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It looks like I should take back some of the nasty things I wrote about UPS. Here is the tracking info for the wayward package as of today:
The package arrived! They were cool enough to upgrade the package for free, without my asking for it. So, without sarcasm: thank you for fixing your error quickly and effectively. That is a hallmark of good service. Well ... thanks again, UPS. Griping about UPS is becoming quite boring; at a certain point someone could justifiably ask me, "Well, what did you expect from them? Service?" But I won't let this die quite yet. UPS gets away with actions that would put most companies out of business, it seems to me. My track record with them is abysmal: I would not be exaggerating if I said that 80% of UPS-delivered packages to me have been screwed up in one way or another. Damage, delays, delivery people not bothering to knock on the door, delivery people literally throwing packages onto the doorstep.... This is absurd. And it makes me more frustrated because I just keep putting up with it. As you have probably guessed, the Christmas gift did not show up today. I called their customer service number to pressure them into providing free Saturday delivery for me (I have been successful at this in the past.) Not that I got a chance to this time: I reached a recording that said, and I quote, "Thank you for calling UPS. Due to extreme call volume, we cannot take your call at this time." There is not even a semblance of customer service here. I'm at a loss as to what to do about this. My best idea so far is this: any time an online store will only ship via UPS, I will avoid placing an order with them, and send the owners an email informing them that they just lost a sale due to their UPS shipping policy. And that's my rant for tonight. Television alert: It looks like Outdoor Life Network is running "a full day of skiing and snowboarding" on Christmas Day from 8AM to 8PM. The highlight: "The day culminates with OLN Special Premieres: First, at 6pm ET, back-to-back brand-new episodes of Skier's World from Heavenly Resort in Lake Tahoe and the slopes in Banff, Alberta. Then, catch No Boundaries -- Snow, featuring a man who wants to be the first to snowboard Mount Everest, even if the odds are not in his favor." This sounds impressive. Even better, there is no way it will be a live broadcast, so we can probably be guaranteed that we won't watch him plummet to his death (OLN isn't FOX, after all.1) I'll be setting my VCR. Unfortunately, this is fairly typical of my experiences with UPS:
Here's to hoping that this item, which I intend to give as a Christmas gift, arrives today.... I used to promote At Your Office, an online office supplies retailer, on my Best of the Web page: A deep-discount online office supply company. It's so deep discount, in fact, that I have never had to pay for anything I've ordered from them, they simply email me every couple of weeks with a free offer. A year and a half ago, I added a note to the entry: As of 25 May, 1999, this ceased to be true; I ordered 4 permanent Marks-A-Lot markers from them along with my free order, for $0.54 apiece and no extra shipping costs. Then a few months later I felt compelled to add another note: As of 8 October, 1999, the preceding remains humorous but sadly no longer true. I have ordered several times from At Your Office, but never without something getting damaged en route. They pack things very, very poorly. So, for now, my recommendation is to look somewhere else. I am still on their email list, however. In early December 2000 I decided to buy a guillotine-style paper trimmer. I drove to the local Staples and selected one that looked promising. When I got it home I found three problems with it. First, the unit was too light so it risked sliding on the table when in use. Second, imagine you are looking at the trimmer from the top: on the left there is a flat grid area for laying out your paper, then a perhaps 1 cm metal strip to its right, then the blade. The grid and the metal strip were not at the same height, which meant that paper would never lie flat on the trimmer. Finally, the ruler along the top that tells how much you are cutting was mis-calibrated. I decided to return it and buy a new one, so I started poking around online. I checked out the online stores of Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples. Each of these companies offers a service where orders of most items are delivered the next day by a truck dispatched from one of their stores (Rockwell Science Center, where I work, has such an arrangement with Office Depot.) I did not find a trimmer that I liked, however, so I reluctantly decided to check At Your Office, which had just sent me an email advertising "free shipping and one-use Kodak camera with any order over $50." It turns out that two things have changed at At Your