Back to the Grind Stone

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After a lovely Christmas with family at home, the 27th saw me heading off in the direction of Ceres with brother, sister, girlfriend and two of brother’s friends. This resulted in 5 days of hiking (and swimming, and jumping and…) in the Witelskloof. Hopefully I’ll have a post up about that in the next week.

Friday night saw me seeing in the new year with girlfriend and family at the 5FM new year’s concert at the Waterfront (bands included Aking, Zebra & Giraffe and Just Jinjer).

New Year’s day was a trip to Betty’s Bay to join my parents and siblings, spent the night there and now I sit watching Top Gear at home, preparing myself for another 2 weeks of work.

The South African Post Office is Terrible.

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I’ve never previously had anything major against the SAPO. Sure they’re expensive and the service isn’t amazing, but it’s not that bad. It’s just recently now that I’m getting annoyed.

Firstly my PO Box is up for renewal, and on the little letter I got in my post it very nicely told me that I can pay in one of 3 ways, either in person in cash (pass), online on the SAPO website or online with Kalahari.net (win!). So obviously a few days after I got the invoice I hopped onto Kalahari.net and spent 20min searching for a link to pay for my PO Box, eventually googling the term, and being linked to a Kalahari.net page which said payments are closed and would reopen on 1 October (it was now the 15th). So I did the logical thing and sent an email off to Kalahari.net who told me the service was not available this year and I’d have to make other arrangements.

Fine, so I went onto the SAPO website to pay there, but it required signing up for an account and some other PT which I wasn’t lus for at the time, so I passed it off till this last weekend when I found the invoice sitting in my draw. So I hop online go to the SAPO website which has a link to www.epostal.co.za which I click and the website is offline, not responding… So I leave it and Monday morning they must have restarted the website, cause the website is running again.

So Monday when I get home from work I go to the website and create an account, then they send you an activation e-mail. So I wait a bit for the email to arrive, but it doesn’t. Activation e-mails are generally instantaneous, this one took 12 hours. So I get home today and I login and create a new password, now to renew my postbox! Or not. It seems you have to link your post box to your account (sure makes sense) so they ask you for your account number. I have searched all my paperwork relating to my PO Box that I have ever received and nowhere does it indicate an account number. They very nicely offer you the alternative to input your PO Box number, ZIP code and ID which I do, and apparently it can’t find my account, so they give a number to phone. But it’s 18:30 and the office hours only stretch till 17:30 apparently, so I am left stranded until tomorrow.

The second axe I have to grind is the their website stability. As I mentioned early their epostal website wasn’t running this weekend, and this has been the norm throughout this year. I visit the SAPO and SpeedServices websites on a fairly regular basis and at least half the time the websites are down/out of order or respond painfully slowly, so that my tracking number look up times out.

Postage fees. I’ve received quite a few packages from Hong Kong, via ebay, and I always have a look at the stamps on the items, and not once has the postage exceeded the equivalent of R10. So then why, for me to return a product to Hong Kong does it cost me a flat rate of R90 + a cost per weight amount?

I’ve also just received a letter from CapeMail, supposedly all post to and from the Cape goes through that office in the GoodWood area. Anyway, the letter mentions something about a package that they have their waiting for me to make a payment to cover import duties or something. Now I’ve been waiting for a package for almost 2 months now, which I believe to be this package. The letter gives the instructions that I can go collect the package there, or pay the amount (without any banking details given) and fax through proof and they will send the package to my local post office.

So I look to see how much I have to pay, and no where is there written an amount, however someone has crossed out “R0.00” with a permanent marker for some reason. Again I have to wait till tomorrow to phone and figure this out. To go and fetch this item in Goodwood will cost me more in time and money than the R10 I paid for the product in the first place.

“This seller does not ship to South Africa.”

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I’ve always been a big fan of eBay. It’s allowed me to get hold of lots of things which I otherwise wouldn’t have got, or payed a ruddy fortune for, well relatively. My first purchase, if I recall correctly, was a new lithium ion battery for my Archos Media Player. The old battery had kinda “swelled” up and no longer retained much of a charge. So for R150 or so on E-bay, I got a new battery shipped out of Hong Kong, and on my doorstep 4 weeks later.

