Darrel

£50 for a form letter. What a rip-off. Totally shameful.

the Norwegians passed a new law in Norway

On the global sillyness scale this certainly wins hands down.

They are the best.

Wow! Who else do you fly with? RyanAir?

Qatar are on a par with most of the other middle eastern airlines. My Airbus from Doha to BKK had not been cleaned properly. Doha airport is an antiquated dump: all buses and motorised stairways. The food on Qatar was reasonable, apart from a really nasty breakfast wrap that I didnt even un-wrap. The menu was wrong. Drinks were decent but they didnt have a big choice of brands. The beer was barely cool. The tea and coffee were OK. The electronic in-flight entertainment was OK when it worked, which was not all of the time. The flight was full and the crew took forever to serve the meals. They looked pretty miserable and didnt do any smiling. The Heathrow leg was better.

Good points:

23kg standard allowance + 7kg carry-on. My luggage weighed over 42kg in total and no one said anything, apart from putting a "heavy" label on the main bag. Plus extra alllowance if you are in the FFP.

They do 1yr open returns on the cheap, which was my main reason for flying with them.

Good choice of departure times from London.

Do your check-in online for Heathrow and then walk straight past the huge queue of arabs and asians with their mountains of luggage and thousands of children. I'm sure all the people on my flight were queuing to go through just one desk. Or maybe they were there early for the next day's flight!

23kg with Qatar

I flew here with Qatar last year. Prior to arrival at Heathrow I was a bit bothered about my baggage (28+kg) and carry-on (14kg) but they didnt even mention it at check-in. Just stuck a "heavy" label on the bag.

"Doctor Fish"

Health experts are investigating the safety of fish pedicures after concerns that this latest pampering craze could spread infections.

From BBC news.

I'm not sure there are many countries in Europe where he would have committed any sort of crime by doing this. Even Britain, that bastion of hare-brained morality, the world's most crooked politicians and the greatest percentage of teenage pregnancies in Europe.

To say that 17 is underage is just plain silly. The notion "raping .... with or without consent" is even dafter.

(Awaits the calls "A witch! Burn him, burn him". Ho hum.)

Ive seen Dell and Acer laptops fail more frequently the others.

Possibly because along with HP/Compaq they are the world's biggest manufacturers? The more you make the more there are to fail.

I've also seen a lot of broken Dells and Acers, and I've seen a lot more of them that arent broken.

if you are buying bits and pieces to put in the end product, by all definitions of quality - you are responsible.

This is true, in a way. But the basic hard drive device is intrinsically unreliable. It WILL FAIL ONE DAY and so it seems unreasonable to blame an assembler if it does so a bit early. The warranty covers it anyway and there is no way anyone can tell when a particular drive will fail.

I personally think that the Soi Buakow area is far and away the best part of Pattaya today: it still retains a little bit of character and hasnt become a middle-class shopping mall for families like the rest of town.

Walking street is an expensive and boring joke. I've been 3 times in as many months, and each time was only to walk through to get to the pier area. Soi 6 is just plain nasty: been once in 3 months and dont intend going back ever. Everywhere else is just too dull or too full of Russians or has too much traffic and noise and condos and real estate brokers.

Soi Buakow (with the Sois off it, and including the extension across South Rd to the old DayNight area) has a good selection of cheap restaurants of all types and styles, decent rooms, every other service one could reasonably expect to find, plenty of street food and a fair bit of street entertainment. They should restrict the traffic along it though; it would be much nicer pedestrianised.

When Soi Buakow becomes a dull and boring shopping centre like the rest of Pattaya (which it probably will before long) then it will certainly be time to go and live somewhere else. Just 20 years ago most of the town was like Soi Buakow is today, and it was a lot more fun then.

Why do you want a new line so badly? Wouldnt it be better to see if the place you are going to has something already in place? Many do. Even if they have a private exchange a direct line (with ADSL) can be wired around it quite simply.

You also have wireless, 3G etc. so there should always be some solution no matter where you go.

The iPod/iPhone headset certainly uses the same socket.

