The best reward card I’ve ever had is the PC financial MasterCard.  In the past five years I’ve accumulated almost $700 of free merchandise which is awesome.  It makes more sense to just have one rewards card that you can use everywhere instead of having to go out of your way or shop at specific places which to me is just a pain in the ass.

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It took some shopping around to find a good front pocket wallet. I found out about The Rogue Wallet Company during my online search.  Compared to everything else I was able to find online which wasn’t much they seemed to have the perfect blend of functionality, design and quality that I was looking for.  Their wallets also have a unique patented cut to fit perfectly in your front pocket.

I ordered the the original black Rogue Wallet with satin leather.  It really is a finely made wallet with a beautiful cut and finish.  It has a great feel and with the radius it fits perfectly in your front pocket.  The ID thumb slot is a nice touch and it easily holds all the cards I really need on a daily basis.  Even with the front pocket wallet fully loaded it’s still less then half the thickness of my original wallet empty.  If you haven’t done it yet I’d recommend switching to a front pocket wallet.

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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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A set of 3 non stick different sized woks, small, medium and large.
2 frying pans.
Bamboo paper towel stand.
Cusinart silicone spatula
15 pack of non slip hangers
Stovetop spoon rest
Set of 4 dipping dishes
14 inch pizza pan
Non stick Baking pan
Kitchen Aid meat thermometer

Suprisingly we were able to get all that at just under $100.

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I did some reading on creating traps for Earwigs and how to get rid of them.  One of the methods was putting out a low can/container of vegatable oil and apparently they’ll crawl in and die.  I’m not sure why Earwigs are attracted to oil but we unwittingly found out it works well.

We had cleaned out the grease catcher on our BBQ and forgot the can outside for about a week.  When I went to pick it up it was full of dead Earwigs and pretty gross looking.  I think I’m going to put a can with vegtable oil outside by the front door and hopefully trap all the Earwigs before they make their way inside.

Earwig Death Camp

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• Ending a phone call via Bluetooth headset doesn’t close the phone app.  Unlocking to the home screen will show the phone app still open and tapping the End button does not close it.  Must press the home screen button to close.
• Push for email doesn’t work when WiFi is enabled, only works when using carrier data.
• Emails via Exchange account don’t sync in terms of what’s been read.  Previously if I read the email first on my iPhone it would show as read in Outlook or vice versa…no longer.
• Whatsapp app takes 10 seconds to load which is extremely annoying.
• Photos and video will freeze and tapping the screen does nothing.
• Tethering via Bluetooth is choppy although tethering via the USB cable still works normally.
• Timer randomly works.
• Certain applications that worked fine before will randomly close while in use.
• Email audio notifications are delayed quite a bit.

If you’ve noticed other bugs in the iOS 4 please comment and I’ll add them to the list.

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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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