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About meArchives for December, 2003
New webbery . . .
. . . for the new year. I am getting my act in gear and posting the forms needed for Adam and Jes to get started on their sites. You can go see what’s there (more or less final state, unless one or both of them complain about how much the designs suck) by clicking on jes.durf.org and adam.durf.org. Let me know what you think of these . . . they’ll both have the same Greymatter blog system set up behind them for easy updating.
A very merry Christmas it was indeed
Or not . . . Too much sickness involved this year. I went to work on the morning of the 25th and felt sort of blah all day. A trip to Enchante in the evening went downhill fast and I started throwing up everything that was put into my body, including water, until the next morning. Went to the office to pick up the laptop and some work to take home and headed back to Koganei, where I slept and slept until Megu came home, She was sick too . . .
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Keeping America safe from Pocky
So I tried to mail a package to my brother today. He likes some kinds of Japanese candy, so I bought a bunch at the supermarket and stuck them in a box and went down to the post office to mail them off to California.
But Pocky = terrorism as of this month, evidently. I was informed by the post office staff that the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 mandates that all shipments of food into America must be accompanied by a confirmation number obtained through a Prior Notice system to be found on the FDA website. Any food that arrives in America on or after December 12 without such a number will be quarantined and either destroyed or shipped back to the sender at the sender’s expense.
Crap. This is a pain. So I go back home and log in to the site where this Prior Notice system lives. Surprise number two of the day: It isn’t live yet. “Coming December 2003,” the page merrily tells me in a festive holiday red color.
After poking around some more, I find this page, which lets me know that the system will be going online on December 12, the same day that the regulations kick in. It also tells me that I cannot apply for a number more than 5 days ahead of the arrival of my package. This means that:
* I have to wait until December 12 to get my PN confirmation number,
* I have to spring for the most expensive shipping option to make sure the package arrives on the West Coast within that 5-day window, or
* I have to ship it off and just guess randomly when the thing will arrive, and then magically get the number printed on the package while it is in transit so it won’t get thrown into an incinerator in Long Beach to keep America safe from all the anthrax I am no doubt enclosing in the boxes of Pocky for Adam.
Congratulations to the United States of America on a bureaucracy well created! I’m sure you will all sleep securely this evening knowing that no gifts of foreign food will be arriving without proper numbers, and indeed no foreign food gifts will be arriving at all since the system isn’t up when it needs to be.
Don’t worry, though, the terrorists will just send their anthrax in packages that don’t contain food. Those don’t get stopped at all.
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