TigerDirect.Ca Responds

(Previously.)

Boilerplate time:

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your email.

You can always check for shipping charges for the product when you are on the check out portion of the process, you can put in you zip code on the field and it will provide you with details regarding the charges that might be applicable for the order.



Thank you for visiting our website. We appreciate your business. If you have further inquiries and reply to this email, please make sure to include your entire message, so we can address it appropriately.

Sincerely,
Dennis
TigerDirect.ca Web Response

Of course, I can't let this go.

Thank you for your reply.

However, I have reviewed the check out process, and I still cannot see where I was warned about the possibility of additional shipping charges or fees.

This PDF is the order confirmation screen: http://wiki.xdroop.com/dropbox/TigerDirect-1.pdf

There is an interesting phrase here towards the bottom of the screen:

All prices in Canadian dollars. No additional duties or fees.

(see http://wiki.xdroop.com/gallery2/d/3355-1/101229163732001.jpg)



This PDF is the order confirmation screen immediately before credit card information is entered:

[link removed because it does have some privacy stuff of mine here]

Again, the same phrase is present. I see two shipping options itemized here, both UPS variants. But there is no warning about the possibility of additional fees of any kind, and the bold text above would strongly lead one to believe that further fees are not in any way likely.

If you could clear up this confusion of mine, I would appreciate it.

Let me be clear here:

I do not want to reverse this transaction.

I don't even care if I get a refund on the UPS brokerage fees.

All I want is the assurance that the next time I choose TigerDirect.ca, if I am entering into a transaction where additional fees may apply, I get clearly warned about them.

Thank you again for your attention to this matter.

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Tiger Canada wrote:

I'm pretty pissed about this.

TigerDirect.Ca shipping problem

So what happened:

I got a new laptop for work. For whatever reason, PCMCIA/CardBus adapters are no longer in vogue, so my CardBus ethernet card is no good anymore.

To provide a little context here: when I need to do some diagnostics with networks, sniffing or whatever, I like to do it from a VM. I also like to do it from an interface that my base OS doesn't use. That way I can remain connected to the working part of the network, hopefully, so I can use the internet to help me figure out what is going on. Therefore I need a third (after the built-in RJ45 and wireless) interface for the VMs.

So OK, I do my research and discover that I do have a ExpressCard slot on the new computer. And I'll admit it took me a half hour to figure out how to get it open. And after a bit of research I find a card at TigerDirect.ca which fits my needs.

So on 20 December 2010, I order it.

On 29 December it arrives, along with a UPS delivery dude who wants 40% of the card's value in COD charges for customs brokerage fees.

And I go, WTF? I ordered from a .ca company, why is it coming from a US address? But I pay the man because I want the card.

And I do see that it was shipped from someplace in Naperville Illinois.

Anyways, this is the email I sent to the Tiger Direct feedback email, the same day:

Greetings

With regards to the above order, it apparently shipped from a US location and the UPS agent required COD for customs brokerage services.

My expectation, in dealing with a .ca website, that the product would have been shipped from Canada. It was for this reason I selected tigerdirect to perform this transaction.

While I am happy with the device, had the possibility of further shipping fees (which approach 40% of the post-tax value of the transaction), it would have changed the value proposition of the transaction.

Can you show me where in the order process I would have been instructed to consider the possibility of additional costs due to shipping from the US?

Thank you for any insight you may be able to offer.

(Tiger Direct people playing along at home can see order D0894185.)

In fact, shortly after sending this, I ran through the order process again, and find this buried in the fine print:



Their two shipping options available to me were "UPS WorldShip CA" for $7, and "UPS WorldShip Express" for $22.

I consider this borderline dishonest, even if they could argue they are not responsible for charges incurred by the shipping company. At this point I would not order from them again.

I'll update if/when I get a response.

Review: Tron Legacy (IMAX-3D)

I saw this movie in IMAX-3D. I have only seen a handful of movies in 3D, including Avatar, and remain convinced that 3D is a gimmick. A neat gimmick, to be sure, but just a gimmick.

