bunn

 The Shop on the Borderlands sells many things to many countries. Up till this year, our position on import duties and tariffs has been, more or less:  'if you want to  buy it, we'll post it: you are best placed to look up exactly what the country you live in charges for importing the things you've chosen to buy, and the postal service or courier will sort that out for you for a small fee'.  I'm sure this put some people off buying from us, but it was fairly clear to customers (we gave them warnings about it) and very easily manageable for us.

Then Mr Trump decided he was going to Tariff All the Things at extremely short notice (like less than a month!) 

In an attempt to make the filthy Foreigner (ie, us) pay rather than the US citizen, he insisted that not only would there be no exceptions for small parcels, but anyone who bought stuff from outside the USA and had it posted to them, would be billed at least $80 unless the seller prepaid the tariff.  

So suddenly we had to try to work out what the US tariff was going to be for everything we sold so we could charge and post appropriately.  This was complicated by the fact that tariffs are not based on where the Shop is based, or where the company that designed and commissioned the product is based, but where the physical object was made.  So, for example, some D&D books are printed in the USA, but some are printed in China, and some in Belgium.

And there's no way to predict where a specific book was printed, without taking it off the shelf and rummaging through it in the hope that it will have  'printed in Lithuania' written on it somewhere (Lithuania is a bit of a hotbed of RPG printing...)  Some books have no indication where they were printed at all, so you have to guess.  Some of our stock is 50 years old. Doesn't matter.  We still have to declare where it was made. 

Anyway, we did that for all the 12000ish Things in the Shop.  And we gave them all international product classification codes (which is how you declare you're selling dice and not books for tax purposes, for example) 

And we did it twice, because the first solution we had didn't work. (It was a quicker job the second time since the data was in and just had to be moved, but still. ) 

So, I tested ordering various products and they seemed to be getting what we thought was the right amount of tariff/customs fee appearing on them. Then we got a pleading email from a hopeful American, unable to find the thing they specially wanted in the USA, so we let them order - a book printed in the UK. They got charged the amount we expected by Royal Mail, 10% tariff plus 50p admin, and a week later, their book had reached them!  Hurray! 

So it all works now, right?  IF ONLY. We got another pleading American email, so we let that guy order too, and in a surge of confidence, turned off our message saying 'sorry no orders to the USA for now.'

But.  We put US Order #2 through the Royal Mail system, for three books made in Italy, and... RM charged us 50p admin fee for doing the duty for us, and nothing more.  But they were printed in Italy! Italy has a 15% tariff! 

So we rang Royal Mail, and said: why no tariff?  And they said: Oh it's fine. Tariffs don't apply to books.  

So we rang off and reinspected US Order #1, which was definitely a book, and definitely printed in the UK, and for which we were definitely billed 10% of the value for the tariff a week and a half ago.  And boggled. 

(I might not have got all the terminology 100% right, but I'm increasingly dubious that anyone has got this 100% right) 

Update:Parcel #1 had got tangled up in the massive update project and went out with the HS code saying it was a boxed board game by accident. So I think we're OK sending books without billing tariffs for them. Or, I hope so...

For some reason I haven't posted here in ages, but I don't really want to drop out of the habit, so here's an attempt to catch up. 

Itching things
( Read more... )I am now feeding Theo the new insect-based dog food pellets, which he seems to like a lot, as much as almost anything apart from cheese.  Cheese is his absolute favorite thing. 

Nenya cat remains competent and untroubled by Woes. 

Not even going to try to post about World Events.  Times too interesting. 

I read a copy of Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic which had been hanging around, to try to decide if I wanted to keep any of my Neil Gaiman books, now that it turns out he's a creepy sexual predator. Haven't decided, but did conclude the end of M is for Magic seemed oddly cold and depressing, so I will probably get rid at least of that one. 

The number of orders arriving at the Shop on the Borderlands is up considerably on last year, but the value of orders is not: we are mooching along sending out about 20% more stuff, but with about the same money coming in as last year.  Unsure if this is down to what we've got in stock, macroeconomic trends, or just... randomness.  We have reduced the enormous backlog of RPGs in the house but not in the Shop, however, which has to be a good thing. We might even have slain the backlog by the New Year at this rate. 




