Once we picked up our bags we went to the Sandals waiting lounge in the airport where you can relax, use the bathroom and help yourself to a beer on tap. Your choices are Red Stripe and Red Stripe Light. We didn’t wait long in the lounge before the bus was ready to go. Our bags were brought to the bus by a porter who will remind you to tip them.

The ride to Sandals in Whitehouse Jamaica took 1.5 hours through narrow, windy, hilly, bumpy roads. I didn’t realize that they drive on the left side of the road there. The first part of the drive is the most interesting going through Montego Bay, the closer you get to the resort the less scenic it becomes. There are an amazing amount of huge potholes on the roads, ones that would wreck your car if you were to hit one. The bus stops once at a rest stop sanctioned by Sandals roughly halfway. The bus company/driver isn’t directly employed by Sandals but are contracted and therefore expect a tip and they will remind you of this as well.

On arrival at the resort as you get off the bus you’re told that your bags will be taken to your room for you. You then gather in the lobby and someone will come around to gather your voucher and check you in. We found out once we got our room number that we received a free upgrade to the Dutch village. We had originally booked in the French village. After that you can leave a credit card number at the front desk for room charges. They will place a hold of $400 USD on your credit card. As we were told our bags would be brought to our room for us we headed to our room to get settled in. Our bags weren’t in the room yet so we waited a while and no one came so we headed back to the front desk in the lobby to see where our bags where. They advised they had been waiting for us but couldn’t find us which was strange as there was no bellboy waiting in the lobby or by the doors with our bags. At any rate we headed back to our room and shortly after our bags arrived.

Our room was a Grand Luxury walkout, obviously on the ground floor which was nice. There were sliding glass doors with a small patio just large enough for a little table and two chairs. We had a beachfront view and there was a hot tub right in front of our room between us and the beach which throughout the course of our stay was rarely used so we had it to ourselves most of the time. The room had a loveseat couch, coffee table, desk and chair, king size bed, and TV. Surprisingly the TV wasn’t a flat screen which was a little disappointing. The room has a large safe to store valuables and is big enough to fit a 16 inch laptop. There is also a large ceiling fan and air conditioning which worked splendidly.

There is WiFi available throughout the resort and in the rooms. WiFi does cost $38.99 for the week which is a better deal versus paying for a 24 hour period which is roughly $15. There is no bandwidth limit imposed but you’ll see that with the speeds you get there’s no chance you’ll be racking up large data downloads. Due to placement of the wireless antennas you will get best reception either outside on your patio or towards the outside edge of your room facing the beach. The Internet speeds are not very fast, in low reception areas you can expect 50 to 75 KBps or lower and in high reception areas upwards to 170 KBps. The speeds are more then adequate for email and web surfing. Anything that’s graphically intense or streaming video/radio will choke.

The Sandals in Whitehouse had a variety of restaurants to choose from. All of them except for one are grouped together located in the same section of the resort. There is Giuseppe’s which is an Italian restaurant where you can eat pizza for lunch dressed in causal attire or otherwise dinner which requires smart casual attire. The food here is pretty good but not amazing. Jasmine’s is an Asian restaurant which is only open for dinner and requires smart casual attire. The food here is delicious and we ate there twice. Eleanor’s serves Caribbean cuisine and is open for a la carte breakfast and dinner. We didn’t like a lot of the choices on the menu but what we did have was quite good. Neptune’s serves Mediterranean cuisine which was quite good. The Bayside restaurant serves international fare and is the main restaurant which serves buffet style breakfast and lunch and a seated dinner. The food there is delicious with a large variety, they change a few of the dishes everyday. Café de Paris is a Parisian-style patisserie with lots of choices and will definitely satisfy your need for sweets and caffeine. Bluefield Beach Club which is at the opposite end of the resort in the French village serves typical Jamaican food which is quite good. The Jerk chicken there is amazing. Service in all of the restaurants was exceptional, you can expect to be greeted, seated, chair pulled out for you, napkin draped across your lap. Drinks and meals are served promptly as well as dishes being cleared away. Reservations are not required at any of the restaurants and we never experienced any wait although we’ve heard that during busy season you can wait sometimes up to two hours to be seated at certain restaurants.

While we where at the Sandals resort in Whitehouse it was only at roughly 70% capacity and they would rotate closing one of the restaurants for dinner each night. They notify you which restaurant it will be in the Daily Breeze newsletter that they print and deliver to your room each evening. The Daily Breeze also notifies you of activities coming up, weather, changes etc.