My hope was that I could just watch the movie and let it flow over me, without me thinking about it. I didn't want to think about story, effects, characters, none of that. I'd been waiting for this for over a year.

On first viewing, overall my verdict is approval. This movie is true to the spirit of the original Tron. There were only a couple of effects which I found jarring, and only one or two plot points that made me go "wait, what?"

I read a review which said, in part:

Successful or not, Tron was pushing the envelope, trying for something new, Tron: Legacy is paralysed by its reverence for the old.

And in a way this is true. Tron: Legacy is very much caught up by the weight of the original, and the time that has passed since the original. I don't think this is a bad thing. Those of us who love the original don't want a radical reboot of the universe; we want an updated Tron universe, but a continuation of the story and characters.
There is a lot of love for the history we grew up with here. Right from Sam's opening sequence, where he makes a well-worn observation regarding a building's fixture, we are given the signal that the creators of Legacy also remember and love the original. Flynn's office contains an old Sun i386 workstation, a beast that was old when I started with Sun equipment more than 15 years ago, but it captured the feel of the computing environment from the time. We are offered occasional updated recognizers, and a brief glimpse of the grid tanks that hark back to the original, and the MCP's carrier is present in an updated form. Jenn noted nods to both Wang and Cray.

Tron: Legacy continues the nifty sleight-of-hand that the original perpetrated. Tron was actually about Kevin Flynn, with the title character as a side kick. Similarly, Legacy is actually about Sam Flynn, and the returning character Tron is barely mentioned, even though he is present in more ways that are immediately obvious.

Legacy is also another movie about fathers and sons, a topic which rings with me a bit more now.

The jarring effect I mentioned above? When Sam returns to his garage/apartment, the garage door is obviously a CGI and the movement is just… wrong. Simple stuff, especially with the effects-heavy sequences later in the movie. But that one was the one which made me notice it.

Plot-wise, there are a few quibbles. There was one character who was so over-the-top that he was almost not over-the-top enough. There was one point where Kevin Flynn makes a completely unexpected change of mind in how he wants to carry on his quest that didn't fit. There was one point where a character tells us Gemm. My name is Gemm. and I thought well of course it is, honey.

Jenn thought the movie could have used more explanation of the plot points as things went on; I thought that the script contained enough explanation of both the back-plot from the original movie as well as providing the needed context for the more immediate action.

But these are but minor details. All that aside, I think this is a worthy successor. It is one of the few movies I've seen in the last few years that I want to see again in the theater (although probably just 2D this time, thank you). I bought the soundtrack by Daft Punk, and look forward to seeing the movie in my DVD collection.

End of line.

Attention Span

Commentary on the attention span of today's Internet:

Exhibit A, a 45-minute video showing high-speed photography of various aspects of a Shuttle launch.

Exhibit B, a 3-minute video showing a Lego Antikythera Mechanism implementation.

Exhibit A has less than 10,000 views.

Exhibit B? More than 430,000 views.

I Wonder

So one of the complaints of the inner-city residents is that suburban residents cost the city more to service than inner-city residents do.

I was wondering today: if one includes the unpaid, implied infrastructure deficit (the impending costs which will be required to replace, revitalize, or overhaul the in-place infrastructure) -- is that still true?

I find this all interesting, because I seem to recall that one of the main reasons FOR the amalgamated city was the fact that the suburbs was filled with a large, happy tax-base which went to work every day in downtown Ottawa, requiring Ottawa to build infrastructure that the freeloading suburbites never paid for. This was why Orleans and Nepean had balanced budgets or surpluses all those years while Ottawa had comparatively harder budget choices to make.

Why I Didn't Vote, 2010

(I mentioned on Twitter that I wasn't going to vote, and some folks asked why. Since this is a complicated issue that won't fit into 140 characters, I wrote it up here and linked to it.)