We took the canoe out a couple of days ago, just a gentle paddle for half an hour.  I wanted to check that she was still in good condition, thinking of probably selling her in the Spring. She's not really best adapted for the amount of wind we get here, and we haven't used her much since we got the kayaks and the boat.  I will miss her but hopefully we can find a more up-river home for her where she will get further moderately-sedate adventures. 

I am making changes to the code of an old, old website.  Some remnants of the code probably date right back to 2005 or 2006, and the last really major revamp of it was in 2015. 

At some point, it grew a content management system when the original system that the customer was buying into for managing their business proved to be a broken reed and my sister and her partner, who I was working with at the time, built a quick thing that was going to tide them over for a year or so till something better could be sorted. 

Of course, it never was sorted, but it has been elaborated and experimented with, simplified again, and elaborated again in new directions. 

I try to comment as I go, but honestly there is no way that anyone but me could really work on it any more, and at some point, my ability to patch it up and keep it afloat for one more year is going to run dry. 

Anyway, it made me think of this line from the Tombs of Atuan.  Not that the altar has fallen quite yet, but there are definitely mice nesting behind the empty throne:
 
 She knew the turnings of a ruined maze, she knew the dances danced before a fallen altar.

If you are running a database with an API that other people have to connect to and pull data out of using scripts they had to write, you don't just RANDOMLY CHANGE THE FIELD STRUCTURE AND CAPITALISATION TO MAKE IT PRETTIER!

Without any notice, or information, other than just updating your own documentation, so that bunn, staring blankly at code she wrote months ago, has to go and look at the documentation, and stare as if seeking enlightenment at the data coming out of the database, to finally figure out that, oh yes, all these fields that were named like this, are now named like that!

RAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

A few months back I was at the recycling centre with some boxes, and happened to notice that the cardboard recycling skip was full of large rectangular pieces of what looked like cardboard picture mounts - ie, the middle bit that gets cut out of the mount when you have something framed.    I became enamoured of them and grabbed a huge pile of them out of the skip (what?  I put other cardboard in the skip!  The Cardboard-eating Skip Monster does not go hungry on my account!)

Anyway, I have been drawing on these cardboard rectangles, and they are excellent.  You don't have the bits of paper flopping about like with a sketchbook, they are light, and yet quite rigid so you don't need to put them on top of anything to support them, you can draw with one on your lap.  They aren't all quite the same size and proportions, but that's fine, I don't mind.  They have the odd pencil squiggle on them, but I can rub that out, and they take paint well so I can also overpaint them.

I don't even know what these things are called, let alone how to get more of them.  I'm wondering if I called a picture framing shop and asked if they had any middles, they'd think I was mad.

In other news, I hate writing proposals, and will apparently do almost anything to avoid finishing this one.  Writing proposals is THE WORST. 

No, you may not have a nap
No, you may not have another cup of tea.
No, you may not pet the cat.
No, you may not use social media.
No, you may not paint.
No, sneakily researching painting reference images does not count as productivity.

Just do the bloody work, OK?

NO NO NO DO NOT GO TO SLEEP! WAKE UP WAKE UP!

Oh all right.  You may have more coffee.  If you must.   And you may give the dogs a 2-minute training session, it's supposed to be good for their brains, maybe it will do something for human brains too.

The server and local PC backups are automated, of course.  But deleting them isn't, which causes me Issues.

One location my backup are stored at (I  have three lots of backups, each on a separate server belonging to a dfferent company) is on Amazon's S3 servers, at their Ireland datacentre*.  This service charges by volume of data stored.  So yesterday I was sitting there staring at the pile of lovely backups from April (each one a golden second chance to avert disaster or idiocy! Who cannot love a second chance???)

And I was thinking: probably I don't need 5 complete backups of absolutely everything from April. If I delete these, I will save money, and still have May and June. BUT WHAT IF SOMETHING AWFUL HAPPENED IN MAY OR JUNE THAT I'VE NOT YET DISCOVERED???

In the end I deleted all but one of April.  I also have a full backup from March, and January still lurking. This may be a form of hoarding.  Or it may just be prudence.  I can't tell.

( my datacentre routing angst, let me show you it )

That infuriating moment when you realise that, once again, the reason it didn't work is not because you don't understand and are clueless and should give up and go away,  but merely because you made a really stupid syntax error, which you did not spot because you assumed the problem was you were Doing Everything Wrong.

I need to have more confidence in my general comprehension skills, and much less confidence in my punctuation and basic error-checking.