the3rdrock.com

It is unbe­liev­ably sad, brows­ing the auto­mot­ive TOOLS sec­tion of a cer­tain web­site and see­ing the major­ity of lis­ted items, many pages worth, pop­u­lated as dia­gnostic tools, com­puter cabling and elec­tronic chips.

WtF happened to real cars?! If your ‘mech­anic’ uses a laptop within 10 Ft. of your car, if you see a plastic cover when you open the bon­net, if you push a but­ton to move your arse back­wards & for­wards, if you push a but­ton to start your car and if there’s a USB port where there should be a radio tun­ing knob, you con­trib­uted to the death of real cars.

Have you ever wondered why couriering-by-air costs so much?

It’s not the proft mar­gin and it’s not the taxes. The lat­ter is also for your account, if you weren’t aware, and the taxes are cal­cu­lated upon the value of the items AND the shipping.

It’s the fuel. Put­ting a plane into the sky requires a lot of things; aero­dy­nam­ics, costly mater­i­als, years of train­ing & exper­i­ence and a lot of power. Keep­ing it there requires avi­ation fuel, and lots of it. Everytime our politi­cians piss off a sheikh, our fuel costs more.

Recently I was busy doing the final prep’ work on an old car of mine in order to have it ready for a show. I dis­covered quite late in the pro­cess that I was miss­ing a few key parts, which simply weren’t avail­able loc­ally. With time run­ning out, my usual ship­ping options were wholly unsuit­able. I had to resort to airfreight.

I logged on to one of my usual web-based stores and selec­ted what I needed. Due to my loc­a­tion being dark Africa, land of thieves & con­men, bad exper­i­ences had led the retailer to only offer­ing me Pri­or­ity Air as my ship­ping option; the most expens­ive ‘eco­nomy’ option.

My order con­sisted of two springs, two rub­ber seals, some metal pins and some plastic handles. All in all, about 600 g worth of ‘stuff’. The box it arrived in was about half the size of a reg­u­lar pizza box.

The map above traces my shipment…

Mar 26, 2012 5:31 PM Delivered JOHANNESBURG ZA
Mar 26, 2012 1:32 PM On FedEx vehicle for deliv­ery WONDERBOOM POORT ZA
Mar 26, 2012 9:32 AM Deliv­ery excep­tion WONDERBOOM POORT ZA Held, unable to col­lect pay­ment
Mar 24, 2012 12:38 PM Inter­na­tional ship­ment release — Import JOHANNESBURG ZA
Mar 24, 2012 10:53 AM In transit JOHANNESBURG ZA Pack­age avail­able for clear­ance
Mar 23, 2012 5:56 AM In transit POYLE GB
Mar 23, 2012 1:01 AM In transit STANSTED GB
Mar 22, 2012 5:40 PM In transit STANSTED GB
Mar 22, 2012 4:27 AM Depar­ted FedEx loc­a­tion PARIS FR
Mar 22, 2012 1:11 AM Arrived at FedEx loc­a­tion PARIS FR
Mar 22, 2012 12:00 AM Depar­ted FedEx loc­a­tion KOELN DE
Mar 22, 2012 12:00 AM In transit KOELN DE
Mar 21, 2012 7:02 PM Arrived at FedEx loc­a­tion KOELN DE
Mar 21, 2012 4:25 AM In transit MEMPHIS, TN
Mar 21, 2012 4:12 AM Depar­ted FedEx loc­a­tion MEMPHIS, TN
Mar 20, 2012 3:00 PM In transit MEMPHIS, TN
Mar 20, 2012 12:02 PM Arrived at FedEx loc­a­tion MEMPHIS, TN
Mar 19, 2012 8:05 PM Left FedEx ori­gin facil­ity ONTARIO, CA
Mar 19, 2012 4:25 PM Picked up ONTARIO, CA
Mar 19, 2012 5:26 PM Ship­ment inform­a­tion sent to FedEx

That saga took place over 8 days. I’m not going to go into how slow that is com­pared to other ship­ments of mine in the past, but need­less to say, it’s the most con­vo­luted ship­ping track­ing I’ve per­son­ally encountered.

My order amoun­ted to approx­im­ately USD 66. Ship­ping was approx­im­ately USD 100.

Duties on my side amoun­ted to approx­im­ately ZAR 256.

Order total? In the region of ZAR 1,550.

The parts were less than a third of the total cost.

Surely, in this day and age, someone at the cour­ier com­pany can devise a method of find­ing more dir­ect routes for par­cels than rout­ing everything through mul­tiple dis­tri­bu­tion centres?

