Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

To build a reputation

I think I’ve written on here before that sometimes it’s good to buy from AliExpress. The same item being sold on Amazon is often times more expensive, so why not buy from the source? And often times - because AliExpress seems so desperate for sales - there would be coupons and discounts to easily save even more. The only downside of course is shipping. You’re not getting two days of free with AliExpress. But we can all wait for a solid discount in this economy, can’t we?

Recently I bought a thing of knee sleeves on AliExpress. The item shipped from China in about a week and half. No problems there. However, on the AliExpress app, the order never advanced past the preparation stage. After a certain date, I was to actually get a refund. For an order I actually received.

Being the standup citizen that I am, I wanted to notify AliExpress that I got the item. For orders that actually shipped with tracking, there is a button on the app to do so. But since my knee sleeves never got past the initial processing, that same button isn’t available. I’m too introverted to get on a phone, so I did the non standup thing and left it alone. The refund hit my credit card at the date promised. In my defense, it was only $15 total. How much could it cost, Michael?

It seems AliExpress is hyper protective of its reputation. Even though it features largely disposable stuff made in China, it is very much not a scam. The company really wants to make sure items get to the final destination, and has implemented all sorts of incentives for people to trust it. There’s a cash coupon if an order is delayed beyond the promised timeframe. There’s free returns if an item arrives damaged. And of course, there’s an automatic refund for customers that never receive the product.

Word on the street is AliExpress take customer complaints of vendors very seriously, too. I may not buy often on that platform, but I’ve all the confidence when I do. Due apologies that I essentially stole an item!

The waiting game

Before you buy anything on Amazon, it’s smart to check camelcamelcamel on an item’s historical pricing. Has it been cheaper in recent weeks? Is the discount really a discount, or did the vendor simply raise the price then handed out coupons? If you’re able to wait, it’s good strategy to ensure you’re getting the best price. All the randomized savings here and there can add up bigly.

Amazon, not content to let a third party service get all the ad revenue, have rolled out historical pricing check right in the item description. The “Rufus AI” doesn’t go as far back as camelcamelcamel - the past 90 days versus for as long as an item has been listed, but I reckon three months is sufficient data to see if you’re getting ripped off. Who cares if a thing is $20 cheaper back in 2021. Inflation comes for everything and everyone.

I however am incapable for waiting. The worst part of online shopping is the lag time between ordering and the package arriving at the door. Especially if the item is part of a bigger project I am working on.

I bought a used VW Golf GTI back in October, and I’ve been slowly fixing the flaws left behind by the previous owner. The goal isn’t to make it perfect again - as much as I want to. The goal is to refresh the car to a level where it would be as if I had owned it the entire time. A portion of that is buying new parts to replaced worn out ones. And the worst thing that can happen to me is seeing that an item is backordered.

It seems I don’t get satisfaction until something is done. This in between process stuff is merely an annoyance. Good things come to those who wait? Forget that! I want a project done as quickly as possible so I can move on to other things. In the meantime I’ve got to look at an unfinished - to me - car, and it bugs me every time.

That backordered set of wheels cannot come soon enough.

Right on queue

Recently I was at Whole Foods picking up an Amazon package. I like to do this for the important stuff, so the eliminate the possibility of theft when going the typical ship-to-your-front-door route. Not that I’ve ever had a package stolen, now that I think about it (knocking tremendously on wood). But when I got to have something for certain, the pickup option at Whole Foods is the method to go when shopping on Amazon.

It also helps the local Whole Foods is but a third of a mile away from me.

Ahead of me at the pickup line is a woman with a cart full items to return. There’s about a dozen things in there, and each of them have to be scanned and bagged individually. Needless to say, this process took way longer than the typical counter transaction.

The guy behind me in line was audibly upset with many groans and grunts. Come on, dude: what can be done about it? The woman with many returns have every right to the service as we do. Word on the street is Amazon actually does ban serial abusers of the return system, but that threshold has got to be high, I presume. Either way, we just got to wait. That’s like getting angry at a grocery store because the person in front has a cart full of products.

Whether or not a person is capable of waiting in a queue in a calm and patient manner can reveal a great deal about their temperament. The folks who are incapable of doing so likely have a strong overlap with the population of road-raging drivers. The most trivial of inconveniences are enough to trigger an adverse reaction tantamount to grievous personal offense. We can also blame this on social media, right? (Sarcasm.) The instant and constant dopamine drip have conditioned us to be intolerant of waiting.

If you can’t be happy waiting in a line, you can’t be happy.

Black Friday strategy

It is Black Friday season. That’s right: what used to be just a single day of sales (the Friday after Thanksgiving, obviously) have stretched onto many weeks. And I hate it. REP Fitness has had a weekly rotating category since the start of November. Amazon has been doing Black Friday flash sales starting last week.

As a consumer it’s frustrating to have to be on alert over a period, instead of knowing for sure that all deals are available on the day of Black Friday. Amazon does these lightning deals where if you missed it on that particular day, it is gone. So you kind of have to scope things out ahead of time, and keep visiting the website everyday during the holiday season.