At Sandals Whitehouse there are no children, just couples and adults. It’s nice and quiet and peaceful and there’s no rowdy drunken teenagers or adults for that matter running around. Most couples there are on their honeymoon or anniversary although there were a lot of older couples there just on holidays.

Sandals Whitehouse has three pools. The main pool which is the largest is located in front of the lobby. It was easy to get lounge chairs although guests who have concierge service have lounge chairs reserved for them. Again we heard that during busy season it can be difficult to get a lounge chair at the main pool as so many end up being reserved. The other pools are located in the Italian and French village and are quite smaller. The French village pool has a volleyball net across it. For some reason the French village pool deck has the most comfortable lounge chairs, they’re almost beds in fact and are quite nice.

The beach that runs the full stretch of the resort is quite narrow and the sand is hard packed. It’s interesting to note that there is not much of a tide at all. I’m not sure if that’s typical for all of Jamaica or just the part of the island where we were located. If you go for a walk on the beach once you get to the end of the resort property a guard will come out of the guardhouse immediately and notify you nicely that if you decide to continue walking on it’s at your own risk etc. The water is very shallow and quite warm, sadly almost the entire beach is full of sea grass and seaweed. They have 3 different sections buoyed off for swimming and except for the section in front of the French village you’ll want to avoid swimming in the other areas unless for some reason you love being coated in seaweed.

Basic water sports like hobie catting, wind surfing, wake boarding, water skiing etc. are free and first come first serve. You can also go on a glass bottom boat ride which is informative. You will get to see some sea life but it’s not overly impressive and the coral there is all a uniform murky brown colour.

To do anything else at the resort is quite expensive including extras in the room and any of their spa services. For instance a relaxation massage will cost $139 USD which is outrageous as you can get an hour long massage from an RMT for half that price here in Canada. People from the Spa will come around and solicit you while you’re lying around the pool. It’s constant everyday although they’re pretty good once you tell them no thank you. They do get paid commission though for Spa services which makes them quite active in their solicitation.

The weather we experienced while at Sandals Whitehouse was pretty good. They have a weird weather pattern that repeats everyday. In the morning it’s sunny and clear, towards the middle of the day clouds begin to gather and it gets very windy and may or may not rain. In the evening it may clear up or remain cloudy with lightening at night. It was quite humid, so much so that walking out of your room will result in glasses and camera lenses fogging up.

While restaurant and food service was exceptional, room service was lacking. Housekeeping would forget to leave coffee for the next morning or place garbage bags in the cans. We received curdled creamers. Calling the front desk to have bottled water sent to the room took 3 phone calls over the course of six hours before we received it. There was also an issue with the rubber weather stripping that runs around the door jamb of the front door. A section of it at the top had come unglued and was hanging off. We had called multiple times to the front desk to have someone fix it before someone actually came. When they did instead of gluing it back in place they ripped the whole strip off which resulted in no seal along that side of the door. It was never replaced during our stay.

Sandals Whitehouse has a couple of duty free resort shops which carry a variety of the usual items. I bought a few bottles of hot sauce as they had a deal for buy 3 get 1 free. Even still they were expensive at $9.00 USD per bottle. Their alcohol is over priced for a duty free shop and I would recommend purchasing alcohol at the duty free at the airport on the way down or if you want alcohol to bring home wait until you’re at the airport to buy it. A 20 oz. bottle of Appleton rum was $21 and we bought a 1.75L bottle of Appleton rum at the airport for $22.00.

Sandals Whitehouse also employs photographers, presumably professionals that will walk around all day even in the restaurants and solicit you for pictures. There’s no obligation to buy them but either way they will give you a tag with a number on it to go view your photos. If you do choose to go view your photographs they’re not cheap. They charge $16.00 USD per picture although I believe they cap it at $299 USD for all your photos on a CD.

Sandals Whitehouse does have a few resident Peacocks which are pretty but can be quite loud at times. It’s also not unsual to see Sea crabs wondering around on land at night through the first time you see one it does give you a start. We enjoyed our stay on the whole after all it was our honeymoon, having said that we don’t think we would go back a second time to Sandals Whitehouse in Jamaica.

