Maximum PC Subsribers: Are You Paying Too Much?

There’s only one computer magazine that I subscribe to, and I’ve been a subscriber for 12 years: Maximum PC (which started life as boot). I think the magazine is fantastic, and I trust the coverage I read in it – there are too many magazines on the market today that do little more than re-publish press releases with a few words changed. If the gang at Maximum PC tells me something sucks, there’s a really good chance it sucks. I think so highly of the magazine that I someday hope to write an article for the magazine as well (it’s a little dream I have).

My goodwill toward the magazine was tested the other day when I was filling out my subscriber card to renew, like I do every year, and I decided to check their Web site for some reason to see what the normal online price was. Below is my subscriber card (after some heavy use of the eraser tool)…$34.95 USD is what I pay for a year’s worth of the magazine, and this is the renewal price for current subscribers.

So imagine my surprise when I checked the site and saw that someone getting a brand new subscription was paying $5 less than I was…and if they signed up for two years, they’d save $20. When I renew my subscription, I don’t even get an option for two years! So it seems that I shouldn’t be renewing, I should be buying a new subscription each year. Amazingly, this isn’t an online vs. offline thing: when I checked my renewal rates using the Web site, I was offered the same “great” deal: $34.95 for a one-year renewal, and $54.95 for a two-year renewal.

Ultimately this isn’t big money, but it goes to show you that you shouldn’t blindly trust when a company is giving you a “good deal” as a “valued repeat customer” – check into it, and you might be surprised…

Don’t Vote!

Both the USA and Canada have an election coming up fast, and when my buddy Todd posted this on his blog, I thought it was worth re-posting here: it’s a great video. I have a pretty simple attitude about voting: unless I vote, I don’t have a right to complain about things that the government does, because if I don’t vote, I give up my right to do so. So Canadians, Americans, vote! It doesn’t matter to me who anyone votes for, but voting as an act should be a non-negotiable act for anyone living in a democracy.

Office Clean-Up Time…Who Wants Some Free Stuff?

UPDATE: The CD and MoGo Mouse have been claimed.

I’m cleaning up my office and I found this CD – I managed to end up with two copies of After This I’ll Show You My Rock Collection by The Back Row. It’s a great a capella CD; they do a particularly killer cover of What Hurts The Most by Rascal Flatts. Anyone want it?

I also have a MVP-branded MoGo Mouse BT that’s doing nothing – it looks like a PCMCIA version. Any takers?

Use the comment form to send me which one you’d like – first come, first serve. If the first person who contacts me wants both, they get ’em both.

Canada’s “Do Not Call” List: Feeble From the Start

Michael Geist says it perfectly:

“The Canadian government passed legislation in 2005 mandating the creation of a do-not-call registry.  The registry takes effect on September 30, 2008, yet many Canadians may be disappointed to learn about the exemption of a wide range of organizations (registered charities, business with prior relationships, political parties, survey companies, and newspapers).  Under the law, exempted organizations are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of the number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.”

If I were to summarize the types of organizations that I get telemarketing calls from, it would be charities, survey companies, and certainly businesses with which I’ve had a “prior relationship”. The last one is especially egregious in that the threshold of what a “prior relationship” is doesn’t seem to be defined anywhere that I could find. If it means “We got his number from a database that we purchased from a company that he used to do business with”, then what’s the point in having this Do Not Call list?

Thankfully, Michael Geist has created iOptOut. I don’t know how well it will work, but I’ve registered and given it a try.

Japan 2008: Day 11

That’s right, I’m still processing Japan photos. 😀 Our eleventh day in Japan was our first full day in Okinawa. Since it wasn’t as warm as we’d hoped, the whole lounging-around-the-pool plan went out the window, so we decided to head out to “American Village”, a local North American-focused shopping area. The full gallery is published on my photo site. As a side note, the little watermark in the bottom right corner is courtesy of Picasa 3 – you just type in the watermark text and it handles the rest upon export. Slick!

Face Off Against Cancer 2008 Photos

On Saturday the 13th of September, 2008, I attended Memory Foundation’s Face-Off Against Cancer, a hockey tournament held in Chestermere that raises money for malignant melanoma research and support for families impacted by it. This year the tournament was held in Crystal Violante’s honour, my friend who passed away from cancer last year. They already had an event photographer, but I decided to bring along my Nikon D300 and Canon HF100 HD video camera and do my best to capture the memories for the people playing on Crystal’s Shooting Stars, the team created in her honour. Ashley set a personal goal of $2000 for fund-raising, and she managed to hit $2935 thanks to great support from our friends and family. Thanks to everyone that donated! The full album can be viewed on my photo site.

