Posts made by honkinggoose

I haven’t looked at Bitconnect, but presume you are correct. One way to convince them is to tell them you can do the same thing as bitconnect. Register a corp named, let’s say, ConConnect, with no assets. Offer the same deal as bitconnect, just to your friends and family. When the bubble bursts, you won’t have to worry about your friends and family nagging you about investment schemes ever again.

Oh, and when all is said and done, if you end up in jail, you can use the ConConnect domain to set up dating for convicts. W-W.

That you can’t pay back.

@miserly said:
“i get an email from expedia basically says they have cancelled the reservations and don’t bother trying to make reservations on this account again.”

Can you just create another account, using a different email address … and possibly different cc?

@fasttimes said:
“Create your own VPN and slip it into someone’s house.”

How did that go by without a comment?

I’ve been a Firefox user since v. 1.0, but the last few years have been a bit much. From updating without my permission to breaking addons that work safely, I may just go back to lynx. While I’m at it, DOS 3.3 sounds good, too. “:-)”

Sounds like it’s living up to the hype … to me. Of course, I’m in marketing. “:-)”

@vegasvegan said:
“but if it lives up to the hype I may just jump on it earlier than usual.”

but if frogs had wings … “:-)”

@frett If you’re planning skills are good here, they’ll be good there. At least they speak English. As @my4mainecoons mentions, guidebooks are great place to start. We used one of Rick Steves’ guidebooks to pick the places that we wanted to see.

As for car info, yes, they all have steering wheels on the right. It took quite an effort on the first day to adjust, especially the right hand turns. After that it was only a problem when there was no traffic (nothing to remind you to stay to the left). I went through a few empty traffic circles the wrong way. “:-)” Almost all rentals have manual trannies, but with so many changes to vehicles in the last decade, I don’t know if they still have clutches.
One oddity that I had to learn on my on was their traffic signals go from red to yellow to green. The yellow is kind of like a green light ( but not an arrow ) in a turn lane - you’re free to go if it’s clear. There are speeding cameras on a lot of the M series highways, where the fast lane is to the right, and it’s illegal to pass on the left. Despite my first day jitters, and catching a few curbs on right hand turns, driving was one of my fond memories of that trip. People in England seem to take driving a lot more seriously than Americans. On the not-very-crowded M1 driving at 60 - 70 mph, I felt quite confident that if anything happened, I knew exactly what the vehicles near me would do. To me, that was an incredibly freeing experience, and made driving very enjoyable.

Okay, so now I am long-windedgoose. “:-)”. One last thing that talking about the driving reminded me of - everywhere that you are a pedestrian, remember to always look to the right as you come to a curb. We are so programmed to look to the left that we often have a foot half-way off the curb as we look to the right. In Great Britain, it is exactly the opposite.

Congrats on what can be an amazing experience if you’ve never been to Europe. You are going when the exchange rate is very good. You may want to confirm that May is still the shoulder season. If not, April lodging rates will be much lower. Once you decide what you want to see / do, you can then determine if there is a tour that covers those things.

My wife and I went a dozen years ago, but we won’t be tour people until at least our 70’s, if then. For us a significant percentage of the fun was deciding what to see and where to go. We both spent a few nights researching (cost, location, time required) and ranking the sites that we each wanted to see. We then spent a little time each night discussing and narrowing down the sites. It was a packed two weeks that we will never forget. We actually hit everything that we planned to do, but weren’t allowed into two of the castles due to the queen being in residence, or about to be in residence. We used Priceline and Betterbidding to pick a great rate on a great hotel next to the tube in London, took a train to Bath for a half-day, rented a car and drove to the Cotswolds, Nottingham, York, Inverness, Edinburgh, and lots of smaller places along the way. We met tons of wonderful people, saw historical sites with a whole new perspective, and thoroughly enjoyed the entire trip, including our 1.5 “rain days”. The people of England, including London, were much warmer and friendlier than we expected.

I can be kind of thrifty :-), but we did not pinch pennies on this trip (nor did we spend like a drunken sailor). This was going to be, in all likelihood, our only trip to England, and I did not want to constantly be calculating the exchange into dollars. I don’t recall exact numbers, but our two weeks were way under $3000, including airfare. We stayed at one B&B for 2 nights, one 3 star hotel for 3 nights, one 4 star for 4 nights, and a five star for 1 night. The remainder were with family. To get a very rough idea of costs, just figure out how much the trip would cost you in comparable areas in the U.S. and then multiply it by the exchange rate.

Finally, although we saw tons of sights, the two that stand tall above the rest are the British Library and the Cambridge American Cemetery.
Whether you do a tour, or do everything on your own, have fun.

Thank you for the work-around.

I’ve opened 3 checking accounts in the past 6 years where I needed checks. Only one of the banks offered free checking. That didn’t stop me from asking, and getting them for free at all three. I haven’t yet had to re-order.

@Ma Barker said:
“This is understandable so the bank will not be out of $$ if the check bounces fwr. For bounced checks, they assess a fee for it and Chase is one of those banks that aren’t forgiving especially to those who have opted out of overdraft protection.”

@richard, make absolutely sure that the check is not going to bounce. Not only will you be hit with the mentioned fees, but rest assured that the exchange rate for the “bounced” part of the transaction will be much better than the lousy exchange rate for the “deposit” part. Thus, not only do you have hunt down a check bouncer in a foreign country, but you get a bounce fee from Chase, and one additional gut punch of losing 3 - 5 percent on the deposit-bounce transaction. Yuck!

There is no harm in it. I tried it about 5 years ago, and got a call a couple of days later, IIRC. I had to go into the branch and redeposit it. Today, since they scan the checks, the ATM will probably reject it by identifying the routing number as foreign. If they ever tie their forex rates into the ATM system, they could accept them. The volume is probably so low that it doesn’t warrant the expense, though.

I had never heard of them. A pretty interesting breed … and story.

Oops! I meant no more Planters Nuts.

Is Zeb a Guernsey?

@dangeRuss
Thank you so much. And now there are no more nuts. Oh, if it were only that easy. “:-)”