Ugh.

It’s surprising how often I use the camera on the phone.

I found this blog post about deleting the thumbnail cache on an iPhone, and it seems to have worked. Also, it links to a neat program to browse the files on your phone. It took a couple restarts of the phone to rebuild the thumbnails, and then the Albums in the Photos app. Perhaps it would have only taken one restart if I had been more patient on the first boot.

I guess it’s time I back up those photos again.

We don’t have many employees, so we use the CRA’s web forms. I have to admit, the CRA T4 Web Forms get better every year.  A couple years ago, the web generated T4′s looked… odd. They were very different from the traditional T4 layout, so we didn’t use those. Last year, that was fixed. This year, there are some nice little improvements here and there.

For some reason, you have to fill in box 26 this year, Box 26, “CPP/QPP Pensionable Earnings”.  In our case, we just have to enter the same value from Box 14, “Employment Income”.

Anyway, this is a reminder to other Canadian micro-businesses. It’s time to do the T4′s.

Oh, and happy Chinese New Year.

This is only indirectly related to Perceptus Solutions Inc., but it is relevant to one of our pet peeves, currency exchange costs for a Canadian. Perceptus is in an awkward situation, because of our web site revenues, and our web advertising, a lot of our revenues and expenses are in US funds. And every time that an exchange happens, we lose, and banks or other financial companies win.

Recently, when logged into my personal TD Waterhouse account, I saw one of those little internal banner ads that mentioned that they have an automatic US Sweeps Service to minimize currency exchange costs in your RRSP account. All it took was a quick call to the TD Waterhouse 1-800 number, to enroll. The folks on the phone refer to this as their “TD Waterhouse Automatic FX Wash Service”. This service will take your US dollars from USD stock sales and put them into a US Money Market fund. Later, when you need USD, it will automatically take USD from the MM fund, before taking any remaining amount from your CAD balance.

Let’s do some math. I’m not sure what the rate TD Waterhouse charges, but most institutions that I’ve used charge at least 1% over the exchange rate as a fee for doing a currency exchange. If you convert $1000 a year in your RRSP every year for 10 years, that’s $10,000 converted. The exchange fees of that, at 1%, would be $100. If you were a more active user, for a longer period of time… say, $10,000 a year in sales of USD stock, and you did this for 30 years, you would save $3,000 (plus compounding).

Start the new year off right and save a few bucks on your financial services. I have no idea which RRSP providers have similar features.

We do one or two highly customized bingo card designs every year. They’re a nice change of pace, and often, we can re-use a little bit of programming on the live site. This time, we made a small improvement to the font size of column headers that are mixed lengths. That improvement will be pushed to the print-bingo.com site in the near future.

If you are reading this, and would like custom bingo cards to suit your own complex requirements, give us a call or email.

A couple months ago I helped someone return their Gateway netbook to Acer for repairs. Acer repaired the machine and sent it back by FedEx Ground Service.

At the delivery, someone dutifully signed for the package.  There’s only one catch, whoever signed for it, walked off with the machine. Yes, the netbook was stolen. It could have been a neighbour, or one of the contractors at the house next door, or one of the city workers who happened to be working on the street that day. Whoever it was, the FedEx driver let some random person who happened to be near the property sign for the package.

The rest of this story took over a month to play out.

Initially, Acer was not very helpful, they told us to deal with FedEx for a claim.  FedEx “ran a trace” to try and find the package.  Eventually, a FedEx loss claim was filed; however, it required Acer to relinquish their rights making their own claim. The whole situation was a mess, and it took several calls to Acer support to keep things moving along. Further, I suspect that FedEx would only pay out the minimum $100 coverage that is included with each delivery.  Acer self-insures (i.e. doesn’t buy insurance) on their shipments (this actually make sense given their shipping volume).

In the end, Acer finally took responsibility and dealt with the FedEx claim and shipped a replacement machine (with arguably better specs).

This isn’t an exclusively FedEx problem.  By coincidence, a couple weeks later, a  UPS delivery person let me sign for a package after I got out of my car and started walking towards the house. And no, the UPS delivery person couldn’t have recognized me, I’m rarely the one to receive deliveries.

I’m surprised that stolen packages don’t happen more often – or maybe they do.

The moral of the story? Avoid shipping items to a residential address. Couriers hate residences – they’re widely spaced out (relative to business districts), and often, no one is home.