If I wasn’t pay­ing for a sight­see­ing tour for my parts, I’d have more cash avail­able to ship more items. Get my point?

I feel like I should have tour­ist stick­ers on my car…

“Come in, Eagle 1. This is Major Cockup, report­ing for duty…”

Apo­lo­gies for the down­time exper­i­enced over the last day. I’ve been try­ing to per­form major changes with minor skills.

Unfor­tu­nately, as you may have guessed, they didn’t work so well. Until such time as I can tackle it again, you’ll all just have to hang loose to see what the changes are…

Kind regards,

Nic

Is there a new blog-based Spam trend that hasn’t been prop­erly iden­ti­fied, yet?

This blog employs some soph­ist­ic­ated anti-Spamming meas­ures to ensure that no Spam com­ments make their way through to the Com­ments boards used through­out. Depend­ing on the traffic, they could num­ber from a few hun­dred to a few thou­sand, per week! Blocked. Per­haps that’s why they now seem to be try­ing their luck with my email address…

On the 7th of March, I received an email, from a lady named Eliza [sur­name omitted].

For all intents and pur­poses, it looked ‘real’. Here it is:

——– Ori­ginal Mes­sage ——–
Sub­ject:         Quick ques­tion about your post
Date:         Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:01:15 –0800
From:         Eliza Xxxxxx <eliza.xxxxxxxx@xxxxx.com>
To:         xxxxxxxx@the3rdrock.com

Hey Nich­olas,

I just fin­ished read­ing a post of yours from a bit ago and really enjoyed it!

Do you do advert­ising? I’m mar­ket­ing out a site and can pay you via PayPal for adding a few text links to an old post. These links would go to resources on edu­ca­tion and top­ics related to the theme of your post.

Let me know if we can work some­thing out!

Thanks
Eliza Xxxxxx

—-
“A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop words when speech becomes unne­ces­sary” — Ingrid Bergman

It was cer­tainly a tad unusual, but I went with it and replied to the lady, sig­nalling my interest and spe­cify­ing the neces­sary details per­tain­ing to my blog.

I never heard back from Eliza.

Last night I received this bizarre email:

——– Ori­ginal Mes­sage ——–
Sub­ject:         Dental Ques­tion
Date:         Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:20:45 –0500 (CDT)
From:         Amy <amy@xxxxxxxxxxxx.org>
To:         Nich­olas <xxxxxxxx@the3rdrock.com>

Hi Nich­olas,

I designed a [Spam term related the teeth industry] resource guide for stu­dents called [link removed].

I know from per­sonal exper­i­ence that search­ing for the right [Spam term related the teeth industry] pro­gram can be a time con­sum­ing task and it is cer­tainly very com­pet­it­ive. That is why I designed my [teeth] resource guide to help stu­dents who are inter­ested in becom­ing a [tooth­doc­tor] find pro­grams across the coun­try just by vis­it­ing one site.

As you have a related site, would you mind help­ing me to con­nect pro­spect­ive stu­dents with my site by adding it to your resources page of http://blog.the3rdrock.com/2012/03/06/flushing-money-down-the-pipes/? This post has noth­ing spe­cific to do with ‘teeth’!

Thank you so much for your time and any effort to add my link to your page! If you prefer to not receive another email about my [Spam term related the teeth industry] site, please let me know!

Best Regards,
Amy

PO Box 1531
Hou­s­ton, TX 77219

This is a new tac­tic to me. Whilst “Amy’s” one may be a little easier to spot, “Eliza’s” [I’m assum­ing] is a lot harder to pick up. With no real info’ in that one, I’m still at a loss as to what the idea is behind that one is.

Are there any other Word­Press oper­at­ors out there receiv­ing similiarly-odd requests?

As always, be on the lookout for blatant SEO-style com­mu­nic­a­tion, sus­pi­cious con­tact details and unusually-odd comms.

As the title states, this domain — and it’s rel­at­ives — shall be mov­ing to a new vir­tual home.

Same domain, bet­ter host.

Whilst I endeav­our to main­tain con­stant and unin­ter­rup­ted uptime, ser­vice may be briefly interrupted.

The sug­ges­ted rem­edy is a cup of tea, some rusks and some patience.

See you on the other side…

Nic

the3rdrock.com has moved over to Feed­burner for its RSS feeds. Cent­ral­ising them will bring a faster and sim­pler exper­i­ence for you.

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Please drop a line if you run into any prob­lems and let me know how it’s work­ing for you.

Kind regards.