Skip to main content

A simple exchange on eBay

I bought a 52mm-52mm coupler from a HK supplier (goes by the name of william-s-home). After I paid for the item, I noticed that the seller had a warning that the shipping could take 20-30 days and to email them if I wanted to cancel because I was just reading this note.

I emailed him and requested a cancellation. The seller was SO polite. We had a few exchanges and he/she was always extremely respectful.

I now have this image in my head of a venerable old Chinese trader who takes his business and reputation very seriously. For him, this is not just a way to earn money. It is a way of life, a principle, and things must be done correctly. The item cost $4.00 with shipping. It probably cost more than that for both of us in terms of the time spent emailing and completing the formalities for cancelling the transaction.

It was all very civilized and suddenly made me want to be a global trader, exchanging emails with people from far flung places in the globe, because life is too short and the world is too big and there are too many good people out there to not get to know them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or...
Post a Comment
Read more

Store numpy arrays in sqlite

Use numpy.getbuffer (or sqlite3.Binary ) in combination with numpy.frombuffer to lug numpy data in and out of the sqlite3 database: import sqlite3, numpy r1d = numpy.random.randn(10) con = sqlite3.connect(':memory:') con.execute("CREATE TABLE eye(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, desc TEXT, data BLOB)") con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", sqlite3.Binary(r1d))) con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", numpy.getbuffer(r1d))) res = con.execute("SELECT * FROM eye").fetchall() con.close() #res -> #[(1, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b220, size 80 at 0x10371b1e0>), # (2, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b190, size 80 at 0x10371b150>)] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[0][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[1][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] Note that for work where data ty...
Post a Comment
Read more