Category: General

Shipping to Canada

I see Dave Shea has been explain­ing why he does­n’t typ­ic­ally order goods online; I’ve ordered lots of goods online and had mixed exper­i­ences. I usu­ally only buy online if 1) I can­’t find what I’m look­ing for loc­ally, or 2) it’s sub­stan­tially cheap­er than buy­ing loc­ally. I also make sure of war­ranty implic­a­tions for any­thing I buy that might need one (e.g., my Tung­sten).

I tend to give the nod to Cana­dian retail­ers because of the hassles Dave talks about and also because I like to sup­port loc­al or semi-loc­al small busi­nesses (although I have bought enough at Amazon that the reg­u­lar “you might be inter­ested in” emails give a remark­ably con­son­ant view into my cur­rent interests). I buy books at Amazon.com if I’m not in a hurry to get them and if they’re cheap­er, includ­ing ship­ping, than buy­ing the same books loc­ally. This is often the case right now since books have the price prin­ted on the back, and the Cana­dian dol­lar is cur­rently worth quite a lot more com­pared to the US dol­lar than when lots of the books were printed. 

Although I haven’t had any­thing shipped by them for some time, I agree with Derek Miller, who advises avoid­ing UPS if at all pos­sible; I’ve found UPS in the past to be very quick to charge double fees if two boxes in the same ship­ment are labelled with the total (they charge as if each box had the total value). What I do to try to get around that prob­lem is to either call or email the place I’m order­ing from if I think there’s a chance they might put things into more than one box, and dis­cuss the issue with them. The res­ult is that I haven’t had that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for a few years now. Com­pan­ies that don’t answer the phone or email don’t get my custom.

Recent exper­i­ences that I’ve had with order­ing from out­side Canada:

  • books from a couple of small retail­ers in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
  • two baby slings hand-made by a small retail­er in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
  • quite a few books from Amazon.de com­ing through Canada Post: charged GST and asso­ci­ated oth­er fees about half the time
  • books from Amazon.com com­ing via Canada Post: occa­sion­ally charged GST etc. If you request pri­or­ity ship­ping, Amazon col­lects an Import Fees Depos­it to cov­er the vari­ous charges (I guess to save time in delivery)
  • buy­ing a humid­i­fi­er from Venta Air­wash­er: this is a longer story. I called up to order rather than using the web­site, to dis­cuss the deliv­ery issues. They charged me GST and when I said I found that odd since they’re a US store, they assured me everything would be fine. And to call back and let them know if it was­n’t. Sure enough, the humid­i­fi­er (great humid­i­fi­er, BTW) showed up with no extra charges and I was pleas­antly sur­prised. Until the bill from Fed­ex arrived in the mail a week later. I called the com­pany, com­plained, they said they’d take care of it, I called Fed­ex to tell them what was hap­pen­ing, did­n’t pay the bill, and haven’t heard any­thing in the year since, so I assume Venta did take care of it.

In the unex­pec­ted-but-in-the-end-ok cat­egory: I ordered a DVD from BBC Canada, and was charged the nor­mal GST etc. The prob­lem here was that they shipped the DVD from the US, and Canada Post promptly charged me $12 for GST, duties, etc., des­pite the envel­ope hav­ing a “GST paid” stamp on it. I called BBC Canada to com­plain and they cred­ited my cred­it card with the $12. I hope they got the money back from Rev­en­ue Canada; at least I did­n’t have to pay.

Social Networking Musings

It seems social net­work sites are con­sidered the heart of the inter­net these days, at least if you’re under 25 (which I’m not); real-life net­works still exist of course, espe­cially if you have chil­dren (see Tim’s post on Real Social Net­works). I’m old-fash­ioned in that I still use email to keep in touch with people and not exclus­ively instant mes­saging (for one thing, lots of the people I email are in timezones 7 or more hours away) and I have enough to do without writ­ing in strangers’ scrap­books (one big reas­on I deleted my Orkut account was because I nev­er went there except to delete what people had writ­ten in my scrap­book and even­tu­ally I could­n’t be bothered any more). For me the big value of a social net­work­ing site is being able to keep in touch with people I used to work with (in a com­pany, on some stand­ards com­mit­tee, or through the XML con­fer­ence). Giv­en that people in the tech industry move jobs and email addresses with alac­rity, I’ve decided to use Linked­In as a large self-updat­ing address book. This is maybe not the major reas­on that the site exists, but it’s use­ful for that. So as I have time I’m search­ing for names of people I know and send­ing out invites to “con­nect” while I still have their email addresses (I’ve already lost touch with lots of people from DOM WG days, for example); for­tu­nately this pro­cess can be inter­rup­ted when the baby wakes up and demands attention.

