boonkoh

It looks like maybe Oskars have stopped doing landscaping and fencing. I called three times and left voicemails over the past week, as well as emailed, but no response so far. Oskars - if you're around, but busy, let me know, and we can speak some time later.

As much as people moan about councils turning streets into residents permit parking zones only, it solves this problem of people dumping cars on streets with free parking. I live on one of those streets, and while I haven't had abandoned vehicles left, I have had all sorts of tradesmen, commuters, vacationers, etc dumping their cars for days or weeks on end. In fact, it is neigh impossible to find a parking spot on a weekday evening, but come Friday evening, the whole road is empty!

I agree, always use a VPN when on a public network with your laptop. They can be quite cheap too, a few pounds a month. But you do have to choose carefully, as not all VPNs are trustworthy.

As someone who has in the past been unemployed for a period of time as well as setting up my own business, coffee shops with free wifi were an essential part of getting me through both phases. You cannot imagine how depressing it is to sit at home, working by yourself, with just quiet. I found myself most productive when I had some white noise - if you think about most office environments, there is always white noise in the background and I guess I'd gotten used to that. Just getting out of the house also freed me up from distractions at home. In a coffee shop, all you can do is focus on your work (unless of course you bump into someone you know and then there goes the rest of the afternoon...) You might find it frustrating when you pop in once every fortnight for your coffee to find me "squatting", but the truth is I "squat" there multiple times a week, often when the place is empty like on a Tuesday morning, and I buy more coffee and food over a course of a month than you would going in every 2 weeks. That is why coffee shops offer free wifi - we might only order one cup every few hours, but we do it regularly over time. The solution is not to ban laptop squatters or take away the wifi - it is to have more coffee shops in the neighbourhood, so everyone can be satisfied.

Its all a matter of perspective!! Everyone has their own individual opinion of London. If there was group-think, we would have 7 billion people living in London.

i would buy a second hand car, and only think about the next 5 years at this point. That's because I genuinely believe that there is so much change in car technology at the moment - from electric to hybrids to self driving cars - that in 5 years time the traditional car may start to become obsolete and the residual value will fall through the floor.

Check out Three Mobile's Feel At Home scheme. It's free if you're on a contract or have payg where you have bought a monthly add on. Essentially, it is free roaming calls, texts, and data in the USA. On PAYG you only have to buy a ?10 add on each month to get it. Note though that the free calls and texts are to UK numbers, not local US numbers. But rEceiving calls and texts are free. If you want to get a local US SIM card, not all of them work in British mobile phones, as they use a different network there (CDMA). One of the few networks that support UK phones (which run on a GSM network) is T-Mobile. You can get a SIM where for $30 a month you get quite a lot of texts, minutes, and data. But you can only get it once you're in the U.S.