Like Christmas, but just for me

Joy of Joys! After 2 days sitting in purgatory Mississauga (why must the GTA always be my nemesis?) the FedEx gods have favoured me. My new MacBook has sprung, nearly instantaneously, from those hellish suburbs onto a truck in Victoria by the sea. Praise the Fates! At last, all that Chinese-enslaving mass production and planet-scorching delivery will come to fruition. I think I need to stay home from school to receive it.

Silly snow days

It turns out that the city of Victoria doesn't own a snow plow or even a snow shovel. At least, that's what it looks like. We get a little bit of snow and because the city fails to clear the streets, they get icy and treacherous and school needs to be cancelled the next day. Please. At least this gave Varley a chance to see a snowy beach in Victoria and me lots of time to check on the progress of my new MacBook (still stuck in Mississauga!).

From our sweat shop to your door

Like others I am suffering from FedEx anxiety, frequently checking the shipping status of my new MacBook. (Tip: Simple Tracking provides more tracking details than FedEx does)

I should have anticipated, but I was surprised to note that FedEx reported my order shipped (on the first business day) from SUZHOU CN. That's CN, as in China. Naturally. I don't know why I imagined they were assembled in the US.

So as I sit, thinking about all the fossil fuels pouring into the environment because I wanted a computer that is built on the other side of the planet (as I'm sure they all are), I started thinking about what goes on in SUZHOU CN. Probably it's a different plant, but at least one Apple supplier in SUZHOU is allegedly not playing nice. Even buying from manufacturers in China that do "play nice" according to local standards makes me feel a bit dirty (and not in a good way). "According to a China Labor Watch project coordinator, Xiao Min Zheng, the minimum wage... where... the iPod nano factory [is] located, is... about $80 a month." (from the same article)

I wish China would hurry up and get rich so their living standards and wages would increase to a point where we would stop buying from them. Of course, I'm sure we'd just move on to the next "starve the workers and beat them for good measure" sweat shop haven.

But I do love my shiny new electronics.

MacBook buyer's remorse

I finally caved to my techno-lust and ordered a new MacBook from the Apple educational web site. Hey, if I'm going to be a student all my life, I might as well get some discounts, I figure.

True to form, a day later I was regretting it. My trusty PowerBook G4 really has no flaws other than being made from aluminum and being a bit too slow to play 1280x720 or 1920x1080 HD video. OK, that last bit is really frustrating since I love watching high definition porn videos Apple trailers.

The thing is, I really wanted a black Mac but paying the extra $200 Canadian for an extra 40 Gig of hard drive space and some black plastic was too much for me to swallow. So I did the "smart" thing and ordered the white MacBook, which is clearly the best value. Except the next morning I saw the white MacBook of a fellow law student (Tara) and the damn thing was filthy. Aside from a general griminess that she said came from normal use, it had ink all over its right corner. Tara said the ink was just incidental ink that had been on her palm when she touched the machine. Sigh. My trusty aluminum PowerBook could shrug off anything. A little buff and it was looking new again.

Hopefully I'll be so dazzled by the newness of my MacBook when it arrives that I'll forget about how shiny my trusty old PowerBook was.

Tortfeasor(.com)

So I was sitting in my first year torts class today and I've done less work than I should have this term. In the course of lecturing, our very lovely professor showed an overhead slide with the word "tortfeasor" on it. I thought this was such a great word that I immediately decided I wanted to make a t-shirt with "tortfeasor" across the chest. Then I thought it would be neat to register the domain name tortfeasor.com and I wondered what I would do with such a domain. I speculated that maybe I would combine the two ideas and sell t-shirts with "tortfeasor" written across their chests online.

Then I checked and found that Andrew Sinclair had beaten me to it. Get yours now!

Diese Closed Memo ist einen nuisance Memo!

Seriously, if this is the closed memo, who wants to tackle the open one? Pain in my ass!