian souvenirs. Good thing I brought almost no cash 🙂

Here is the best of my pictures from New York City in June 2005. When I go back I can use my new Canon Powershot Pro 1!

I posted before that I was looking for some interesting ethnic jewelry. I found some, on eBay of course 🙂 Here is my new Kuchi tribal necklace from Norther Afghanistan. It will look stunning in a shadow box. I have a few more on the way.

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I have always enjoyed Amaryllis bulbs. While they are super easy to bloom the first time around, it’s a bit tricky to get them to bloom again. For many years I posted pictures of my flowers because I purchased my first digital camera at the same time as my passion for these flowers was ignited. Today, I still own a few of them and they are the only plants I keep. I had a few versions of my site, here is number 2.

Mad about Amaryllis was the first site I monetized using affiliate programs. I had a book store and linked to garden.com where I got my first affiliate check for $50.

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I fell in love with bagatelles in 1997. Within 2 years I had acquired about 100 spanning the years between 1890 and 1990. They come from every corner of North America. I have my favorites but I love how they are mirrors of the values and popular topics of each decade they represent.

This website was not publicly available, it was an intranet built for myself and a few other enthusiastic collectors. It contained a database of bagatelles that I owned and saw on eBay. It allowed me to collect bagatelles virtually! Still, I made an effort to give it a nice UX and user experience. It was built in ASP and connected to a MS Access database.

Here are a few screenshots of the management interface.

Adding a new bagatelle was easy and the interface allowed for a picture upload.

In 2001 I created a web service that would automatically manage errors across all my sites sending me an e-mail every time one was encountered. Before that, I had custom pages asking the user questions. It would also be sent through e-mail.

I used to be a bit obsessed with registration forms. I spent a considerable amount of time testing how many fields a human could see before deciding that it was too time-consuming to go on with the registration process. That number seemed to be 4… that’s it, just 4! Of course this site was by invitation only so it wasn’t an issue.

A small part of my collection of bagatelles in situ

This lovely little train is the first item I ever sold on eBay.