Parboiled Apple

The new version of Mac OS X is due out in October. There are a few features in the server version I was interested in so I dropped by the Canadian and U.S. online Apple stores to check out the pricing. Yikes!

At the time of this writing the U.S. and Canadian dollar are at par. Yet the Canadian price for OS X (not server) at $150 is a whopping 16% higher than the U.S. price of $130. The Family Pack is much worse at CAD$250 vs. USD$200 for a 25% price gouge.

There's no duty on software. Shipping across the border is negligible difference in volume. So how can Apple Canada justify this price difference?

To top it off, we have to pay 14% taxes on the price gouging, so that brings the difference up to $22.80 for a single copy and $57 for a family pack.

Good ol' Apple. They can't be content to make their money on selling superior products, they have to rip us off on the exchange rate.

I thought I'd send Apple an email complaining about this price gouging. I checked high and low on their store web site and couldn't find any email address. Do you think they want to hear from their customers? Why yes! All you need to do is waste your time by calling them and waiting on hold.

Here's a new blog I've started to track this unconscionable gouging.

Return for refund

In my daily walks through a beautiful park nearby, I encounter a lot of litter. Some I pick up, most I leave. I'm walking two big dogs on leashes and trying to pick up after them. That's all I can manage.

Sunday mornings are bad because the teenagers leave their empty beer, liquor, and soft drink bottles along with empty cigarette packages.

Here's my proposal. Although I think teenagers have more money than sense, we could make it financially attractive for the litterers, or entrepreneurs, to clean up the mess. We do this by increasing the deposit on items that are usually discarded such as booze and water bottles, cigarette packages, plastic bags, and maybe even takeout food containers.

And I mean raise it to a whopping amount. Let's say $2 per glass bottle, $1 per plastic bottle, $2 per cigarette package, 50¢ per plastic grocery bag and $1 per large bag, and $1 per takeout container.

Your 24 bottles of beer now set you back an additional $48. I think you'll be seriously interested in returning those.

That bottle of water that you paid $1.50 for now costs you $2.50.

Cigarettes are already pretty expensive with all the taxes so we need to make it at least $2 deposit per package.

Many people take home 10, 20, or more plastic bags from the grocery store. Grocery shoppers like to save money, yet we see many plastic bags blowing around. Not when they're paying an extra $10 per trip.

But the one I like most is the takeout food containers. Go ahead. Buy your burger, fries, and drink. That'll cost you an additional $4 including the paper bag it's packaged in.

Of course, this one is also the most problematic because who wants to take back a smelly food container? Hmm, I guess people will be motivated to return it quickly. Also, if you buy from McDonalds, you should be able to return it to any McD's. Let Mickey D's corporate worry about how to balance the deposits and refunds.

Is this workable? Maybe, although the fast food container is a real stretch. But let's face it. Politicians don't have the political will and consumers would revolt saying they never litter and why should they be forced to pay for the inconsiderate pigs.

That's what I'd say. ;-)

Click here for details – just kidding!

Good ol' Rogers Video Direct (Zip.ca) is back on this blog. This time for their ongoing billing problems. If they weren't offering such a good service and had some competition from someone like NetFlix, I'd dump them in a second.

Many months ago they changed their billing system such that they no longer included the amount in the monthly email. They continued to list the movies that exceeded the free shipping threshold.

In place of the amount, they say “Click here to view details of your charges.” Every single damn time I click that link, it causes a search of billing records and comes up empty. They're clearly sending the email out before their database is updated.

Fine. They made a mistake. Big deal. Except I've reported this problem to them twice, months ago. It still hasn't been fixed.

I also asked them to detail the charges so we knew exactly which movies were covered by the package and which weren't. Nope. Don't want the customer too informed now, do we?

If you read about the other problems I've documented on this blog, you've got to wonder how much more successful this company would be if they had competent people working there.

If they tried to expand into the States, NetFlix would kill them. Dead.

Return to sender

Sigh. When will charities learn that in this age of email that I send very little physical mail through the postal service so I really, really don't need to have tons of return address labels.

Charities think that if they flood me with return address labels that that will somehow entice me to give them more money. To any charity fundraising folks who may be reading this I say, please stop!

This is a waste of funds that I've already sent you. You're starting to piss me off and make me think that my money would be better utilized with another charity. Geez Louise, I wouldn't buy these return address labels, so why do you think I want you to spend the money I'm sending you for medical research or whatever, on sending me useless gifts.

Smarten up people!

“We'll keep your application on file.”

Why?

Why keep a job application on file when you know you'll never search your own database of previous applicants? I've always suspected this was the truth, but I've had it confirmed by one company.

