I love living in Canada but thanks to the Internet I do a lot of cross-border shopping. Of course things I purchase have to get up here somehow and many sellers in the US insist on using UPS to get shipments here.
No problem right? They charge me for shipping costs, hand it to UPS and pay them to ship it and it arrives, right?
Wrong. Every time UPS takes a shipment across the border they charge you a “brokerage fee”. This fee is supposed to be based on the value of the shipment but in my experience it’s been a ridiculous cash-grab. A few years ago I found some great gloves for street hockey online and ordered two pairs valued at about $100 total. When the UPS guy arrived at the door he told me I owed $70 in brokerage fees.
That’s right, the shipping costs had been paid already. UPS got their money for what they do and had not told their customer about any additional costs, nor had they contacted me in advance about it. They bring the shipment right to you, wave it under your nose and then tell you about the additional fee which amounts to a ransom.
A few weeks back we had a warranty replacement for our notebook’s battery get shipped to us. The value was declared at $93 though we didn’t have to pay any of that, and shipping was covered by the manufacturer. Mel handled the warranty call so I didn’t know much about it. Imagine my surprise when the UPS guy shows up at the door with our supposedly free-and-paid-for battery and demands a $55 brokerage fee. I was flabbergasted but had no clue if we’d be able to ever get it without paying it so I handed over my credit card.
Never again.
I’ve had shipments come from the US from other companies such as FedEx and no such additional fee has ever been charged. UPS should be avoided like the plague for cross-border shipments. This fee is atrocious and they should be ashamed at themselves for bilking the recipients and for misleading their customers who think the shipping fee they’ve paid covers everything.
Screw you UPS, you’ve delivered your last package to my door. I invite everyone else to join in and boycott UPS for doing this crap.
Here’s a site that agrees with me. Funny that the messages that defend UPS are all people supporting the drivers and not this gouge policy. For the record, the UPS guys have all been polite and professional and it wasn’t their idea (as far as I know) to try to rip me off. I’m still boycotting them because of their bosses.
Several months back I was in the local Future Shop and Blake (the only FS employee worth talking to) asked me if I was getting an XBox 360. I told him I would eventually and he said I should get a deposit down because they’re only getting twenty and 18 of them were reserved. So I put $50 on it and left it at that.
Cue to a few months later and we’ve got a big upcoming move (Mel’s current 2 hour each way commute is painful for me to think about, so I can’t imagine how she’s enjoying doing it!) and hidden expenses all over and a few of my clients are slow to pay me what they owe me and the 360 launches. We discuss it and decide I should just go in and get it anyway. The money will come and we’re not as bad off as we have been.
So I picked it up, along with Perfect Dark Zero and an extra wireless controller. It’s a nice piece of technology. The XBox Live interface is beautiful even without an HDTV to use it on. I easily set up the 360 to stream my MP3 collection over the network from my PC. Getting my digital music into the living room and onto the stereo has been something I’ve wanted for ages, so that’s all good.
PDZ is a good shooter, but it’s a console shooter. I’m terrible at using the console controllers to play shooter type games. I suppose I’ll get better at it eventually. I’m very much looking forward to DOA4 and some of the promised RPGs for the system.
For Mel we bought the XBox Live “Bejeweled 2″ and she’s already got us to #12 in the all-time high scores. We’d buy some of the other “classic” games online but they’re overpriced. I’m not going to pay $10 to play “Joust” on my XBox 360, and I doubt many other people will. I think they’d get a hundred times as many purchasers if they just microcosted it down to $1. Heck, make those games a buck or two and I’ll buy most of them. But at $10 each I’ve grabbed the one my wife plays obsessively on the computer and that’s it.
Y’know, I love this guy more every time I hear him talk (or in this case, read something he wrote). Quoted here in its entirety:
I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?
So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The Atheism part is easy.
But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.
Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
An update in the news on Sony’s Rootkit DRM(Digital Rights Management) software that I mentioned previously.
Microsoft has labelled the rootkit spyware and an upcoming update to the Malicious Software Removal Tool (you all get your Windows Updates, right?) will remove it from an infected system.
While the obvious comment is that “it’s sad to be saved by Microsoft”, I’m very happy about this. The average Windows user won’t even know they’ve got the rootkit installed and their computer will just degenerate into a stealthed-virus-ridden mess. Even those users should be getting their updates from Microsoft and once they do they should be ok.
Last week, Mel officially accepted a job offer from eBay and starting in two weeks will be working at their Burnaby office as a Team Supervisor in (I believe) online support. She’d been courted by a few companies through a headhunter but eBay was the first to finish up (some putting on a hiring freeze right after expressing interest).
Before their official offer we sat down and talked about what it would take to get us to leave Chilliwack. We both love it here, and it’s a much cheaper place to live than further west towards Vancouver, but we couldn’t fool ourselves that this would be a great opportunity for her and could certainly be worth it if the money was right. So it all hinged on that. I won’t go into specifics, but the offer was quite a bit above our “we’ll make a hard decision” level, so there really wasn’t any discussion about it at all. She simply had to take the job.
So she’ll be commuting for the first while, and I’ll be looking for a place for us. We’ll be looking at moving in the new year, and I’d like to get a place as close to where she’ll be working as we can. We’ll be renting, and though we’re just two + our awesome dog we’ll be looking at a two or three bedroom house if we can find one for the right money. We could rent a townhouse, I guess, though with our DVD sound system’s woofer I think we should give our neighbours some separation.
So if anyone has a reasonable two-three bedroom house in North Burnaby for rent, let me know!
Check out this article. Seems Sony created software to protect their music CDs from being pirated (note: Every song has totally been pirated and is all over the net for easy download) that didn’t just hide itself, but would hide any file that started with “$sys$” in the filename.
I read an article about this “rootkit” earlier and thought “What a bunch of jerks,” but didn’t even realize the true extent of the damage they’ve caused with this: They’ve given hackers the ultimate tool to hide their hacks, ruining online gaming quite possibly forever.
The article I linked mentions World of Warcraft, but the same can be true of any game hack, including first-person shooters like Counterstrike, or the new Battlefield 2 or Quake 4. All totally ruined because their new anti-cheat measures simply can’t detect a file that’s been hidden by such a rootkit.
And it doesn’t stop at games. I’m sure most viruses coming down the pipe these days will use the $sys$ prefix so they can’t be detect and cleaned by anti-virus software.
And the cause of this bullshit? A multi-billion dollar media conglomerate didn’t want Joe Consumer to be able to copy their legally purchased music CD onto their computer.
As I mentioned, the pirates worked around this protection already. How? They simply didn’t let their CD drive do an “autorun” so the software was never installed in the first place and then copied the music just like any other CD.
So I went out to Future Shop today and picked up Star Wars: Battlefront II. I enjoyed the first one quite a bit and this sequel was a decent price so I grabbed the DVD version.
Brought it home, installed it and went to run it and got this charming error:
What’s causing that? THE BUILT IN ANTIPIRACY SOFTWARE.
Hey thanks Lucasarts for using shitty software that makes it so LEGITIMATE PURCHASERS can’t use the product they PAID FOR.
I’m sure in a day or two the pirate sites will have a no-cd crack and people who didn’t pay for the game will be able to play their copies JUST FUCKING FINE.
Next time why don’t I just wait for them to do that and then not pay for a product that screws me over for playing by the rules?
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