Jimtac.com

I’m a person who hates to see companies artificially degrade services for the sole purpose of getting you to pay more, in order for them to be able to do what they cannot without extraordinary measures being taken, thus justifying the cost. As the title suggests Canada Post seems to be doing that now.

I’m one of those that likes to actually track my packages from the moment that I get my packages tracking number, which is how I have been watching my package sit processed in a postal facility in Mississauga since a day after being notified that my order had been shipped by Amazon. Now if this had been a case of the package actually being in transit that would be one thing, but just sitting there… that’s another altogether.

Last time that CP messed up, my mail was about a month late in being delivered, now I’m sure that it wasn’t Canada Post proper, but rather the local contracted delivery person that decided to take 3 weeks off, and not line up a replacement, and the local postal facility for not doing something about it, and I guess that there are no checks in place to ensure that mail is being delivered on schedule… Oh and I don’t think that I’ve yet to mention that for some reason, financially relevant envelopes seem to come with torn flaps which are more than wide enough to peer inside, where the innocuous ones rarely arrive molested. I’ve been told that it’s simply the elastic bands used to bundle the envelopes to make delivery easier for the carrier; but when there are several envelopes in one bundle, and not just only, but ALL financial ones… hmmm…. Oh… (CP also has no direct way to report mail tampering, other than to the people suspected of it.)

When an ISP sells faster download speeds, they aren’t delaying your packets, but instead selling you a larger amount of the bandwidth capability of their network. This is in contrast to delays created by a process such as this “If you don’t pay us more, we’ll just hang onto this for a while, and if it’s not there on time… Well, sucks to be you.” mentality in constant use by courier and postal entities. I ask you, when was he last time that you were compensated in any way when a courier, or delivery company missed their delivery date, let alone a crown corporation?

Well here’s hoping that my delivery shows up on time on Monday… But I won’t hold my breath, since the door hangers letting you know about an attempted delivery show up in the superbox at the end of the street after 3PM (a few days late), letting me know that I have a package awaiting pick up, though I’ve yet to have an actual delivery attempt made to my door by Canada Post since I’ve lived here.

Tim

Edit Monday Feb 22 : Checked the mailbox when I got home from work at around 5:30, no notice. No door hanger on the door either, (not that I really expected it), so once again CP Fail…

Edit Tuesday Feb 23: It arrived [the "delivery attempt" notice in the mailbox], and I picked up Mass Effect 2:CE at the convenience store/post office, super awesome dent in the box, and the corresponding dent in the metal collector’s case inside and all…

TweetDeck even with it’s reliance on AIR is hands-down my favorite desktop client, and I’ve used [and paid for], but I keep going to TweetDeck on the iPhone only to be disappointed time after time. It crashed 4 times while trying to set it up, and at varying steps in the process which made it hard to blame one step that I could skip in order to proceed, one of which was that unlike the desktop app, you are required to allow TweetDeck to update Facebook [if you so choose to add FB access at all], or not be allowed to continue, which was also one of my crashes…

Once set up, I did like that there were decent options, and the ability to finally add multiple twitter accounts, though the MySpace account in the desktop version is not included, admittedly not a huge deal, but notable nonetheless. The look of the Light UI option was nice, but it does feel to me like it was tossed in as an option after other twitter apps included it. In the end I find that it’s with reservations added to my roster of twitter apps for the iPhone that will actually remain on my iPhone [if it remains crash free]. If TweetDeck adds push notifications, It’ll be my primary twitter app for the iPhone too. [I've also posted this to the related TUAW article]