I friend of mine recently was hired by a company for a new position. However, she had applied to this same company a couple of months back for a different position, so they did have her résumé on file. But they never called her. She got the job by resubmitting her résumé again for the new job posting.

In other words, they didn't find the candidate they hired by looking at previous applications, only at new ones.

So why lie to all those prospective job seekers? Why let them think that the reason you're not calling about that new job posting, that they're a perfect match for, has nothing to do with you having searched your database, found their résumé and thinking they're not qualified? It's because you haven't bothered to search the database at all?

These companies are the same ones that post job openings that are months old, with a start date of ASAP so presumably they need to fill the job, yet the job is never filled. It simply can't be that they can't find a suitable person for all those old jobs.

Think about it. Would you want to work at a company that cares so little about prospective employees that they would let countless people waste their time creating cover letters and submitting résumés only to have them ignored?

And employers wonder why people jump ship at a moment's notice when something better comes along. It's the employers who started the whole sour experience.

Driving me crazy

I had the great misfortune of trying to book a driver's licence road test for my daughter with DriveTest.

The online booking did not work, twice, stalling both times trying to process my credit card. At no time did their stupid web site time out and ask me to try again. They explicitly warned about not pressing the Back or Cancel buttons. Yeah, well what the hell do I do when you f__k up?

There is no contact number to talk to a human being to ask if the transaction went through or not. So I called the automated phone system to confirm my appointment. There was no record so I can only assume that neither transaction went through. I'll have to watch my credit card because I don't trust any system that's this badly designed.

To either confirm or book an appointment by telephone using their automated torture phone system means that you will have to press a conservative 8,367 numbers on your telephone and takes about 15 minutes. All of this could be done by talking to a real human being in about 5 minutes.

Automated systems are tools of torture used by sadists against unsuspecting consumers.

Not very filling

Back in mid-February I complained to Rogers Video Direct that they had canceled my Refill privilege after one DVD was reported missing out of 200.

As background, Rogers Video Direct has plans that allow for various numbers of DVDs to be out at one time with no due date. If you go to their web site and indicate that you're returning a DVD, they will send you one more immediately without waiting for the postal service to return the DVD. Sounds great.

Except they penalize you severely for reporting a stolen DVD by canceling the Refill privilege until the investigation is complete. They claim, “When thefts are reported, we take detailed reports, in order to share those with Canada Post and the police to investigate past thefts and avoid future ones.” Sounds great except nobody from Canada Post or the police contacted me to investigate.

I mean, it's only one DVD. Do you think either CP or the cops have time to investigate that? No way, unless other mail is going missing from that route. So this is bogus.

Well, months went by and other problems with their service distracted me. I checked today to see if they had reinstated Refill (didn't seem to be the case given the delivery timings), and found out that there is no indication anywhere I can find about Refill. It was on the home page before it went A.W.O.L. It seems they silently removed that feature. Nothing like keeping your customers informed.

It never ceases to amaze me how companies have the opportunity to be excellent, but keep shooting themselves in the foot with reductions of service and poor communication with their customers.

---

Here's my full complaint to them from February:

I've rented about 200 DVDs in 11 months and reported 1 stolen or 0.5%. According to your refill rules, that means I'm no longer eligible for refill. Why is that?

I can only assume that you believe it was me who stole the DVD since I'm the one you're punishing. Yet nobody has investigated the theft since I've never been approached by Canada Post or the police to determine how the DVD went missing. The fact that you use these gaudy envelopes to make it clear to everyone handling the mail that there's a DVD inside means you folks bear some responsibility. Once I put the envelope in the mailbox, it's out of my hands. Yet, you blame me. That makes no sense.

I can only conclude that Rogers/Zip has convicted me of theft without a trial and have sentenced me to life without refill. OK, it's not that serious, but you get the point.

Please reinstate the refill. If you choose not to I can only conclude you think I'm a thief.

And their reply:

Thank you for contacting Rogers Video Direct , we're pleased to assist you with your inquiry.

Please understand that without proper investigation, theft of DVDs will only lead to higher costs for all our members. Rather than accepting the risk of possible future thefts, we take the time to open investigations to help prevent future ones.

Theft investigations are not simply a matter of filing a report and carrying on business as usual. We must do our best to protect ourselves and all our members from the costs of DVD theft. So, when a member reports a stolen DVD it is not an automatic "no problem", nor is it simply a "customer service" issue. When thefts are reported, we take detailed reports, in order to share those with Canada Post and the police to investigate past thefts and avoid future ones.

