Giles Shaxted

At the end of October Sam and I went on a driving vacation through some of the south east side of the USA. We flew from Grand Cayman to Miami and the hired a car for a quick drive up through Georgia.  Here’s a quick run down of the route we took.

Fly drive to Miami and up to Atlanta

We  drove over 1700 miles and saw a whole bunch of awesome places. We got to hang out with our the Vetters and see some live music thanks to Plain Jane Autmobile.

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making your phone bills cheaper !

At the near beginning of this year i purchased a Philips VOIP841Dual Phone. I could not have been happier with this buy, especially now looking back .. it has done nothing but work out ! The phone itself is a dual phone as it plugs into my landline to give me a local phone number through my phone company as well as plugging via ethernet int my broadband router to give me a Skype phone.

For anyone who doesn’t believe in Skype .. silly you ! 2 cents a minute calls to anywhere in the USA and UK and Canada etc etc. Which as an expat and a traveler comes in very handy. It means I can call Familyin the UK for very cheap and friends in the USA very cheap. EVen to their mobiles .. check out their rates. I believe they are cheaper than almost all other VoIP service providers. The new feature that I am yet to use but seems amazing is All in rates or packages for calling a country or the world for unlimited amount of time per month. I think the price works out to be about $12 a month which I know is cheaper than my local VoIP provider. Cable and Wireless do a plan called Netspeak which has a basic package starting at $50 USD.

Now all that needs to happen is all my friends and family (actually most the family has or has tried to have a skype phone) need to get their hands on a skype phone and we can actually all talk for FREE .. thats the awesome part is Skype to Skype is completely free. The Quality is really very good now, Skype to Skype has a slight delay when you first call but after a few seconds is perfect, and calling other phones just works GREAT. The only trouble I see is that the phones are getting less sexy !

Quick ending note … having also seen a handset that doesn’t have a base unit and links into your home wireless connection .. I would suggest getting one like i pointed out that is Dual and plugs into your router at least as connection and charging is much much better with these non wifi ones !

For the last 5 days I have been driving arund North Georgia, taking in the sites and sounds of the Appalachian Mountains. I have seen plenty of new things as well as experiencing parts of the USA I probably normally wouldn’t.

By far the most unique place I have been is Helen. This Town / Village is nestled in a very scenic valley by the Unicoi Forest.  Helen is a Bavarian style village, and I kid you not the buildings are apline looking and the names like Hansel & gretel Candy Kitchen and the Hofbrau where I stayed.

I have taken quite a few photos which you can see here on Flickr. One of my favourite is this panorama which was all done rather quickly and I would have liked ot get multiple exposures of each shot, but I still kind of like the dark shadows and the lit up trees with all their clours on display.

November .. pirates week … thanks giving … are they STUPID ! We have just had 4 months of Dead summer when it could have been done with a lot less affect on tourists … but no .. they waited until now !

The arrival and pick–up area at Owen Roberts International Airport will be closed from today, Monday, until mid–December, to facilitate construction for part of the Airport Expansion Programme.

Cayman Compass Link Here

Morons.

Ok So I am off to the Bahamas for another week .. and I thought I would pre download some shows to watch while I am there.
I have a few movies .. but I think I want to watch some TV. I am wondering if I should get into LOST from ABC or maybe find some cool discovery channel shows.

I am up to date on 24 so thats a no go .. I need to get a new laptop so I can do some usefull things while away like work on my websites (www.giles.shaxted.co.uk) work in progress and a mirror of this site getting ready to move shaxted.co.uk to a new server)

I think I will start off with some Las Vegas which I have not seen very much of at all and I may try and get a whole season of Boston Legal which I may have seen 5 episodes of. That may keep me going .. but if anyone has any suggestions for any other shows I may not have thought of please go ahead and leave a comment to let me know about it.

Gannet diving for Sardines.

finally got around to posting here about the sardine run. excuse the lameness i just had a hard drive failure and i’m pissed i haven’t backed up in a while. i won’t have lost much information bur it’s expensive now to buy a new hard drive and the get a proper back up system. anyways click to go see the rest of my photos at flickr.com. some people have even been asking if they can get some prints. if you are interested contact me and i will decide how to do it with the hi res images which are not online.

