FREE/BARGAIN — Media Deals (non-eBook/non-audiobook)

[Cinisajoy]

All three of my Amazon orders showed up the day they were supposed to. Now the one Tuesday showed up at about 845pm. But I think that was new UPS guy, not Amazon.
One of the three was shipped to my daughter.
She needed a good set of measuring cups.

[GtrsRGr8]

YourClassical's free classical music download of the day is from composer Aram Khachaturian. It is his Violin Concerto: III. Allegro vivace and is performed by the highly-respected Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Nicolas Koeckert on the violin. Jose Serebrier is the conductor. It is a 10 minute, 9 second piece.

You may recall that all of YourClassical's weeday freebies are (or at least have been heretofore) in the MP3 format.

That may tell you all that you need to know to be ready to go ahead and download it. If so, click on the "Direct MP3 download link" on this webpage. If there is more that you would like to know before downloading it, you might find it on Naxos's webpage for the album from which the piece is taken.

[Purple Lady]

Has anyone else gotten this in Google opinion rewards app? Do you know how much the gift cards are for?

[GtrsRGr8]

Audiobooks or Media Deals. To which thread does this post belong? This one seems the most appropriate . . .

As some of you know, I am a big fan of school (college/university) course audios. Frankly, they have helped me become the brilliant intellectual that I am today.

There are lots of free ones on the Internet, but how do you find one in the subject that you want? You could check all of the individual websites: Coursera, iTunes U, Udemy, et al, one-by-one.

But there is a better way. There are websites that try to gather up all of the courses spread all over the Internet and put them in one spot (their websites). Perhaps none of them have done a better job of it than Open Culture. They purport to list 1,200 free online courses from top universities! According to them, that is now over 40,000 hours of listening!

Go to this Open Culture webpage to see all of the free offerings.

[Connallmac]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

All three of my Amazon orders showed up the day they were supposed to. Now the one Tuesday showed up at about 845pm. But I think that was new UPS guy, not Amazon.
One of the three was shipped to my daughter.
She needed a good set of measuring cups.

I had three separate two-day Prime Orders last week. Two of the three orders were a day late.

[Manabi]

Originally Posted by Catlady

I placed an order on Tuesday, September 27, free two-day Prime shipping; there was no indication on the order page that the item required extra processing. But the confirmation e-mail gave me a delivery date of Monday, October 3, well beyond what I expected. When I got the shipping confirmation yesterday, the delivery date had been moved up to Friday, September 30. And then the package arrived early this morning--two days after the order was placed.

Generally Amazon has given me a correct two-day delivery date from the get-go, sometimes actually delivering in one day. I don't know why they started out this time with a delivery date nearly a week from the order date.

I had something like that happen recently too. I'd ordered the item on the weekend, and it was scheduled to arrive about 5 days out. I also ordered another item over the weekend, and ultimately both arrived in the same box on Monday!

In my case I thought it was just they decided they could send it quicker combined with the other order. But sounds like maybe they're just being weird.

Also: I don't know how the hell they pull off Monday delivery for Prime items ordered on Sunday, but I'm not going to complain!

[GtrsRGr8]

Enjoy a free download of Richard Wagner's Die Feen: Overture, courtesy of YourClassical (and, I suspect, Naxos, too).

The piece is performed by the Malaga Philharmonic Orchestra, with Alexander Rahbari as the conductor. It is a 10 minute, 42 second piece. It is part of a Naxos album of Wagner Overtures.

There's more information about the entire album at this webpage. If and when you decide to download the free piece, navigate to this webpage and click on the "Direct MP3 download link".

With today being Friday, and YourClassical not offering their freebies on the weekend, the next freebie will be on Monday.

[Manabi]

For those of you that have Amazon Prime, Amazon has announced some nice new benefits as a tie-in to the videogame streaming site Twitch (which they bought for nearly $1 billion back in 2014). This extra is being called Twitch Prime, and has some nice bonuses for existing Amazon Prime subscribers:

• Free games & in-game content that rotates monthly. This includes everything from entirely free games, to in-game content for various games. The first month includes the free game Steamline plus in-game content for the free-to-play games Hearthstone and Smite.
• Ad-free viewing on Twitch streams. If you ever watch streams on Twitch, now you can avoid all the ads!
• One free channel subscription every thirty days. Twitch users can subscribe to channels for $5 a month, and that money supports the streamer. Now Amazon will pay that fee for you for one subscription a month. You have to manually select what channel to subscribe to every thirty days, but this is going to be huge for Twitch streamers.

If you're already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you just need to link a Twitch account with your Amazon account to get these new bonuses. If you every play games any, it's probably worth making a Twitch account solely to grab the free games & in-game content every month.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Manabi

<snip>
Also: I don't know how the hell they pull off Monday delivery for Prime items ordered on Sunday, but I'm not going to complain!

At one time, UPS and, I think FedEx, did not transport packages from one location to another on the weekends, at all. I think that that has changed. Home deliveries were "never" done, although both may have made exceptions at a greatly increased price if Christmas or Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday or Sunday and the customer had to have something delivered then.

Occasionally I'll see a UPS local-delivery style truck out and about here in town on a Saturday. I suppose that they have some special, extremely-urgent kind of stuff that they do deliver on Saturdays.

