I recently made a new best friend, and its name is amazon.ca. XD

When I was on the west coast, I thought those people "back east" must get to have whatever they want 'cause that's where everything goes. In a sense, that's not wrong, provided you're within the Greater Toronto or maybe even Montreal. Ottawa, albeit just a few hours away from the two cities, is on a different scale. It's almost as bad as, if not worse than, Surrey.

While Ottawa is a much larger city than Surrey, it's not close to its rich and fancy neighbours like Surrey. This makes Ottawa a rather undesirable location if one wants good East Asian food (apparently there's no good Chinese or Japanese restaurants here from what I'm told) or gets a fix of ACG.

Without my usual sources readily available (Best Buy, London Drugs, Iwase Bookstore, Book Off), I was forced to explore other options. Online shopping was my conclusion, and thus I began searching. Since I work during the day and wouldn't be able to receive any delivery, anyone that returns the product right away when not unable to deliver wouldn't work for me. After some disappointing results, I decided to try Amazon, and I'm very happy with my choice.

I've received one shipment so far (Planetes boxset and Bleach 2nd Season boxset) and am planning to pick up a second shipment tomorrow after church. I've placed four orders this past week or so, but because there's pre-orders, my stuff will come in about six shipments. So far I've only ordered anime DVDs, but that might expand to include games in the future.

Right now I'm also hoping to make friends with amazon.co.jp, but that will depend on how the shipping work. The guy replied back that they use either DHL or FedEx for shipping to Canada, so I'll probably have to check their websites to confirm my options. If everything works out, I will be able to order books and CDs from Japan!

Unfortunately, that's pretty much the only things they would ship outside of Japan. In other words, I can't buy games, software, model kits, or figurines from them. I really am willing to pay the high price to buy the games in Japanese, too. Ah well, I guess I'll have to make do with books and CDs... To compensate the high rate of shipping, I can only order once I pick out a good number of items. Of course, everything's pending until I figure out the shipping dilemma.


On a completely different note, I decided to try this free Flickr Pro thing that Rogers provides... which I might get around to tomorrow.

You see, I had a Flickr account that merged with my Yahoo! account when Yahoo! took over Flickr. Then I forgot about both my Flickr and Yahoo! account for a looooong time. Due to past experiences, I figured that my Yahoo! account is probably suspended or deleted due to inactivity anyway. Then when I signed up with Rogers, I created a Rogers Yahoo! account upon activation.

Obviously I'd want to add to my existing Flickr account rather than creating a new one, so I logged into my Yahoo! account. I was expecting my inbox to be empty, so you can imagine my surprise when the number beside the inbox said 6xx. What the--?!?!?!?!

Yahoo.co.jp wiped out everything I had in my mail box when I didn't login after certain number of months. Yahoo.com didn't do it for some reason. So now I have literally hundreds of emails to go through. Luckily the majority of it are just newsletters where older issues can be ignored and deleted. When I dug back far enough to the first unread message, it was dated in October, 2008. Yeah, I haven't checked my Yahoo! email for almost a year. (Sorry, Eddie, I missed your happy birthday message...)

When I'm done with the mail box sometime tomorrow, I'll try the Flickr thing and see if it transfers over to my Rogers Yahoo! account to get the Pro upgrade. If things proceed smoothly, I might consider using Flickr alongside my Picasa web albums. Since it features unlimited storage, I might even use it as my primary photo album. We'll see.