I have been eligible to vote since the federal general election of 1988. Since that time I have voted in every election I was eligible to do so in, with the exception of the 2010 Municipal Election.

Why?

First, let me distract you with some irrelevancies.

The problem with elections is that just anyone can run. Anyone who has made a career of public service suddenly becomes a "career politician", something which is considered a negative label by the electorate. Ignorance seems a virtue.

The problem with election campaigns is that there are very few new ideas. Most of the platform planks which come up are either incredibly simplistic (ie zero-means-zero), incredibly naiive (ie LRT on Carling), impossible (throwing out all the collective barganing agreements the city has with the unions), illegal (several (usually fringe) candidates always want to do things that are the responsibility of other levels of government), or incredibly vague (ie being in favor of delivering the LRT tunnel on time and on budget, except if it is going to cost too much, in which case we'll scrap it and start from scratch again).

The problem with candidates is that there is, at the end of the day, very little to differentiate most of them apart. So the natural inclination is to pick on real or perceived character flaws of other candidates, blow them out of proportion, and then loudly say, "I'm not like him(*)." US politics, especially presidential politics, is almost exclusively about the "not him" gambit. The federal conservative parties turned this into an electable strategy after the Reform and PC parties merged. It has worked so well that the federal Liberals have now abandoned any semblance of policy development and will now throw all their efforts into the same "not him" strategy.

The problem with elections overall is that all of this is blown up into a firestorm by the media. Candidates prance for the media, who feed back into the whole mess by paying attention and then instigating conflict. This is the reason why the "not him" strategy works: because it is short and simple enough for a soundbite or a five paragraph article. They then tie this up with demands that the candidates possess "vision", which seems to be code for "large projects mostly funded by tax money" (see also Landsdown, the tunnel...).

The problem with the actual act of voting is that there is no way for the electorate to register their displeasure with the options being offered. Ideally there would be some way to show up and decline the ballot in such a way that the declined ballots would be counted and listed along side the number of votes for each candidate. That way you could compare the number of votes for any candidate with the number of voters who cared enough to get involved but didn't like any of the options.

Right now a dissatisfied voter has three options:

• they can skip voting entirely, which makes them look like they don't care;
• they can deliberately spoil their ballot, which makes them look like an idiot; or
• they can vote for someone they don't want to win, which makes them an idiot.

When we vote, we are putting a vote for someone. This is an implied endorsement of at least something they have, be it their ideas, their record, even the order their name is presented on the ballot.

As such, I feel very strongly that campaigns and platforms need to be for something. Being "I'm not him" is not being for something.

We are not (or should not be) voting against someone. We can only vote for someone.

So all that said, we come back to why I didn't vote this time around: I did not think there was any person or collection of ideas that I wanted to vote for.

Mr. Watson is a career politician, and as such he left himself plenty of wiggle room on his promises. So he'll do what it is feasable to do. This is a safe and practical position to have. The problem is he hasn't differentiated between what he'd like to do verses what is most likely to be dropped, ie what the priorities are if there isn't enough money in the budget to do everything (and there isn't). There isn't any substance to him. And he's bailed on jobs before, leaving municipal politics to run provincially, and then leaving his ministerial job with the governing Liberals to come back to us fine folk.

Mr. Doucett never made many bones about not caring much for the suburbs, and since my place of residence (Morgan's Grant, north North Kanata) is the embodiment of sprawl,
I got the impression that he really didn't have anything for me and wasn't going to bother to try. (See this discussion I put into #NCR about Mr. Doucett's platform and sprawl in general.) His LRT-down-Carling idea was willful blindness in terms of what is actually achievable with a bureaucracy involved, and his constant windmill-tilting at the Landsdown plan was tiring. His inconsistancy in how unchallengable council decisions should be (ie absolute when it came to the OMB, except where he disagreed with it as in the tunnel and Landsdown). His vision of the city seemed to be restricted to the Glebe (and a downtown without a LRT tunnel).