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NTI WF-2109 product features are as follows:

1.Comply with IEEE 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11n standard for 2.4GHz Wireless LAN.
2.Compliant with PCI 2.2 standard.
3.Capable of up to 128-Bit WEP, TKIP and AES.
4.Support Windows98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/7.
5.Support MIMO technology with 1 transmit and 2 receive.
6.Lower power consumption.
7.Easy to install and configure

As per the manufacturer Windows 7 is supported. The NTI WF-2109 ships with a drivers CD but you’ll find that if you’re running Windows 7 attempting to install the driver via the CD will error out and advise you that the operating system is not supported. Windows 7 does not have a built in plug and play driver for the NTI WF-2109. What you’ll need to do is make sure that you have a hard wired connection or otherwise bridge a wireless connection from a laptop so that Windows can download and install the driver. The NTI WF-2109 actually shows up in the Device Manager as a Realtek RTL8190 802.11n Wireless LAN (Mini-) PCI NIC.

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SCANPAN Spectrum Utility Knife

Scanpan Spectrum Utility Knifes come in a variety of bright fun colours. They caught my eye while I was checking out with some other purchases at Tweed & Hickory. With my favourite colour being blue it was an easy choice and I spontaneously purchased this knife.

Colour aside the Scanpan Spectrum Utility Knife has some cool features.
The blade is very sharp and made of high carbon stainless steel.
Superior hollow ground cutting edge.
The blade has a non-stick coating making the knife super easy to clean. The non-stick coating complies with the US FDA requirements, which means that the coating does not contain any harmful substances.
The beautifully curved handle is designed with a soft touch and provides great grip.
Includes a practical, easy thumb push release sheath the same colour as the knife.

As per SCANPAN, they state that their Spectrum knives are dishwasher safe but recommend hand washing the knife and towel drying it right away. This will prolong the life of the knife and protect it from the harsh machine cleansing.

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The first time I ever copied a video I had made from my iPhone to my computer and played it I was dismayed that it was sideways.  Obviously that wasn’t going to work and so the search for some software commenced.  After a fair bit of searching I came across X2X free video flip and rotate software which works wonderfully.  It’s a lightweight program under 4MB and gets the job done super fast.   The program rotates your video and saves to mp4 format.  There is no noticeable loss in quality for both audio and video.  Even if you don’t need to rotate video but need mp4 format you can keep the setting at “normal display” and just convert your file.  I use X2X in Windows 7 to rotate iPhone videos.

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The features for the NTI-2406 include:

• Support MIMO technology with 2 transmit and 2 receive.
• Support DHCP Client, PPPoE Client, Static IP
• Support MAC filtering, IP access control, DNS filding
• Support PPTP, L2TP and IPSEC pass through
• Support UPNP (universal plug and play)
• Upgradeable firmware for future functions
• Support WPS (WI-FI protection setup)
• Support data encryption mode: WEP, WPA, WPA2
• Support DMZ
• Support multiple wireless mode: Access Point, Clien, AP+WDS and WDS

The NTI-2406 comes packaged with power adapter, 2 dipole antennas, quick install guide and a CD with user manual and drivers.  On the top of the NTI-2406 are LED indicators for: PWR, WPS, SYS, WLAN, WAN, LAN.  The web browser configuration utility on the NTI-2406 is very clean, easy to use and well laid out,  easy to setup port forwarding, IP filtering, DDNS and routing table configuration..  The default IP address is: 192.168.1.1 and subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 with the DHCP server enabled by default.  To set up the router you’ll need to make sure that your PC is set to obtain an IP automatically.  The default username and password for the NTI-2406 are both “guest”.

The range of the wireless signal on G is decent inside the house and unfortunately I don’t have any N wireless devices but I’m sure that the signal would be even better using N.   On my old wireless G router I had a 7dBi antenna attached for greater range.  That type of antenna isn’t compatible with an N wireless router but once I upgrade to N wireless devices I can appreciate the greater range of N. You can also set the NTI-2406 to transmit the radio signal of your choice or a combination thereof.

There are also parental controls you can use to supervise internet activity.  These controls aren’t just limited to parental use obviously and are handy for use in small businesses.  The term “supervise internet activity” makes it sound like you can view logs or otherwise know what someone has been doing which is not so.  What you can actually do is take advantage of 3 different firewalls, MAC, IP and DNS.  You can set days of week and time to allow or deny access to the internet.  If you use the IP firewall it would be best to set a DHCP reservation for the system first.  Using the DNS filter (firewall) you can block access to websites by keywords.  Again, you can set time of day, all day, days of week, allow or deny.

So far I’m happy with this purchase of the NTI-2406 and it’s working great.  I’m also impressed with the amount of features that are included and the level of configuration available.

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I tried Word 2003 and Word 2007 in compatibility mode and always ended up with the same results.  The cell size in the templates is off so that as you go down the page the labels keep printing higher and higher.  The column widths are also off so that they shift to the left as you move across to the right.  The top margin needs to be set to 0 to actually print in the first row.