I’ve had both good and bad experiences. Majority of my purchases have been from Hong-Kong sellers, whether it be dodgy memory cards and electronics or plain USB cables. I’ve received packages in 3 weeks and I’ve waited 8 weeks as well for a package to arrive. But I understand this, that’s what

But alas, I’m currently trying to acquire one or two products from my old Chinese friends and I look through the lists of pages, sorted by Price (including shipping to SA) and I click on a few products, find one that looks good and go on to buy it, only to be met by a page boldly proclaiming: “This seller does not ship to South Africa.” This is quite disappointing, because it happens over and over again. I’m battlign to find Honk Kong shops that will ship to SA, or practically any other country for that matter. If you check their shipping preferences, most of them look somethign like this:

Item location: HongKong, Hong Kong
Shipping to: Worldwide
Excludes: Aruba, Afghanistan, Angola, Anguilla, Albania, Andorra, Netherlands Antilles, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Armenia, Antigua and Barbuda, Austria, Azerbaijan Republic, Burundi, Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Bahamas, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Barbados, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Botswana, Central African Republic, Canada, Chile, China, Cote d Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cameroon, Congo, Democratic Republic of the, Congo, Republic of the, Colombia, Comoros, Cape Verde Islands, Costa Rica, Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Algeria, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Western Sahara, Spain, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), France, Gabon Republic, United Kingdom, Georgia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Guinea, Guadeloupe, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Greece, Grenada, Greenland, Guatemala, French Guiana, Guam, Guyana, Hong Kong, Honduras, Croatia, Republic of, Haiti, Hungary, Indonesia, India, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Saint Lucia, Sri Lanka, Lesotho, Lithuania, Latvia, Macau, Morocco, Monaco, Moldova, Madagascar, Maldives, Mexico, Macedonia, Mali, Malta, Montenegro, Mozambique, Mauritania, Montserrat, Martinique, Mauritius, Malawi, Malaysia, Mayotte, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Paraguay, Qatar, Reunion, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Saint Helena, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, San Marino, Somalia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Serbia, Suriname, Slovakia, Slovenia, Swaziland, Seychelles, Turks and Caicos Islands, Chad, Togo, Thailand, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Venezuela, British Virgin Islands, Virgin Islands (U.S.), Vietnam, Yemen, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Africa, Central America and Caribbean, Middle East, North America, South America

Now by looking at that page, I honestly can’t see a country it doesn’t mention, although it claims to ship worldwide, the list of exclusions is ludicrous! North America, Africa, South America as continents are all excluded. Heck they don’t even ship to Hong Kong or China, so wtf do they actually ship to?

I hope this won’t be the end of my ebaying days, because I’ve always revelled in the variety and ease with which one can purchase, and always envied the Americans and their “Daily Deals”.

My Garmin is logging my every move.

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A while ago while researching a new toy, my Garmin Nuvi 200, I found a neat way to get my model, and several others, to log the route you followed. It’s a slight hassle but works fairly nicely, see instructions below. but the other day I was searching through my Garmin and happened upon a file by the name of “Current.gpx” with a second file “1.gpx” in an archive folder. Both were gpx files so I quickly imported them into Google Maps to take a look.

Now after I’d had a look, I went and looked for the same files on my Dad’s GPS, a Garmin nuvi 350, and found the same files. His files just contained a marker with each of his favourites which then popped up all over Google Earth, mine however contained a very detailed history of every journey I had ever made while my Garmin was on. On one side I thought this was pretty cool, on the other hand I wondered how many people out there are selling there GPSs with thousands of kilometres of driving history sitting on them. It’s quite fun to actually look at the routes. In Google Earth you can select each “route” or section of time while your Garmin was online, so each journey say. Then you can generate a cool altitude, speed vs time graph, and follow it around your route.

After thinking about it a bit and checking out my archive file, it seems that it only activated this “feature” after I used the hacked method to get it to log my single route, so I don’t think it’s anything for people to worry about, perhaps just to keep in mind.

To activate the custom tracking method, you must have locked signal and be looking at the map. Click “Menu”, then “Tools”, then “Where am I?”. Click once on the writing under “Nearest Address” then twice on the text under “My Location” then once again on the text under “Nearest Address”. This should bring up another menu with the options “Start Playback” and “Start Recording”. Click start recording. Two things you will notice. The screenshot button automatically turns itself on (you can turn it off in the menu if you want) and there is a large stop button at the top of the screen. Click that when you want to stop recording your moves. You may notice that there is a timer, it doesn’t tick every second, so if you’re unsure whether it’s working or not, you just have to wait a bit till it ticks over, often jumping several seconds at a time.

To get your data you need to plug your GPS into a PC and go on to the Garmin nuvi drive. Open the Garmin folder and then the Logs folder. Here you will find dated folders with all your logs. The gps.bin file is the one that contains your data.

To convert this into something a bit more usable you are going to need to download a program called Nutrak. This program will generate a GPX file for you which can be opened with Google Earth and various other programs.

Note: I believe by recording your moves once, it activates the automatic recording of every journey you ever take, ever.
Note2: I managed to find the post where I originally discovered this, he also gives nice pictured instructions, you can check it out here. Fairly old hack.