Mr. O'Brien... well, after "Zero Means Zero", what more needs to be said? The only positive I can think of is that council operated very smoothly while he was on trial, and he managed a budget consensus -- the only problem being it was a consensus that totally ignored him.

None of the other candidates could even be taken seriously as someone you would actively want to see in the Mayor's chair.

So given all that, who am I supposed to vote for? Seriously. Voting for someone I don't like proves me an idiot.

For all my talk about making a protest vote, I couldn't do it in the end, it felt dishonest.

And since the turn-out was less than 50% this time, I'm clearly not alone.

The bottom line here is that the huge number of people who didn't vote represent a enormous failure on the part of the candidates and their platforms. They failed to attract the interest of those who didn't care, and they failed to meet the standards of those of us who cared and paid attention but found them lacking.

To suggest that since I didn't vote means that I don't have a right to complain over the next four years is ridiculous. As a home owner, I pay taxes, and that is what gives me the right to complain. You wouldn't suggest that since I didn't vote I no longer have the expectation of garbage pickup, would you?

To suggest that I don't take the privilege of voting seriously, that I don't respect the sacrifice of those who worked, fought, and in some cases died for that privilege, is insulting to me and those who gained me that privilege. I am not hiding behind excuses like "I'm too busy" or "I don't care". I have paid attention to the campaigns and considered things very closely and seriously. I daresay that in deciding to not to vote, I spent far more time with this issue than some who did vote.

To suggest that I should throw that vote away by spoiling the ballot, or voting for someone I don't want to, strikes me as insulting to those who gained me that privilege. Participation in governance like this is something to be taken very seriously, and the suggestion that a vote be wasted -- in any way -- tries to oversimplify and trivialize the entire process.

This was the first time I didn't vote, but I suspect it won't be the last. My previous vote was a protest vote for the Green Party, and it left me feeling dishonest. I'm not going to pretend that politics is any different than it was when I was younger, but I do know that my tolerance for it has gone way down.

And the way of the present seems to be to have more spectacularly less qualified candidates (Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Ford) which cater an overly simplistic and totally undeliverable message to the masses who want simple solutions to complicated problems.

I am not optimistic for the future, since nobody has the vision to make me so.

--

* == Statistically it is going to be a him. Totally different issue.

On Suburbs

(This is a thinly edited IRC rant I put into #NCR this week.)

Doucet became clearer to me once I realized he doesn't care if I vote for him since he's not interested in doing anything for me as a Kanata resident. Which perhaps paradoxically means he's a safe protest vote, since none of Larry, Jim, or Andy do it for me.

Suburbs are a hard problem. But since we pay taxes too, we have to be part of the solution. You can't just go around wringing your hands and saying "sprawl is evil", you have to make incentives for sprawlers to de-sprawl and you have to make sure the de-sprawlers don't lose their shirt while doing so.

Also, there are reasons why people live out here:

1) it is nicer than the city
2) it is cheaper than the city
3) it is quieter than the city

...and trying to make the rest of the city into a Glebe clone isn't going to solve ANY of those problems.

The Glebe is unique:

- it is close to the city
- but it isn't super dense

...basically it is a suburb that was pre-sprawl sprawl that Ottawa expanded to envelope.

The problem I have with Doucett's transit plan is that it is masquarading as two plans. A line that does commuter rail from Kanata into the core is not going to serve local on/off traffic down Carling. It is a one-or-the-other. I mean, look at how frickin' long it takes the 85 to go from downtown to Bayshore (or maybe I'm dating myself with that comment? does teh 85 still do that run?) whereas an express from kanata lakes is 60 minutes.

Or was, anyways.

I don't want to know how long it is from Morgan's Grant, it is something I've never had to do.

Bottom line, Doucett's look-how-great-the-Glebe-is campaign doesn't sell out here in Kanata. But it looks like it doesn't sell in most places, so, like I said earlier, it makes him a safe protest vote.


...and heck, if he does pull an NDP victory: he can't be any worse than Larry was, since I doubt council will listen to him, either.

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