During the investigation time period the slot is held until we have been assured that the shipping address is secure and once our internal investigation has been completed. Should the DVDs be recovered the slots are released immediately.

We will place the reported slot on hold until the investigation is complete. This act is not intended to be interpreted as any sort of judgment or conclusion. It is merely a safeguard to eliminate the possibility of additional DVD losses while our investigation is underway.

The Refill feature is only removed temporarily until it has been assessed that your mailing route is once again secure.

We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

They bug me so I guess they're working

TV bugs. Those annoying station IDs and promos that overlay the TV program you're trying to enjoy. They call them bugs because they're specifically designed to annoy the hell out of the viewer and destroy your viewing pleasure.

And they work!

You can tell how insecure a TV station is, how poorly they're doing in the ratings, and how stupid their executives and program managers are by the size, colour, opacity, and animation of the bugs. The greater of any of those variables, the more insecure the station is.

They also have a low opinion of their viewers if they think they need to be constantly reminded what channel they're watching. “Our stupid programming attracts stupid viewers so lets have a huge, brightly coloured, opaque, animated station ID bounce around the screen during dramatic moments.”

Other than the TV station itself, who gives a flying f__k what station it is? I'm only interested in the programming. If I need to know what the station is so I can record this or watch it again, it's easy enough to find out without the stupid perma-logo in my face pissing me off.

Most often, these bucking fugs are in the lower-right corner of the screen. That is unless one network rebrands another network's show as some Canadian broadcasters do with U.S. shows. Then they can be in multiple places.

Now, some shows are so insecure, or believe you're so stupid, that they have the name of the program permanently on screen.

To me, these bugs are advertising, plain and simple. The TV station is almost always a commercial entity and therefore having their station ID in your face for the whole friggin' program is equivalent to non-stop advertising – for themselves.

I know it's advertising because they disappear during the “real” ads. The advertisers would revolt if their message was corrupted by the bugs. But the wimpy content providers, like movie producers and directors, don't write into their contracts that when their movies are broadcast on TV, they can't be obfuscated by the bugs. Wake up!

Yet another reason to watch TV programs by download (legal or otherwise) or on DVD.

This hour has 42 minutes

With the advent of a PVR (personal video recorder) or DVR (digital video recorder), I now record all programs and fast-forward through all the commercials. I'd skip the commercials using the Skip button, if there was one, except the chicken-shit manufacturers of the recorder are in bed with the TV networks in making it as inconvenient as possible to skip the commercials without generating a consumer revolt. They compromise and allow fast-forward.

Believe me, the day they take away my ability to skip commercials is the day I stop watching TV entirely.

Many people like the TV series, 24. I watched a couple of episodes now and then and it was OK. I rented the first disc in the series on DVD through Rogers Video Direct (Zip.ca). For $2.50, I get four, one-hour episodes. Well, not really.

Each episode is in reality a mere 42 minutes long. If you watched that live, you also had to sit through 18 minutes of crap disrupting the program. Now you know why I skip the commercials.

For me to catch up on the six seasons, at six discs per season, I'd have to pay 6 x 6 x $2.50 = $90. No quantity discounts. Frankly, this is way too much for a TV series. I don't care how good it is.

Yet, the idiots at NBC Universal are killing the deal with Apple to sell programs on the iTunes Store. Whatever. Apparently, they sold a lot of programs to people with more money than brains. Each episode is priced at USD$2 (CAD$2.10 if you could buy them in Canada, which you can't). Yes, that's right, two bucks! NBC wants to raise the price to $5 per episode.

Are these people hopelessly, nucking futs?

Geez, and I though I was being gouged at CAD$2.50 for four, count 'em, episodes.

It's idiots like these that are going to be responsible for a resurgence in books. Far more entertainment for the money.

The best date in the world

2007-09-05 = September 5, 2007

Don't you just love the English language? The word “date” has numerous meanings:

Noun:

• the day of the month or year as specified by a number.
  
• a particular day or year of a given event.
• the period of time to which an artifact or structure belongs.
• a social or romantic appointment or engagement.
• a sweet, dark brown, oval fruit containing a hard stone, often eaten dried.
  

Verb:

• establish or ascertain the date of (an object or event).
• indicate or expose as being old-fashioned.
• go out with (someone in whom one is romantically or sexually interested).

Wow! How the hell does anyone learn this cockeyed language?

I'm going to confine my rant to calendar dates. In particular the numeric formats we write them as.

There are three major ways of writing a numeric date with various formatting variations:

1. Year-month-day (Standard ISO 8601).
2. Month-day-year (U.S. convention).
3. Day-month-year (Canadian/British convention).