Place of Rescue Fundraiser 2008 Photos

On September the 12th, 2008, there was a fundraiser held at RockPointe Church for Place of Rescue, a Cambodian orphanage for victims of AIDS. Country music artist Paul Brandt, joined by his wife Liz, played an acoustic set as part of the evening, which also included silent and live auctions. Over $100,000 was raised for Place of Rescue that evening; the generosity of the people who attended was touching. From a photography point of view, I enjoyed myself, though it was hard to get the pictures I wanted of Paul Brandt while trying to avoid blocking other people’s view. One of the things I need to do more of as a photographer is to take risks to get great shots.

When You Accept Money for a Job…

…you’d better be professional and deliver professional results. Over the past few days we’ve been putting the final pieces in place in a home renovation project, and I’m getting increasingly frustrated the more I discover about the errors one of our contractors made. There’s nothing worse than trusting someone to do a job for you and finding out that they cut corners, didn’t install what they said they’d installed, and generally rushed the project. Doesn’t anyone care about their professional reputation any more? You’d think in this Internet era they would…

Kijiji: What’s the Etiquette Here?

Over the past six months, I’ve been using eBay less and using Kijiji more. I’ve found that eBay is increasingly a home for professional sellers, with jacked up shipping prices, fixed “Buy It Now” selling prices instead of bidding, and it’s hard to search for anything without finding endless listings of knock-off accessories and bundles instead of the product you’re really searching for. Then there’s the whole feedback thing, where I’ve been hit with negative feedback from sellers when I’ve complained to them about their shoddy selling practices. The feedback issue has been largely fixed, but somehow when I browse eBay now I feel like something has gone horribly wrong with it.

Kijiji on the other hand, which interestingly enough is an eBay company, is a completely difference experience. It was created to compete with Craigslist. I’ve never actually used Craiglist for anything, largely because I didn’t realize until last year that it was available for use outside the USA. I personally find it extremely ugly, like a DOS BBS from 15 years ago. At any rate, Kijiji looks great, is a fast site, and works really well. I’ve sold a few things on it, but I’m still pretty new at it.

And so we come to the question: what’s the ettiquette for selling things via classified ads when it comes to fielding multiple inquiries? Last month I was selling a Samsung CDMA mobile phone – it was a few years old, and I just wated to get rid of it, so it was at a fire-sale price of $10. I had six inquiries, one person even wanted me to ship it across Canada to them. One woman said she’d show up to look at it, but never did, and I ended up selling it to another person. The point is, I considered it un-sold until I had the money in my hands. I think of Kijiji like a one-item garage sale – the first person to pay for it, gets it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was selling a motherboard + CPU, and it went much like the sale of the phone: several inquiries, and on Thursday afternoon one guy wanted to come see it on a Friday morning, with the intention of purchasing it. As I was exchaning email messages with him, another guy called and said he’d come and buy it on Thursday night. I didn’t tell the Friday morning guy it was sold, because it wasn’t yet, and for all I knew the Thursday night guy wasn’t going to show up. He did show up, and after I sold him the motherboard + CPU, I immediately emailed the Friday morning guy and told him the products were sold. Friday morning guy got quite irate with me, claming that I wasn’t being fair to him; that he had already re-arranged his schedule to come and pick up the motherboard + CPU, and I shouldn’t have sold it to someone else.

So what’s the proper etiquette when selling items via classified ads – do you stop selling it and pull the ad when someone says they’re going to come buy it? Or is it first come, first serve – the first person to show up with the money gets it? Did I wrong Friday morning guy by not selling it to him?

I Guess I Still Need to Price Shop…

It’s funny, when it comes to buying technology, I rarely if ever “shop around” because most stores will sell the same product for the same MSRP, or close enough that it doesn’t matter. Imagine my surprise today when I decided to see who had a Linksys 802.11n gigabit router in stock, and I saw a 50% price difference in the products! London Drugs had it for $139, Best Buy had it for $149, and Future Shop had it for…$99! There’s no indication that the Future Shop price is a sale price – so there’s a $50 difference in price on a $150 product. I find it highly amusing that the Linksys Web site has been down all day…you’d think a networking company (Cisco) would know how to keep a Web site online. 😉