Month: November 2007

American Imports, Chinese Deaths

“The patients arrive every day in Chinese hospitals with disabling and fatal diseases, acquired while making products for America. On the sixth floor of the Guangzhou Occupational Disease and Prevention Hospital, Wei Chaihua, 44, sits on his iron-rail bed, tethered to an oxygen tank. He is dying of the lung disease silicosis, a result of making Char-Broil gas stoves sold in Utah and throughout the U.S. Down the hall, He Yuyun, 36, who for years brushed America’s furniture with paint containing benzene and other solvents, receives treatment for myelodysplastic anemia, a precursor to leukemia.”

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This is a scary, sobering article. It was brought to my attention over at Digital Media Thoughts, and we had a little discussion about it there. The question is, what do we do about it? Can we avoid products made by the companies who treat their workers this way? Even if you boycott a certain product, unless you write a letter to the company explaining why you’re not buying their product, they’ll probably just think they’re not marketing it enough.

This is what happen when a country has a population of 1.3 billion people, a government with a voracious desire to modernize at any cost, and no Judeo-Christian history that speaks to the value of human life. Life is disposable to a culture like that – although it’s not like some of the conditions in North America are much better. A read of Fast Food Nation (an eye-opening book) tells us that. Greed is the real problem here, like it always is. What else is new?

Partisan Politics in the Blogging World? It’s Not My Fault!

It’s funny what Google AdSense will put up on a site sometimes…

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“Rationalize Like A Pirate” Day

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Thankfully, no content-pirate that I know has given me this excuse, but it can’t be that far off given our current cultural climate…

Vista’s Irritating Me Lately

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How can Vista be reporting my network drives as being broken in the folder pane, yet functional and connected in the Computer reporting. When I closed it and opened it again (Windows Key + E), it was reporting them as being connected. The most irritating of all though? When I tried to open the network drive, I’m getting an error about the drive not being accessible (“An unexpected network error occurred.”) This is all related to some funkiness with my Windows Home Server that has cropped up and is puzzling me. There are some things that I adore about Windows Home Server, and some things that are driving me nuts.

Back to Vista: I’m thinking about doing a week-long log where I keep track of everything that puzzles/frustrates me about Vista…but I’m worried that the results might be too depressing.

A Funny and Brave Politician? Is There Such a Thing?

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I don’t think much of most politicians; integrity seems to be a foreign word to most of them. I happened to click on a link in the signature of a Pocket PC Thoughts community member who posted in my thread about WiFi (boy that’s generated some interesting commentary across my network!) and I ended up at the Web site of one of his projects: a Web site for Ken Gordon. I’d just finished the article about my New York trip, so I was rewarding myself with 5 minutes of mindless Web surfing (something I don’t do often). What caught my attention on the Ken Gordon sight was this image:

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Could it be? A politician with the stones to get into a tank with sharks? Yup! There’s the official 30 second TV spot showing him in the tank, but the really funny one is the no stuntman used video – I can’t believe how close some of those massive sharks got to him and he never flinched. I don’t care how satiated or “tame” those sharks might be, there’s still a certain level of danger and it’s not something you’d likely find me doing. He further demonstrates his sense of humour in another video spot, and some added bravery by jumping tandem out of a plane.

I don’t live in Colorado, and I definitely lean more toward the right politically, but if I could I’d vote for this guy – if he has the guts to jump out of a plane, be in a tank with sharks, and turn down $100,000 in contributions from special interest groups, he’s got more courage (on multiple levels) than 99% of the politicians out there. I hope he wins his election!

Canadian Dollar Continues to Surge, We Continue to Get Ripped Off at Retail

One of the realities of living in Canada is that we’re closely tied to the USA – we consume their TV, movies, books, music, etc. 99.99% of Canadian popular culture is identical to American popular culture. In other ways, we’re a curious mix: I think of height in inches, weight in pounds, but speed in KH/h and temperature in Celsius. As the Canadian dollar continues to surge past the value of the US dollar (this morning my bank Web site tells me that buying one Canadian dollar would cost $1.09 USD) the price disparity of many commercial goods becomes more glaring (and I become more depressed every time I see a US cheque with my name on it). You see, when we buy a book or magazine in Canada, there’s a price in US dollars and one in Canadian dollars. It never really changes, and all Canadians know they’re paying more than the currency difference indicates they should. But lately of course, things have flipped and now it’s just crazy to pay $9.99 CAD for a book that has a price of $6.99 USD on it. This is an email I sent to Amazon.ca this morning:

“I was wondering, now that the Canadian dollar is significantly stronger than the US dollar, when will Amazon adjust the prices of it’s products to reflect that? Especially books of course, because those have the highest pricing disparity. Canadians have been being ripped-off for years on the Canadian pricing of books, it’s only now that the disparity is so severe companies are being forced to act. When will Amazon?” 

I think to some degree Amazon has started to react to pricing: I checked the price of a few best-sellers, and Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America and So Can You” is $16.19 USD on Amazon.com but only $15 CAD on Amazon.ca. On the other hand, the book “You: Staying Young: is selling for $15.60 USD on Amazon.com, but $18.89 CAD on Amazon.ca. Other Canadian companies are starting to act: Indigo announced a 10-20% discount program, although that doesn’t seem nearly enough when the cover prices of books were already 30-40% off the true dollar value.

Anyone in Europe is no doubt already familiar with the realities of locally-adjusted pricing: the Euro and British Pound have been stronger than the US dollar for years, yet the prices of technology items rarely, if ever, reflect that. The VAT issue clouds the waters somewhat, but I doubt I could find a European happy with the prices they’re paying when they know how much it costs for an American to buy the same thing.

