Markus’ Blog

I knew along with everybody else that there was some (indirect) price gouging going on in Canada with the US dollar losing more and more against the Canadian dollar. What I didn’t know is how bad it was in the consumer electronic market.

Take the new Canon Powershot G9 for instance, which I am considering getting myself (or have Santa get for me lol). My good old G1 is slowly coming to the end of its useful life. I like the G1, but there are so many more, nice features available now, seven years after the G1. One thing I will miss, however, will be the tilting LCD.

BestBuy in the US offers the G9 for US$499.99, BestBuy in Canada offers it for CA$599.99. Yep, thats $100 more in Canada, despite the fact that the Canadian dollar is worth more than the US dollar. According to XE.com, US$499.99 = CA$476.242 in today’s money. Granted, that’s a little unfair, because XE shows mid-market rates — better rates than anybody would ever get at a bank counter or through their credit card. So let’s assume US$499.99 = CA$489.99 if you did the exchange at the bank. And doesn’t $489.99 look like a perfect marketing price (seeming like a lot less than $500 while still being close)? Nope, apparently not. They want $600 instead.

Ain’t gonna happen, people. Not from me. I can get it shipped from the States and still save a bundle. And that’s without even looking at Amazon.com and other online stores, who will most likely be even cheaper.

I remember I did the same thing seven years ago, when I bought the G1. Except that I ordered it from Germany, where it was a lot cheaper than in Austria. — I guess, we’ve found yet another stunning similarity in how the relationship Canada vs. US mirrors the relationship Austria vs. Germany. There are quite a few that I have come to notice, but that’s material for another post.

My schveetie just sent me this YouTube link about a cat doing its wakeup routine in the morning. (Click here if the video doesn’t show below.)

It’s hilarious and so freaking true. That’s totally me every morning. As far as I can tell, though, there hasn’t been a bat involved — yet. But only because I am too easy a victim, I would imagine.

Queen Calli Boo the Kitty has tried on occasion, however, to suffocate me with her long fur. She curls up next to my head, her fur ending up in my nose and mouth. That usually happens during the night, though, not in the morning.

Update:

Looks like this animation was created by a guy named Simon Tofield. More of his stuff is available at Tandem Films. They even changed their start page to advertise the kitty animation. They are also saying on their home-page that this was just the beginning of a series and that we can expect more along the same lines.

Today, my site exceeded the threshold of 10,000 spam comments — according to my Akismet statistics. It only took about a year for my blog to reach that crazy number. Can’t remember exactly when I installed and activated the Akismet plugin for Wordpress (at that time it didn’t come bundled with Wordpress yet).

I briefly had other spam protection solutions (can’t even remember at this point what they were), but switched to Akismet when it became available. I am sure glad I did. I also turned on “automatically delete spam comments from old posts” when that feature became available, and I am very glad about that feature, too.

Without Akismet, I would have been forced to either make it much harder for people to leave legitimate comments (captchas, enforcing logging in, etc.) or turn off commenting altogether. I can’t believe that blog spamming is that bad these days that my tiny blog receives 10,000 spams in a year. Big sites receive 100 times the amount of spam. Basically, spammers are attacking the third Internet technology now:

• first they ruined usenet (news groups)
• then they made dealing with e-mail a pain in the rear
• and lastly (for now) they are going for web sites and are making blogging difficult, too (the same goes for forums, wikis, etc.)

They are putting the burden of their money making on the e-mail user (who needs spam filters) and the blog/web site owner (who, too, needs spam filters), and so on, and so forth. I hate those bastards. Let’s hope they die out some day. Unfortunately, I’m afraid there’s simply too much money to be made with not much financial risk or any (serious) legal implications.

I never thought that I’d mention “flights” and “me having luck” in the same sentence. But after yesterday’s flight from San Francisco to Vancouver that seems in order.

The Bay Area got their first real rain since March or April, yesterday. And rain it did. The 40 minute drive from San Jose to SFO Airport turned into a 65 minute drive because of it. I am assuming it was also the rain’s fault that pretty much all flights out of Terminal 3 (those were the only flights times I saw) were delayed.

For a few minutes I thought my flight was amongst them — again: the monitors listed a 10:40pm departure for the 6:50pm flight to Vancouver. Fortunately I misread and found out within five minutes. There’s a United Airlines flight that leaves SFO for YVR at 6:50pm, and there’s an Air Canada flight that leaves at 6:55pm. I was on the latter and had missed that little detail looking at the monitors. We were on time. Well, pretty much on time anyway. We took off at 7:15pm, but still got into Vancouver by 9:20pm. Much, much better than waiting till 10:40pm to even leave San Francisco.

I am in San Jose, for the seventh time overall (since February 2006).

It’s been a really good trip so far. US immigration (at Vancouver Airport) was a breeze. I got to the airport at about 5:45am. By the time I went through immigration it was probably 6:00am. There was no lineup whatsoever, and the immigration officer was actually really nice (yes, it does happen). Only two quick questions as to what I was going to do while in San Jose and where/with whom, and that was it.

Airport security decided to select me as their “random search” target, though. (Looks like they have to report x number of detailed searches per day to their superiors.) That cost about 5 minutes and wasn’t really that bad at all. They did use their portable metal detector on me, padded me down and swabbed my bag with a little cloth that they then put into an analyzer. When they were done, they filled out their report form (“we did our duty and conducted a random inspection”) and I was on my way.

The weather down here is lovely. It’s about 18°C out and sunny. Very few clouds. Looks just like it did in July (which also means everything is still brown and dry) — except that it is actually nice and bearable outside. You don’t immediately long for an air conditioned room once you step outside. It also seems less misty/humid. In the summer, I noticed that in the evening (as soon as the sun set) a fairly low layer of clouds would form and it would stick around till 10am the next day when it would burn off. Not so much now. It’s much clearer. They are predicting rain for tomorrow, though. Showers actually. But big deal. A true Vancouverite won’t be taking offense at that.

Work-wise it’s been good, too. Talked to many people over the last two days, and I think quite some progress was made. So, that’s good. That’s, in fact, exactly how it’s supposed to be. Also, it’s nice meeting the guys in person and just chat and catch up on things — we can’t just talk about work. Meeting your co-workers in person becomes kind of special, if you only get to see them every three to four months. Besides, there’s always a good lunch in there for everybody. This time it was dim sum, which was really yummy. — Maybe that’s the true reason I always get such a warm welcome: they all know that they’ll be well fed.

Let’s hope that tomorrow, the last day here, will be just as good and productive.

Yay! We’ll be going to Kamloops for the Thanksgiving long weekend. We’ll meet Brigette’s mom and family friends there. We’ll be taking it easy, have some good food and an all around good time. Sunday we’ll have traditional turkey for dinner. Yummers!

Let’s hope the Coquihalla is not too bad. Supposedly there’s a little snow there already. We shall see. On the way back we’ll probably take the slower, but more scenic Fraser Highway.

I upgraded the site to a new theme. Really, I did — even though it doesn’t look very different from before I switched from the original Daisy Rae Gemini (which was written for Wordpress 1.5) to the updated “next generation” Gemini Plus theme written for WordPress 2.x.

What’s the difference? Well, Gemini Plus understands Wordpress 2.2 widgets, which makes it easy to customize the side bar. Other than that, is using better written style sheets that — at least I personally — find easier to wrap my head around, compared to the original Gemini CSS.

I still need to custom tweak the layout it a little. I don’t like the frames that are showing up round the pictures in the menu bar.