Let me say this now, forcefully:
USE YEAR-MONTH-DAY!!!

It has several advantages, the most important being that it cannot be confused with any other format as long as you use a four-digit year and leading zeroes for the month and day.

For example, today is 2007-09-05. Most significant to least significant, just like we write other numbers.

But if I wrote it 9/5/07 or 5/9/07, two different people in two different countries could misinterpret it as September 5th or May 9th. We fight with this daily depending on the whims of people who write down dates, or cash registers that are programmed with one format or another.

Some bozos try to help out by adding leading zeroes to the month and day:
09/05/07 or 05/09/07

Yeah, that really helps. Now I don't even know if yy-mm-dd is a third option. Don't do that!

If everyone used year-month-day, it cannot be confused. Another huge advantage to anyone creating data that needs to be sorted, including file names, is that everything sorts in the proper order.

A file named “sample_10_2_07.txt” will sort in ascending order before “sample_2_10_07.txt” even though the date is February 10th. That's wrong! But it will flip around if someone else uses “sample_02_10_07.txt”.

If you want to eliminate confusion, use the yyyy-mm-dd format. You won't regret it, especially if it's the date code on some food you bought.

The meeting date is 10/11/12. Is that

1. November 12th, 2010
2. October 11th, 2012
3. November 10th, 2012?

Only one is correct.

A chink in the armor

No doubt you've read about the massive toy recalls by Mattel due to high levels of lead in paint used by Chinese suppliers. Do we blame Mattel or the Chinese?

Yes.

The blame needs to be put squarely at the source, with the Chinese suppliers who were aware of the regulations regarding lead in paint. I guess they figure that these toys are for export to North America, so screw 'em. Let the kids get poisoned.

It could be that the manufacturer bought paint in good faith from another Chinese supplier. However, they would have specified that it be lead free unless they were trying to save a buck. Definitely some corruption going on somewhere. The Chinese companies all know about the massive corruption, so if they gave a damn, they'd be checking up on their suppliers.

One thing you can be sure of is that it's cheaper to use lead in paint than not to, otherwise the Chinese wouldn't be doing it.

Mattel must know that their Chinese suppliers are unscrupulous. Why weren't they monitoring the manufacturing process? Or did they contract that out to the Chinese too?

Like the whole illegal drug market, the consumers are to blame too. We don't care if our products are made in China as long as they don't hurt us. Anything to save a buck. Buy the cheapest, not the best made. We can deal with a few exploding laptop batteries, but when it comes to the kids, well …

My sister-in-law just had a baby a few months ago. She is now in the process of replacing everything she has that has paint on it and was made in China. You should too.

It's time consumers made the Chinese wake up and take responsibility for their human rights abuses, environmental castastrophes, shoddy product quality, and corruption.

But will we? Nope. Too much of our consumer goods are made in China. It will take years to build up the industries to replace the Chinese products and the prices will be too high. The best we can do is threaten to take business to other cheap countries that may have a better record.

Anyway, I guarantee when Apple ships the next iPod, it will be a big seller. It's made in China but it's not painted.

Try this until you've destroyed your SIM card

My daughter's boyfriend, no doubt with the approval of my daughter, decided it would be fun if he tried to guess her cell phone's SIM PIN. Some of you are groaning already.

Like many security mechanisms, if you try and fail too many times, you're locked out. Surprise! That's exactly what happened as her phone displayed, “SIM Blocked.”

Dumb teenagers. What can you say?

So why the complaint, yet again, with Rogers? Well, I called Technical Support last night, explained their stupidity, and told the agent what the phone was displaying. I'd done a Google search and found that you needed a PUK (PIN Unlock Key). The phone was displaying, “Enter the PIN1 unlock code.”

Isn't that phrase close enough? Not according to the first agent I talked to. He said, enter garbage over and over again until it prompts for the PUK. He said I'd have to do it 20 times. Not knowing any better, I followed his instructions.

It failed. We gave up and he said to take it into a Rogers store to get it fixed or the SIM replaced. It seems that if you try to guess the PUK too many times, it permanently fries the SIM.

After reading some more on the Internet, I became convinced that the first prompt was for the PUK. I called back this morning and talked to an intelligent agent who gave me the PUK, wondering out loud why the first agent didn't do so. Shazaam! It was unblocked.

Apparently, the PUK never changes so I wrote that down in case it happens again.

The reason I'm pissed with Rogers, even though they resolved a problem that they didn't create, is that on the advice of the first agent I almost fried the SIM card. Not impressive.