the flying squirrel

My QuickPAD finally made its last trip to my door on Friday. Which meant I stood a chance of being able to pick it up yesterday.

UPS has this interesting set-up for picking up packages. Even though they bought Mailboxes Etc. and have all these retail storefronts they could be using, if you want to pick up a package, you have to go to the UPS shipping warehouse thing off of Homer Watson in Kitchener. That’s a bit of a drive. What’s more, their customer counter is only during morning and evening rush hours: 4:30-6:30 pm being when I’d be able to get in there.

I left work at about ten to six, then, and had to stop and get gas (It’s still at around $1.06/litre around here) because I doubted I’d be able to make it there and back otherwise.

I got there in amongst a swarm of brown vans belting out diesel exhaust. I patiently waited in line for my turn at the cashier’s desk.

Like I was saying, the UPS customer service desk is literally in a warehouse. A very loud, concrete and metal warehouse with trucks lined up along the delivery bays. You can see people running around scanning things, yelling at each other and literally throwing packages–packages very much like your own–into the back of vans. No care whatsoever is given to the customer experience here. You’re thrown into the middle of a factory floor. All because you had the audacity to work during the day, and didn’t feel like leaving a cheque with one of your neighbours.

My turn came up and I gave the woman my delivery notice. Instead of being handed my package, which had apparently had its last trip in the van on Friday, I was told that it was still sitting on a truck, and that they were paging the driver to ask when they’d be in.

So I got to wait an extra 15 minutes or so in the warehouse, inhaling the diesel fumes and watching boxes being thrown from one place to another.

After the allotted time has passed and I had served my time for being such a horrible package recipient, I was allowed the honour of paying the extortionate brokerage fees that UPS charges you for paying GST and PST on your behalf. Canada Post does the same thing, but they charge you a flat $5 for every package you receive (which really annoying for subscriptions, but that’s another rant entirely). UPS’ brokerage fee, on the other hand, comes out to roughly what you pay in taxes. In this case, I got to pay an extra $ 30 for their delectable services.

And thus I am reminded why I should always, always remember to make sure anything shipped to me is not shipped via UPS.

At least I got my new toys, finally. And they are lovely to behold.

The weather’s been too horrible to get out for lunch much lately. But I’ve been meaning to get back to Sayal Electronics up on Phillip to pick up some USB cables and look around for stuff. I love that store. It fills my heart with nerdy glee and makes me glad I live where I do.

Except when I got there, it was just a concrete slab with a roof. The walls were gone. So was everything else.

Turns out they moved to Cambridge. Right next to where Stak-A-Shelf moved, by the looks of things. I’m 97% sure it’s RIM’s fault.

Goddamn you, RIM, you’re making my neighbourhood suck.

I’m typing this on a QuickPAD Pro that I’m borrowing from a friend at work. I have one on order, but I’m just trying his out. Mine’s currently doing a little dance with a UPS guy, futilely showing up at my door every day when it knows full well that I’m not home. It’s a little game we play. It likes to tease me.

A QuickPAD, incidentally, is a little hardware word processor. Just an LCD screen full of text and a keyboard. That’s it. I may or may not provide a link later. It’s both good and bad that all I have here is a screen full of text. No web browser. It means that I’m not distracted, but it also deprives you folks of my usual hypertextual style. I like linking things. It means I don’t have to write paragraphs explaining things.

It’s kind of neat how I get the text onto the computer. It stores all the files on a compact flash card, and I could pull that out and plug it into a card reader (if I had how here). It also has a proprietary IR dongle I’m not using. What I am doing is plugging the USB cable into the computer and hitting the “send text” button. It sends my text to the computer as keystrokes. So I can drop all this straight into the text box WordPress “Write” page.

Really, I’m just writing this to see how it is for typing. And it’s pretty good. That’s a good thing, since typing is the whole point of the thing. It’s not perfect. The keyboard feels a bit like an old-school laptop keyboard. And while it has spell check, it’s the old WordPerfect kind with the dialog that pops up in the middle of the screen telling me words are wrong. I used to hate the little red underlines, and I’d always turn them off in Word, but after having them on the Mac and now on Thunderbird for the last little while, I’m finding I rely on them a little too much now.

This is a fun little toy. I just wonder how much I’ll use it. It does reinforce my love of Markdown. And I’m hoping I can leverage it for future blogging greatness. Time will tell. Look forward to it!