International Car Seats

We’re plan­ning on trav­el­ling to Aus­tralia for a vaca­tion, and since the baby will shortly need a new car seat any­way, I was hop­ing to get one that matches Cana­dian and Aus­trali­an stand­ards. Britax makes car seats in each coun­try but when I called them they said the Cana­dian car seats did not meet Aus­trali­an require­ments (hard to believe they can be all that dif­fer­ent, I assume she meant that the car seat isn’t cer­ti­fied in both countries).

Does any­one know of a car seat that can be used for a big infant under the age of 1 (in Canada, that means rear-facing) in both coun­tries? Or have sug­ges­tions? When we’re in Aus­tralia we’ll mostly be with friends rather than driv­ing rent­als, hence the desire to take our own car seat.

This is one place where true inter­na­tion­al stand­ards would be help­ful… I won­der why every coun­try needs its own?

Ephemeral Blogs

I’ve noticed a few blogs dis­ap­pear­ing over the past few months, blogs I used to enjoy read­ing and had poin­ted out to people. I find it dis­ap­point­ing when people decide to get rid of the entire blog, though of course I defend their right to do so (and to not pay host­ing and sup­port costs), since I think the web as a whole loses some­thing when parts of it dis­ap­pear. And mostly these were blogs I read for interest, for the lyr­ic­al writ­ing, or for the sub­ject mat­ter. I’ve become used to the idea that the Web is one big archive, and that inform­a­tion will still be there when I come look­ing for it again; all I have to do is remem­ber which search terms to use, or book­mark the site. When that assump­tion is not val­id, it seems odd some­how, although a few years ago it would have been normal.

And it’s even odder when the blog just ends, and then dis­ap­pears, without even a “can­’t be bothered any more” final mes­sage. The enplaned blog is an example of this. It was an excel­lent blog about the air­line industry, full of inter­est­ing inform­a­tion, and one day it just stopped. And not long after­wards the con­tents of the blog were deleted. And if any­body knows why, they’re not telling… some thoughts are at the Flight Inter­na­tion­al blog (which has now iron­ic­ally also dis­ap­peared; it used to be at http://bizbuzzmedia.com/blogs/flight_international/archive/2006/05/11/2224.aspx.

So if any­one read­ing this is think­ing of stop­ping blog­ging, please do your read­ers a favour and write a “so long and thanks for all the fish” mes­sage to close up, and at least con­sider leav­ing the con­tents of your blog up for pos­ter­ity. Someone some­where will thank you for it, even if you nev­er know about it.

Baby Passports

I had to take the kids in to get pass­port pho­tos done today, since we’ll be trav­el­ling with them out­side of Canada. I found a loc­al place with exper­i­ence in tak­ing pho­tos for dif­fer­ent coun­tries (Canada and New Zea­l­and); the require­ments are dif­fer­ent. For example, Canada wants a white back­ground for the pho­tos, while New Zea­l­and wants a light but not white back­ground. Both coun­tries expect pho­tos with eyes open and mouth closed and no vis­ible hands, so the pho­to­graph­er put a cloth over the hand hold­ing the front of the baby. She kept turn­ing to look at me, or smil­ing at the pho­to­graph­er, but even­tu­ally we were done. For­tu­nately there is an inter­sec­tion set of who’s allowed to sign the back of the pho­tos to say this is really the child in the photo (our fam­ily doc­tor); New Zea­l­and will allow any New Zeal­ander or one of a num­ber of pro­fes­sions to be a wit­ness (guar­ant­or of iden­tity), while Canada insists on the pro­fes­sions (doc­tor, account­ant, etc). One could won­der why people who engage in oth­er pro­fes­sions aren’t con­sidered good enough to veri­fy your iden­tity in Canada. Why not your employ­er, for example? And why is geoscient­ist on the list, but not phys­i­cist or com­puter scientist?

Autumn

The weath­er has changed here at 49 ° lat­it­ude north, the days still warm and sunny, but the nights are cool. The memor­ies of nights when we slept with the fan run­ning and the win­dows open are reced­ing fast, soon to be filed with memor­ies of pre­vi­ous sum­mers. The win­dows in the house that were open until last week are shut now in response to the cool, moist air, and I think of the vari­ous winter-proof­ing tasks that will soon be due. The cats are happy to come in in the even­ings now, no longer eager to stay out­side, wan­der­ing the neigh­bour­hood until all hours. Now they want to sleep on the bed, snug­gling in close to the warmth. Our son does­n’t want a cat sleep­ing on his bed, and they’re not allowed in the baby’s crib, so we are their remain­ing option. The garden is still act­ive, the roses bloom­ing and the phlox and hydrangeas tower­ing over the calen­du­las. The signs of autumn are here as well though, the plums and blue­ber­ries all gone, the pears mostly so. Only the toma­toes are still ripen­ing on their vines. The sum­mer seemed so short this year, I hope the autumn stays longer, gives us more sun before we are sub­ject to the grey and gloom of winter.