Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

Myrtle Beach resort in South Carolina isn’t as well known as some other resorts nearby but don’t let that put you off as it has all the facilities on offer that you could want.

In addition to a wide range of hotel choices and, of course, beach activities there are lots of non-beach based activities in the area too including Myrtle Beach golf, numerous parks, museums and nightlife. This is all in a very compact area so you won’t end up spending hours in the car to get around as you do in some beach resorts which claim to have “everything”: they may well do but usually they’re so spread out that you’re in a completely different resort by the time you get around them all.

Clearly since it’s a beach resort you’re going to get aquariums, water parks and the like but you also get a good selection of non-water based attractions including the Hopsawee Plantation and the Childrens’ Museum. There’s a surprisingly wide range of shows on offer too of which I quite fancy Medieval Times but there are lots of others to cater for all tastes.

If you’re looking for somewhere on the coast but with a good selection of activities outside the beach area then a  Myrtle Beach vacation seems like a good choice.

When it’s a clear plastic bag that’s had a knot tied in it and doesn’t have a ziploc closing mechanism.

That’s the latest nonsense to come from my travels through airport security and one that was particularly crazy. The security staff focused all their attention on that “deficiency” in my packing and managed to miss four separate items that they should have looked at including one that they very definitely should have taken off me.

So what did they miss this time around?

1. A six inch steel pin. That’s definitely on their checklist of items that aren’t allowed through security yet they missed it entirely which is worrying.
2. A rather heavy iced cake. Eh? Well, considering that it was in a sealed transparent plastic container and the icing has the same look and consistency of plastic explosive they should at the very least have rescanned it with the box open.
3. The luggage scales. These look very suspicious on the scanner thanks to the spring mechanism yet they missed them entirely.
4. The resealable plastic bottles in the above plastic bag. No tests were done of the content and they should have been.

At the moment it seems that rather than being aimed at detecting potential terrorists, the security checks are there merely to annoy honest travellers.

It’s only been two weeks since we moved the websites on the American hosts from Powweb who couldn’t even manage to get the basic hosting account set up first time which says something about the poor quality of their support as they only offer one hosting plan so it should be a click and it’s done type of operation.

Lunarpages managed to get the account set up perfectly first time which isn’t really staggering praise as it’s what they do so they should get it right first time. However, the uptime has been dire for the two weeks. Week one saw the sites being down for around an hour per day so I fired off a support ticket asking my account to be moved to a more reliable server. The response was that they’d rebooted it and sorted out a “few issues” at the same time. It did improve alright but only for a couple of days and now it’s just going from bad to worse with downtime amounting to almost an hour less than half-way through the day.

Anyway, ’tis off once more and I’m in the process of downloading the first site that’s going to be heading for Integra-Net which I’ve heard a lot of really good things about and has the other plus point that they’re under $35/year for the hosting plan that I need.

What’s confusing me is why the hosting services are so unreliable though. With exactly the same site monitoring package in place my UK host is showing downtime of several minutes per week (presumably when they reboot the server) and, no, it’s not a UK based monitoring service.

Just as there never seems to be a single bus around, so too it seems to be with house buyers.

With the market having slowed down considerably in the UK, selling in markets that are dependent on that market is also pretty slow. However, that seems to be changing as we’ve now had three quite serious house views in the space of two weeks.

Now, if only we can persuade one to part with a large cheque…

We’ve had our place listed with several estate agents for a while now and had sort-of settled into the thinking that it would sell “sometime” but probably not that soon.

These days, you get a lot of “window shoppers” when you’re trying to get a decent price for your place and we’ve had our share of those through normal estate agents.

However, one estate agent that we listed with some time ago and heard nothing from since got in touch last week to see about a visit on Saturday. They’d said at the outset that they pre-vet purchasers to the extent of checking in advance not only what they’re looking for but also that they’ve got the resources to pay for it and made a point of saying that they’d only be around with “serious buyers”.  Total estate-agent speak if ever there was an example of it we thought.

The call was surprising on several fronts. We’d not heard from them in ages so figured that they’d forgotten about us which was a shame as we’d originally thought that they would be the people who’d sell it for us. More surprising in some ways was that the appointment was for Saturday morning: I always figured that estate agents were strictly Monday to Friday people but apparently not.

Although our place is pretty large, usually we’d people round it in maybe an hour and then a little chat afterwards. These people were here well over two hours and were only asking the kind of questions that you’d ask if you were pretty serious about a place: can we buy that land for a pool?, can we build on that section? and so on.

We still don’t know if they’ll buy the place as they’d seen several other places in the area but the estate agent was talking of getting an architect in to see how much the changes they’d like would cost. If they run to that, I think we may need to start preparing for a fairly quick move as they seemed very proactive.