There’s a massive opportunity here for US companies: START SHIPPING TO CANADA. For years many US companies have refused to ship to Canada, but now that our dollar is kicking ass and taking names, companies that previously haven’t shipped to Canada (NewEgg for instance) or haven’t shipped certain products (Amazon.com won’t ship electronics to Canada) should be falling all over themselves to service the 30 million Canadians who now have a stronger dollar and are eager to shop for US products in US prices. Come on, bring it!

Don’t Take My Order for a Product You Don’t Have

There’s nothing worse for the perception of your company than when a customer of yours feels cheated or tricked – it’s hard for your brand to recover from that. Case in point: on October 1st I was (as always) keenly following Dell’s Days of Deals and they happened to have a Sony Digital Voice Recorder on sale for $69, a full $40 off the normal price of $99. Sometimes I have do to interviews for my Web sites and I thought it would be a decent solution for the price. I placed the order on October 1st at the special price. On November 1st, a full month later, I still didn’t have the product. I had been checking my order online every week or so, expecting it to say it had shipped, but no such luck.

Today I phoned Dell, and 35 minutes, one customer service agent, and one pause-prone (is that a cultural thing or a Dell sales thing?) Indian salesperson later I was told that the product was going to be back in stock in seven to ten business days. So if I’m lucky, it will be somewhere around the six to seven week mark after ordering that my product will show up. Seven to ten business days sounds suspiciously like a generic “I don’t actually know” answer, but I suppose it’s better than what the customer service agent suggested I do: cancel my order and re-place it, trying to get the same discount from online says.

I’ve seen Dell deals be sold out before, which is why I always check them first thing on the morning when the Day of Deals are on. If Dell didn’t have the product in stock, why take my order? It’s certainly not normal for Dell to take a month to ship products – the last product I ordered I received the very next day. I had been hoping to use this voice recorder when I went down to New York (I figured I had 20+ days for it to show up), but Dell betrayed my trust when it never arrived. Come on Dell: you’re supposed to be the master of the supply chain, can’t you show “out of stock” on a promotional deal when you don’t have any more to sell?

Data Plans From Rogers: Stop The Insanity!

[This was originally published at Pocket PC Thoughts and Smartphone Thoughts, but I want to get it out to as many people as possible, so I’m publishing it here as well.]

While researching the HTC Touch that Rogers is releasing today, I came upon something that made my jaw drop: the “special” data plan pricing that Rogers is offering their customers.

In case you went blind looking at the sheer ridiculousness of the prices there, let me recap: the cheapest monthly fee is $15/month (keeping in mind $1 Canadian is about $1.05 USD now) and that gets you 2 megabytes. 2 FREAKIN’ MEGABYTES. What can you do with 2 MB of data? Perhaps if you stick to short, plain-text email messages, and you browsed WAP sites from 1999, you might be able to live with that.

Oh, if you go over, you’ll be charged $10 per 1 MB that you use. If you’re willing to pony up $60 per month, Rogers will graciously extend to you 30 whole MB of data transfer, and only charge you $7 per 1 MB over that amount. Isn’t that nice of them? If you want to get their biggest and best plan, $80 per month will get you a whole 200 MB of data, and if you go over you’ll only be charged $5 per 1 MB. Gosh! Golly! At those prices I can maybe even receive a few HTML messages or attachments per day on my Windows Mobile device.

Digging deeper, I looked at their data plans page (which renders horribly in Firefox I might add) and realized that Blackberry users are even worse off: $60 a month will only get you 25 MB of data. They have a Windows Mobile data plan page here as well, and I was baffled to see only one option offered, a new plan I had heard about a month or two ago: $65 per month for 1000 MB of data, and $1 per addition MB. What a minute…that’s almost (but not quite) reasonable. They recommend this for “tethered laptop use”. It’s certainly a massive cost savings when compared to the $80/200MB plan, but is it enough? No, not by a long shot.

Rogers, like most North American carriers, is constantly being battered by subscriber churn (a customer leaving for another wireless company) and desperately wants two things: to keep their customers from leaving, and to increase their ARPU (average revenue per unit); meaning the amount of money they make off each subscriber. Current data plans are a way to get a lot of money out of a small number of people. What Rogers and most of the carriers don’t seem to grasp is that there’s more money to be made overall if much larger numbers of users had less expensive data plans. Rogers seems content with charging 1000 people $100 a month instead of getting 10,000 people on a $20 a month plan.

Time and time again, I’ve had friends and family express interest in Windows Mobile devices, only to have them be scared away by the cost. And we’re not talking the cost of the device – it’s always the cost of the data plans. People are much more willing to spend $500 on a nice piece of hardware than spending $60 a month on data, year after year. Windows Mobile adoption is being crippled by the expensive data rate plans of Canadian carriers, and until they address the pricing issue, they’re not going to see Windows Mobile smartphones selling as well as they could be.

When Digital Devices Are Stupid

I have a big phone on my desk with a big screen. It has a big clock on it. Over the years I’ve had this phone I’ve become quite accustomed to looking at it to see what time it is, even more so than looking at the clock in the system tray of whatever PC I’m looking at. The problem? It has a built-in time adjustment for daylight savings time – which would normally be helpful – but since the US of A decided to change DST, and Canada followed along, my clock has been one hour slow since the old DST date. If I change it manually, it changes back to what it thinks is the correct time. There’s no option to override this, there’s no way to change it. And because it’s landline phone, there’s no firmware update to fix this problem once and for all. That’s a stupid digital device. I’ve heard so many pros and cons about DST I don’t know who to believe any more, but I do know that it’s frustrating to have a clock that’s been giving me the wrong time for a few days now. 😉