That doesn't really address what you said, though. I think that there are two factors at work. Number 1--Amazon is not your typically-sized business. Their business with carriers has to be enormous. Any company is going to stretch the policy a little bit or more--whatever is necessary--to make sure that they get Amazon's business and not one of their competitors! Related to that, large shippers have always negotiated with carriers to get lower rates than the official rates (that would be ones like you or I or my little business pay). If the carriers will stretch their delivery charge policy and rates, they are certainly going to be willing to stretch their policies on days of pickup and delivery (BTW--UPS, FedEx, et al. have traditionally been shippers primarily to businesses. Hence, the fact that they usually delivered only Monday-Friday, and not Saturdays or Sundays when businesses are largely closed). And if a business like Amazon has 10,000 packages that they want sent out from a distribution center on Sunday, the carrier, of course, is going to make sure that they find a way to get them picked up.

A second factor at work is that your UPS (for example) package(s) delivered on Saturday may have actually been delivered by the Postal Service. In the last decade or so, USPS has tried to be less set in its ways (as government agencies tend to be) and let other carriers handle packages that have to travel long distance (they get it done, for whatever reason, faster than the Postal Service), and receive packages from other carriers for them (the Postal Service) to do the actual delivery, etc.

So, your package is going to get picked up at Amazon on Sunday, be on a truck to your town Sunday night, and be delivered by the carrier the next day, or possibly handed off to USPS to deliver on Monday with their regular deliveries. With the density of their distribution centers being what it is (meaning there's going to be one not all that far from where you live), it's not that hard of a feat to carry out.

Perhaps you've heard about Amazon's plan to deliver packages by drone (they actually may be testing this in certain test markets). In that case, you could, in the future, place your order on Sunday, and get it on Sunday!

[Cinisajoy]

UPS ships many things by rail. I saw at least 3 UPS trailers on a train today.
So yes, they do sort of ship on weekends.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

UPS ships many things by rail. I saw at least 3 UPS trailers on a train today.
So yes, they do sort of ship on weekends.

Yes, but it will be railroad people who are at work and not UPS people.

That does surprise me, though, because rail is a pretty slow means of transportation. But all of the major carriers--UPS, FedEx, et al.--have freight divisions and delivery speed with freight companies (trucking companies are one of the major carriers of freight, too, and you probably know how long something shipped by truck takes sometimes is not much of a concern).

[FizzyWater]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Yes, but it will be railroad people who are at work and not UPS people.

That does surprise me, though, because rail is a pretty slow means of transportation. But all of the major carriers--UPS, FedEx, et al.--have freight divisions and delivery speed with freight companies (trucking companies are one of the major carriers of freight, too, and you probably know how long something shipped by truck takes sometimes is not much of a concern).

I am not a trucking expert, nor have I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express™. But I may once have read an article or news story that said shipping companies were finding it less expensive to ship the trailer via railway long-distance, then let a short-haul trucker take it from the train depot to the end destination.

For some reason, I'm thinking it was an article on ways the railroad companies were trying to stay relevant.

In my last apartment, I crossed a busy train crossing to-and-from my way to work. I can't tell you how many times I sat there watching trains full of car-after-car of trailers, in 2 across and 2 down (a total of 4 - or maybe also two deep, so 8) on a flat railway car.

(I don't miss the 5-7 minutes I'd lose on the days I'd get caught my a train, then just when it was done, another one came by in the other direction - it was a two track crossing).

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Yes, but it will be railroad people who are at work and not UPS people.

That does surprise me, though, because rail is a pretty slow means of transportation. But all of the major carriers--UPS, FedEx, et al.--have freight divisions and delivery speed with freight companies (trucking companies are one of the major carriers of freight, too, and you probably know how long something shipped by truck takes sometimes is not much of a concern).

Actually if a package goes from California to Florida it would take much less time to put the trailer on a train than to be pulled by a truck.
A train can take more trailers and rather than stop the train, they just change engineers.
It is 2069 miles between the two and a truck can only legally drive about 700 miles a day. A train can go approximately 1600 miles a day.

We see at least 3 to 12 UPS trailers on every freight train we see.

Oh and darling, yes truckers are on a schedule.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

I am not a trucking expert, nor have I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express™. But I may once have read an article or news story that said shipping companies were finding it less expensive to ship the trailer via railway long-distance, then let a short-haul trucker take it from the train depot to the end destination.

For some reason, I'm thinking it was an article on ways the railroad companies were trying to stay relevant.
<snip>

I'm not a trucking expert, either. But, I do think that I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express a time or two.

Maybe what you had in mind was a cargo container, rather than a truck trailer. They sit perfectly on the standard-length semi trailer, and can easily be placed on the trailer and taken off. They're the same ones that you may see in a photograph stacked on cargo ships.

Some things don't need fast transportation and, generally, the slower the means of transportation the cheaper that it is. When I was in business school back in the Dark Ages, railroads were considered the second slowest means of shipment. They probably still are. Can anyone guess which one was first (no, this is not a joke this time. ha). If you said "ships" (barges really drag down the figures for ships) you would be correct.

Shipment by rail is inexpensive, and I think that railroads will stay relevant for a long, long time to come. I'm in good company, the billionaire investor Warren Buffett has a huge "position" in one of the railroads. Buffett very, very rarely invests in losers.

[Apache]

UPS and Fed Ex have had Saturday delivery for a long time. It is supposed to be delivered by 1:30 pm and is an extra charge.
Apache