What I’ve done is add what I want to buy to the cart. On my daily visits to Amazon, I go straight to the shopping cart to see if any items are on Black Friday sale. As of writing I already knocked off two things on the list using this strategy. Black Friday discounts can be rather significant, so it’s worth waiting until the sales to buy what you want. Since the season turned autumnal I’ve been queuing up items at various vendors, waiting for the right prices to press checkout.

Of course there are no guarantees the stuff you want actually goes on sale. In that case the calculus is simple. If it’s a want, no purchase. If it’s a need, then the listed price is the listed price. Like these packs of gum. Excellent for teeth cleanliness, will buy regardless.

Happy hunting this Black Friday. The health of the U.S. economy is depending on us!

The best seating material in a car under $100,000.

You get a layoff! You get a layoff!

Word on the streets is that Amazon is cutting 14,000 personnel in its vast corporate offices. That is a lot of people soon to be out of work. The greater Seattle area is in shambles, as the kids say these days. This news comes only a few days after Target announced similar corporate job cuts. All of this coming right before the (hopefully) busy holiday shopping season. Who has money to spend right now, honestly.

The pending Target layoffs hits close to home as my cousin works there in corporate. The problem is, he’s nowhere near the company headquarters in Minnesota. A corporation looking to trim down will certainly look first at folks working off-site, no? I hope the best for my cousin.

The best did not happen for my friend who got laid of from Stanford earlier this year. Even education, the once believed lead-pipe lock of job security (especially at a world renowned university like Stanford), is not immune from the current economic headwinds. I somewhat worry for my position, because I too work for a university. An institution that just this week forecasts dire budget straits for the coming fiscal year. Not great!

We’ve seen so many layoff news throughout 2025, and yet the U.S. stock market is currently, as of writing, sitting at all-time highs. One suspects, basing on sheer mathematics, the bottom has to fall out eventually, no? Folks out of a job aren’t wont to keep on spending.

I’m glad I recently downsized my car to something cheaper, netting a solid difference to add to the rainy day war chest. The current economy is too uncertain to be making daring money moves, at least for someone in my lower middle class position. If I do get unfortunately laid off, I want to have at least 12 months of money runway. I know, right to privilege jail, right away.

Always work sometimes

It’s always interesting to see just how much of the common Internet runs on Amazon’s AWS. When AWS goes down - granted, not often at all - you quickly find out that half the websites you rely on everyday is no longer accessible. How can I function at work when Reddit doesn't load? Nobody can.

That goes to show how important AWS is, and how it really should have absolutely zero downtime. The backups and failsafes should have their own backups and failsafes.

Qualtrics - the online survey company - was completely non-functional during the AWS outage two days ago. (I know this because it’s a service we use at work.) Qualtric’s IT people must have the easiest troubleshooting job in the world: throw hands up, blame Amazon. There’s not much to do when the contracted third-party server your service runs on is acting up. Calling AWS support isn’t going to make them go any faster in fixing the problem. I don’t email Squarespace help whenever their service goes down (more often than I’d prefer, honestly). There's only the wait.

Good news for me, my livelihood is not dependent on this website. Bad news for Qualtrics, when your core service goes down for much of a work day, that’s a lot of lost revenue, never mind angry paying customers. Perhaps the company’s surely high-deductible insurance plan cover such events? If the cut is deep enough, I’d even think about suing Amazon. Word on the street is, Jeff Bezos has plenty of millions to spare.

Can you imagine your smart home devices stopped working on Monday because the backend is AWS? No doubt Internet-of-things make life convenient, but if a server outage somewhere causes me to be locked outside of my home, that’s not going to work.

The amazing Amazon

I don’t see how anyone can boycott Amazon. When you absolutely need that one thing quickly and you cannot be bothered to go anywhere to get it, Amazon always comes through in the clutch. Prime free next-day shipping is an amazing feet of logistical engineering. Labor exploitation be damned if I can replace a broken water bottle in less than 24 hours, for the cheapest price, with just a few taps on the phone.

Good luck getting that convenience genie back into the bottle. I have to wonder those who claim to boycott Amazon on Reddit: do they really do it? Often times, people’s actions do not back up their words. Those who rail against higher education have gone to college themselves, and will send (or have sent) their children to college. Those who advocate for leniency towards the homeless invariably do not have mobile homes parked in their neighborhoods. Women who claims partner income doesn’t matter have never dated someone who made less.

Talk is easy and superficial when you don’t have skin in the game.

I returned from Korea late April. The trip marked a two week hiatus from weightlifting. I then got sick the week after - as one does. So in earnest I did not pick back up the weights until the start of May.

It then took an entire month for me to get back to where I was - in terms of strength numbers - before I went on vacation. I guess that’s about normal? (I lift three times a week.) That’s the thing about traveling when you are chasing the gains on a barbell: you have to accept the regression. You work so hard to gradually reach a certain weight for a certain amount of reps. Then, like the Itsy Bitsy Spider, you go back down and have to do it all over again.

I’m not saying don’t go on vacation. But if there’s a target weight goal you’re chasing, it’s going to get prolonged.