Dell dont make hard drives: hard drive manufacturers do and there are only a handful of them. So whatever computer (PC or Apple) you buy the reliability of the hard drive inside has nothing to do with the logo on the box.

The one thing that everyone should remember about hard drives is that they will ALL fail one day: it's just a question of when. Some last a day, some 10 years, and the price and brand name has no bearing on this. You should back up your data accordingly.

The PC shouldnt freeze and your warranty should take care of that. They will expect you to try reinstalling Windows first and presumably you have already done this.

If none of your external drives spin-up then you must be a bit short of power on your USB ports. Again, the warranty should cover this as the drives should always spin-up with two cables connected.

It may be that there is a fault in the power supply that is causing both the freezing and low power to the USB ports.

As long as you have a working original remote, just get a universal remote with a learning function. OFA and Logitech make them, as do loads of Chinese no-name brands.

If you want to do a good job in breeze blocks then you need to use epoxy bolts like this. They are stronger than the wall itself.

On Maxnet the domain tvunetworks.com doesnt resolve at all and so the video screen doesnt appear. Just the message about the coverage.

So that would imply that the blockage is indeed in Thailand.

Ocean 1 will be built on Mars

Oooh. Can I buy off-plan yet?

The correct fare from (south) Pattaya to Jomtien is 10B pp, not 20B.

Given that you cant even get from the Ambassador to Jomtien by shared baht-bus unless you go right in to BigC then all the way down to Pattaya Beach Rd, as mentioned, and then take the regular baht-bus back to Jomtien (which will add another 10B to the trip each way), there's not much point even thinking about going to Jomtien from the Ambassador unless you want to do it privately. Silly really as it's no distance at all if you cut down to Jomtien Beach Rd at Na-Jomtien. No traffic either.

And I wouldnt want to queue with those Russians either.

As someone who detests all sport, with no exceptions, I just wish that cable and satellite companies would introduce sensible packages that dont require me to pay for expensive sport channels that I simply dont want.

Anyone coming from the UK/Europe would be well advised to check out the ZTE Blade (sold as the Orange San Francisco). Available from Orange stores, Orange online and also from Argos in the UK for GBP90/4500Baht.

No contract, free online unlock, huge third-party ROM support.

Excellent value for money.

It doesnt work for me either, on Maxnet ADSL. I suspect you would have more success talking to ChannelAsia as it seems it is they who are blocking it and not your ISP. A workaround would be to use a proxy/VPN in Singapore or somewhere similar.

The USB headset that I mentioned is definitely the best value/quality for money, assuming that you dont need the portability of a very lightweight headset. I think mine is great.

As far as I know you can use any mic/phones single-lead combo sold for a phone in that single socket as the socket is supposedly a standard one. Maybe you could find someone with such a phone set and try it?

Or maybe you could investigate Bluetooth. Some of those headsets aren't bad though I dont think I would want to use them for prolonged listening to music.

My 4-month old laptop has 3 jack sockets. I've never used any of them as I have the USB headset and to be perfectly honest I dont even know what the 3rd one is for. It also has a built-in mic.

As you mention, I understood that the new standard for jack sockets was to be the single socket type as found on mobile phones (my phone has this also) that carries both stereo audio out and mono mic in. For home theatre use most decent laptops also have an HDMI socket that will carry digital audio along with the digital video: mine certainly does and I use it for both home theatre and to drive a 23in monitor for work .

I suppose they only include the jack socket(s) for those who are using very lightweight headsets.

Maybe you were unlucky. My 200B charger is 3 months old and going strong.

And do you seriously imagine that the Apple ones arent made in exactly the same chinese sweatshops? You just pay extra for the label and the fancy box.

AFAIK most big names offer international warranties. So a HK receipt should do here just as well as a Thai one would.

And no one would suggest travelling to HK just to buy some computer parts (though I might consider taking the bus to Bangkok if I was buying several parts), but the OP did mention combining his purchase with a visa run. If you are going to HK anyway you may as well buy your goodies there and pay less and get a better choice.

Interesting. That could be preferable to relying on the rather dodgy wifi that most hotels have, or could make a hotel/condo without wifi a possibility.