Office since I penned the less-than-favorable reviews above. First, they were acquired by Office.com. Granted, Office.com is a company with a rather vague business model ("Office.com® [...] -- a website that focuses and harnesses the potential of the Internet for the workworld. Office.com combines best of breed content, commerce, community and communications to create the place we work when we work online.") but at least it's new management. Second, At Your Office is now offering free next-day delivery via UPS (I assume to compete with the bricks-and-mortar stores.) So I decided to go for it: on a Thursday, I ordered the paper trimmer, a box of hot cocoa mix for Jenn, a Pilot disposable fountain pen, and the free camera. That evening I checked their site to get UPS tracking numbers for the packages. It showed that the order had been split into three shipments. One, the heaviest, was scheduled for delivery on Friday as promised. The second was scheduled for delivery the following Monday. The third tracking number brought up a package delivered in June of 1999 to Washington state. This was unexpected. The next morning I called AYO customer service to see if I could get the real tracking number. The woman on the phone was courteous, was just as surprised as I about the tracking number incident, and told me that she had no additional information about it. "If it doesn't show up on Monday, call us back," she said. That day (Friday) package #1 arrived, containing the paper trimmer, one corner of interior box dented. Its arrival was appreciated as it was the reason for the order in the first place. On Monday packages #2 and #3 arrived. #2 contained the hot cocoa mix, interior box dented. #3 contained the one-use camera ... and a $0.65 medium point black Pilot ballpoint pen instead of my fountain pen. I called customer service back and explained the error: again, the associate (a different one) was very courteous and promised the problem to be fixed immediately. Sure enough, the next day, a big AYO box arrived by UPS, holding one pen and perhaps 8 liters of packing material (wrinkled stiff paper.) So, the verdict? From my small sample size, I submit that AYO has really not improved since my previous evaluation. Packages arrive late and damaged, poorly packed but using more packaging than necessary. If you are looking for office supplies, perhaps Staples or Office Depot could help you out. This is the article on nutritional toxicology that I mentioned earlier. The key passage: "Toxicology today possesses the means to incriminate any substance to which it cares to devote sufficient testing. This science can indict any substance if it has the inclination." With respect to the last post, it looks like IE will ignore classes selected into SPAN elements much of the time. Perhaps the most conservative route would be to use DIVs exclusively, as I have not run into any problems with them so far. I would really like some standardization on this front. There exists a spec, but every browser's implementation is so riddled with bugs that any CSS design is a minefield of potential incompatibilities. Revised: It looks like I originally mischaracterized the bug. The real bug seems to be that Netscape will not allow CSS padding or margin settings to be set for a TD element. IE, on the other hand, won't let them be set for a SPAN element. Both render the code correctly if they are set for a DIV element. Go figure. Well, I just did something very stupid that resulted in me losing the entirety of the new post I just typed. So, I'll type it again and try to be less stupid this time. The post went as follows: Anyone care to know of a Netscape CSS bug? If a class is defined, given the name "body", and selected into an element, e.g., <SPAN class="body">some spanned text</SPAN>, Netscape takes a serious nose dive. This is true for Netscape 4 in Windows as well as whatever Mac version my friend Petra (who reported the problem to me) uses. In Windows the crash is particularly ugly, causing an invalid page fault and bringing up one of those terminal dialog boxes that can never be dismissed (nor can the OS be restarted, so it's a hard reboot.) This problem may extend to other element names, but I don't want to use any of my machines as a test subject. I can't see anything in the CSS spec that forbids name overlap between classes and elements. But even if there were, surely there should be a more graceful failure route. I might report this at some point, but it is hard to gather the motivation as (1) I don't use Netscape and (2) I very rarely get responses when I submit bug reports. And I think that is pretty much verbatim what I had there before. I am quite fond of nutmeg, and I use it regularly in my cooking. With this being the Christmas season, I'm drinking eggnog; probably more than I should, judging by its nutritional profile. To this, of course, I add nutmeg. Perhaps too much nutmeg. Tonight I decided to have a cup full and began grating a nutmeg into it. Soon the cup contained half a grated nutmeg. I stirred it, added a small splash of brandy, and began sipping it. Halfway through the cup it occurred to me that this could be a very dumb idea: I knew nutmeg could be hallucinogenic or toxic in relatively small quantities (neither of which effects I wanted), but I had no idea what "small" meant. A gram? 10 grams? 