Feel free to leave comments or notes on my flickr account about any of the images you enjoy.

UPDATE: Hard drive failure of My Docments is going to cost me some headaches if they can’t repair it, or clone it. I do have a backup, but I will also loose some recent stuff. Please Clone work ! then I can cry from how much it costs !

Some of you already know that I have made my move to Nassau Bahamas. It is semi permanent until my work permit is approved which technically is not even in for approval yet, should hopefully not be a problem, but then again there’s always Cayman.
My aim is to make it here so I can go back to Cayman richer, owning stuff substantial and being able to retire into doing something I love doing by an early age of 35. Not a bad plan .. we’ll see how it goes.
I have had a hard time adjusting, for the first time in my life I felt homesick. Thats not a slur on my growing up home of england nor my friends and family as I do miss all of that dearly. But I know it will always be there for me. I am however throwing nmyself into work day and night to keep my mind off missing what makes me homesick. All of the people I love in Cayman, you know who you are as I’ve already told ya so.

So anyways, High Fidelity, the movie is one of my favourites has a theme of top five things. So here are my top 5 things for my move.

Top 5 reasons I like Nassau

1. It’s New it’s Exciting
2. My job is using my mind and great for me inn many ways
3. The people are friendly
4. Beer tastes the same here
5. I’m getting lots of rest

Top 5 reasons for not liking Nassau

1. I have no friends here
2. It’s a dirty island in many ways
3. It’s more expensive than anywhere I have ever been
4. The beaches suck
5. It’s frickin cold conmpared to Cayman

soon to come i’ll be writing a retrospective look at my time in Cayman. I think it will be good for me and maybe usefull for other pelople wanting to live their life the same way. Hopefully i’ll also get my photos onto a computer so I can share some of them with you all.

Recently I have seen lots of people having a particular laugh with Google spiders etc. Well I wanted to do something fun for me .. so I was thinking about linking to my own site and seeing how long it would take me to get up in the google listings with that term.

idea has come from: echeng and his “Male Hotness Redefined” and from John Styn’s Workout recognition in google images. What should I go for …

… I was also going to try trackbacks in this post .. that would be a first for me as I never knew what they were or why before .. but no one else with a journal uses them that i know of .. and besides I don’t have the trackbacks in my posts .. do i ? I must go check

Anyway .. now that I have helped Eric and John in their google quest onward with my own ..

Cayman Cowboy lets see if I can make google recognise Cayman Cowboy as a major link to my site and hence when you search for it you will find my site http://giles.shaxted.co.uk Now this obviously has a little bit of meaning to me as Cayman Cowboy was a term that was used in Rodales to describe Divemasters in the Cayman Islands about a decade ago, when i first started working here. The principal behind a Cayman Cowboy according to the article was that all the divemasters on this island, and they named a few companies and almost names, were womanising man whores who would do anything for money and anything to get in a girls pants, which for the most part is true, but I don’t remember it being done in an offensive way. It was just unfortunate that this female femanists journalist came down undercover to write her article entitles The Cayman Cowboy. Which for the record was true just emphasised the wrong points. But we have to say thank you to her as she thought she was slaggin us off and ruining our future hopes .. the spring break afterwards was majorly rammed with American Teens and just a little older all because the girls made their way down here to meet a Cayman Cowboy and the guys their age followed.

It’s never been quite the same down here since then, divemasters now may think they are living the life of a Cayman Cowboy but they are barely even scraping the surface but thats ok .. let them have their fun, i had mine.

Batabano is probably one of the lamest caribbean festivals ever where by a whole week of activities is organised and very few are known about. In fact the only thing I know of that everyone knows about even if they don’t attend is the parade, which can be quite good .. but is always just lacking in something. This year however was really quite good fun for me as in every segment of the parade there were people that i knew.. and it’s always friends that make things better .. so when they come up and do the whole caribbean parade thing for you it makes ya smile. And besides lots of girls walking down the street in a bikini with feather coming out from behind them is always a nice sight.
I haven’t attached all my photos but here are some that are of people i know or seem to capture the event nicely.