It took me 23 test prints and 6 hours of tweaking and messing around with this template to finally get it to work.  It was extremely frustrating and I’ll never buy these again.  This particular sized label for templates 5667 and 8667 is not a product you can use right out of the box.  Unless you’re very adept at creating templates in either Word, Photoshop or Illustrator you’re in for a lot of work and frustration.

Thankfully I was finally able to nail this template down in Word although how I did it doesn’t even make sense.  My left margin is almost twice as wide as what it actually is on paper.  I have no top or right margin.  I had to set the cell and column width wider then what it is on paper.  I’m no Pro at Word although I’m no amateur either.  At any rate I can use what labels I have left and that’s it for me.  Just a word of caution if you’re thinking of buying 5667 or 8667.

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Weishi classic - Double edge safety razor

Weishi classic - Double edge safety razor

Weishi classic - Double edge safety razor

So the first shave went quite well.  I was a bit nervous and thought I might end up with a lot of cuts and nicks.  It was in fact a much smoother shaving experience then using the multi-blade cartridges  I’ve used all my life.  It was a slow shave as I took extra caution.  I think it will take a little while to get used to holding the razor on the right angle and not miss any spots.  The razor came with a free pack of Dorco blades which I wasn’t aware of.  I’ve started with those first and they seem to do a good job so far.

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40 minutes came and went and at around an hour I called back to make sure our order hadn’t been forgotten or overlooked.  I was told that the driver was out with the pizza and it should arrive any minute.  It was another half hour before the pizza arrived just shy of being cold.  I then found out that they had marked method of payment as cash on the receipt and the driver hadn’t brought his debit machine with him.  He left the food and advised he’d be back in half an hour.

The driver finally arrived two and a half hours later at 10:30 PM at night with his debit machine.  To make matters worse it turned out the charge for debit on delivery was $1.50 not $1.00.  Obviously not a big deal but it just made it seem like no one seems to know what’s going on at Pizza Hut.

Overall it wasn’t a great experience and I probably won’t end up ordering from them again.  I’m not sure if this is common service for them but I would hope not.

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I went out to Golden Tire this morning arriving there at 8:45 AM.  I told them I would like to get a set of the Falken ZE-912 tires put on my existing rims in the size I needed.  He told me he had them which I expected since I had already called to confirm.  So they put my car up on the hoist and took off my wheels deflating the existing tires and started to remove them.  It was only at this point that they went to get the tires I had asked for and told me they didn’t have them.  They offered me the Falken 512 tires instead which aren’t as good as the ZE-912.  They also told me they had a Nankang snow tire in the right size.  He also tried to sell me a tire in the size of 205/40/R16 telling me it was the same.  I told him it wasn’t the same and it would throw the speedometer off.  He eventually conceded that I was right.

I finally agreed to get the Nankang snow tires instead and when I asked the price I was told it was $500 for everything.  So I stated that I had been quoted $360 for everything for the all seasons.  Even though this was the same guy that I had spoken with previously on the phone he told me no way it was $360 for the all season tires.  Even after arguing with him he wouldn’t admit what he had told me on the phone.

It took these guys 2 hours straight to get the tires off my rims and put the new ones on and install and balance them.  It was obvious from watching the guy doing the work that he wasn’t even a certified mechanic.  He tried 5 times to mount the new tire on the rim and finally another guy had to come and help him.   After driving home and experiencing wheel shake the whole way it was clear that they hadn’t balanced the tires correctly.  I also checked the pressure in the tires and they were all different ranging from 33 to 37 PSI in each tire.  Even worse was the fact that these guys trashed my rims as well.  Each rim had been scratched, gouged and nicked by Golden Tire during their installation.

I had to go elsewhere to have the tires balanced properly by a professional and sure enough once that was done the wheel shake was gone and it was a smooth ride.  Out of principal I should have gone back to Golden Tire and had them re-balance the tires free of charge.  However, given the amount of damage they incurred and the fact that they weren’t able to balance my tires properly the first time going back would have been nothing less then a hassle and a waste of my time.

Needless to say I’m pissed off and am never going back there again.  If you’re thinking about going to Golden Tire I don’t recommend them AT ALL.  It may be a good deal on tires but not worth the damage to your rims and worse case your car.   In my experience with them they are definitely not honest nor do they do good work.  They’re sloppy and careless which will only cost you more money in end.  Do business with a more reputable company instead and forget about Golden Tire.

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