50 grams? I put down the eggnog and performed a Google search for "ld50 nutmeg". LD50 is a term that denotes the fatal level of consumption for fifty percent of the population (that is, if you have a group of one hundred people and give each of them the LD50 of a substance, around fifty of them will die.) A very cool article debunking nutritional toxicology scares (showing that "natural" ingredients could be far more hazardous than "artificial" ingredients) that I read four years ago got me convinced that the LD50s of many common substances are well within reach. So, to begin with, how much had I injested? I had three nutmegs left, and weighed them on the finest-precision scale available to me, my postal scale. The three nutmegs came in at a third of an ounce (or around 10 grams) total. That meant that each nutmeg was a little over 3 grams, half a nutmeg was between 1.5 and 2 grams, and half a cup of eggnog containing half a nutmeg delivered under a gram of nutmeg, total. I found a webpage that read "Even though there have been cases of narcosis and collapse with just one whole nutmeg, people universally use nutmeg as food seasoning." This was not particularly good news. The next source was also not very positive (intriguingly, this is from a book entitled Legal Highs: A Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Herbs and Chemicals with Psychoactive Properties by one Adam Gottlieb, self-proclaimed 20th Century Alchemist. This is an interesting counterpoint to my position: I'm trying to make sure that I didn't do something very stupid and injest dangerous amounts of a substance while using it for flavoring, while there are apparently people who want to know if they can use it as a psychotropic drug without injesting dangerous amounts.) "Possible nausea during first hour; may cause vomiting or diarrhea in isolated cases. Takes anywhere from one to five hours for effects to set in. Then expect severe cottonmouth, flushing of skin, severely bloodshot eyes, dilated pupils. [...] "Intense sedation". Impaired speech and motor functions. Hallucinations uncommon in average (5-10 gm) doses. Generally followed by long, deep, almost coma-like sleep (expect 16 hours of sleep afterward) and feelings of lethargy after sleep. [...] Safrole is carcinogenic and toxic to the liver." So, bad things can happen, and I was unsure how exactly to interpret this paragraph. "Hallucinations are uncommon in average [...] doses", but what about the other effects? Common? Do they set in at a lower threshold than the hallucination? The final source I found said this: "The perceptible dose is 5 to 15 grams (1 to 3 ground nutmeg seeds). It is a carminative in a dose of 0.03 mL. It is used as a hallucinogen in doses of 2-4 teaspoonfuls or greater than 2 whole nutmeg or 18 grams of fresh ground nutmeg. Effects begin in 3 to 6 hours but may be delayed 8 hours after ingestion and the duration is up to 60 hours. Effects are similar to LSD. Toxicity produces dry mouth, GI upset, abdominal pain, agitation, tremors, feeling of impending doom, delirium, psychosis, and coma. It is reported to produce miosis or mydriasis, hypothermia, hypotension. Cardiovascular effects including chest pain, palpitations and mild hypertension have been reported. One fatality reported in an 8 year old boy who ingested 14 grams was reported in 1908. Severe reactions with shock, hypotension, cyanosis and hypothermia may occur with very large amounts ." I had to look up carminative, miosis, and mydriasis, by the way. OK, we finally have a definition of the perceptible dose, which is a factor of 4 to 12 above what I injested. So it looks like I'm in the clear, although this safety margin is significantly lower than I would like. Do we need a moral here? Don't be an idiot like me: many herbs and spices contain dangerous chemicals in significant amounts. Significant increases in their culinary usage should probably be investigated before ingestion, not after. Liquor.com redesigned their website a couple of months ago. In fact, I think the site is much improved. However, this change broke the script used by ScotchFinder (which I run) so their inventory has been out of the ScotchFinder system since the change. This is not ideal, of course, but I didn't do anything about it until now. So, if you care, Liquor.com is back in ScotchFinder. Well, the hamster saga has turned out well, I think. The pet store was willing to take the two hamsters back, and gave us a half-hamster worth of store credit (about $7 total) for each. We went to Petsmart to purchase a second habitat so the two kept hamsters would have their own spaces. It seems to be working out. Both built nests from shredded bedding after they realized they were alone. Also found ... ack! ... that Petsmart sells the habitat purchased on Thursday for $15 less than For Pets' Sake. For Pets' Sake is a small local store, and generally I like to support stores like this, even if it means spending a little bit more. However:
My effort should probably be to support small business owners whom I admire, who work against odds, paying higher wholesale prices than the big chain stores, with no choice but to charge a bit more. I don't think my effort should be to support the theory of small business ownership. If you want me to pay more for a worse selection, you've got to make it up somewhere. There are other small businesses in the Thousand Oaks area that have a smaller selection and higher prices than larger stores, but don't do anything to make up for this lack. Conejo Valley Wine & Provision Co. is one, where the business model seems to be to make every buyer feel stupid ("I've got it! If they feel offended and embarrassed, they will give me more money!") Paper Depot in Thousand Oaks (right next door to the previous store) is perhaps worse: they assume your question is stupid without even listening to it. I was looking for #6-3/4 envelopes. I was walked through the conversational steps of being told that such envelopes don't exist (which they do), then that their width wasn't 6 1/2 inches (which it is), then that that size wasn't listed on their wall chart (which it was). At the end of this she finally looked in her catalog and found some examples, but was unable to get me a sample envelope: I would have to pay for them in full and if I didn't like them when they arrived, too bad. Sorry folks ... I can order out of a catalog (and for lower prices) without your help. [--- Text removed 27 March 2001 ---] To offset the negativity of this list, I should provide a list of small stores that do go above and beyond the call in order to provide a great shopping experience:
Multiple hamsters in one cage is turning out to be a bad idea. Our gamble of sociability based on their blood relationship seems to be a losing bet. Unfortunately the store has a policy of only accepting returns of sick animals. Our plan is this: we want to keep two of them, which will entail purchasing a second habitat. We are going to try to return two, in the hopes that they can find good, solitary homes elsewhere. If the store won't give us money back, we'll try to get merchandise credit. And if that doesn't work, we'll offer to just give them back if they will sell them as pets (rather than, say, use them as feeders.) This is my sentimentalism getting the best of me here. I hope this all works out. We have hamsters. On Thursday night (14 Dec 2000) Jenn and I went to "For Pets' Sake" here in Thousand Oaks and bought four "teddy bear" hamsters. I had been talking about wanting some for a while, and was up-front with the fact that my primary motivation was to build an increasingly elaborate habitat of tunnels and rooms for them to explore. But I have fallen quickly in love with the little guys. They are such fun to watch, as they explore their environments and try to understand the world around them. Some websites I read warned that hamsters are territorial and that it is a bad idea to keep multiple ones in a single habitat. Other sources said that if they are of the same litter, it won't matter (or won't matter as much.) We are gambling on the latter for now. Here is a picture: you can click on it for a full-sized version. At some point I will post pictures to the Pictures page.
OK everyone, here goes. This is the inaugural post for the newly-redesigned mcgees.org. The idea is to have a running web log on the left and push all the links, which used to populate this page, over to the right. Blogger provides this logging service. I'm pretty impressed with their interface and the power of their design. It is also very gratifying to have this log on mcgees.org rather than on some remote site. The system is this: with a web browser, I can now add a note to my homepage through a convenient text form. The ease of this (compared to FTP-ing a copy of index.html, making the changes manually, and uploading the new version) will likely result in much fresher content on these pages. We shall see. My wife thinks the graphical design (white and green, etc.) makes this page too professional-looking and impersonal. She may very well be right. Please feel free to drop me a note at joshua@mcgees.org and give me suggestions on ways to improve this. [Ed. note, 07 Feb 2001: The design scheme was changed shortly after this post was written.] |
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