guess there must be people who check their phone every minute (or more) to make up for people like me who turn our phone off when we're relaxing on a holiday. mines plugged in and charging but on airplane mode right now and will stay there for the rest of the day as I go out for lunch (may as well the restaurant I'm going to is in a rural area with no phone reception (at least not for my carrier))

which is why Hindu is on the list of the 4 key "Priority" languages.

why? - were you planning on going back to school so you can take them up on that... I'm sure you can afford another trip to Bangkok and save the eduction department the time and effort teaching cocksucking 101 just for your benefit

back, way back, like late 70's early 80's back, I remember my father and other teachers talking trying to introduce at least a single year of manditory asian language studies for high schools. At the time only 2 government schools in the entire state were teaching Japanese and maybe 1 or 2 teaching Chinese (Mandarin) and 1 teaching Indonesian. These were only offered in high schools, apart from what would now be called ESL classes for migrant kids there were _no_ language programs in any government primary schools (talk about a pedagogical disaster... yes lets wait for them to hit 13 before we teach them a second language.... effin' brilliant).

Those few state schools that taught asian languages where "gifted" schools, seated in high income areas competing against Anglican Church run elite grammar schools and, unless you got in on a language or music scholarship had very limited intake outside their defined intake suburbs, so... good luck getting in if you were outside their watershed, I was only 4 klm away from the one teaching Japanese and still couldn't get entry. So if you were a state school student you were left with French, but usually due to class size limits the school only only offered it to you if you got straight As and one of the top 20 English students.

Or maybe, if you were in an area with high migrant kids, you could study Greek and Italian... but only if you were of Greek or Italian decent .... even though it taught standardised Greek and Italian, not the parochial regional dialects that the usual migrant families spoke at home .... so the reasons for those limits on intake that were?....

not counting junk and "to the resident" mail only about 1/5 of mail in my letter box is actually for me
probably 2 out of 5 letters are for either one of three previous tenants who did not forward their mail or inform banks/phone/credit card provider/etc that they had moved, and another 2 out of 5 are from the guys in the house behind (I'm house address xxx and they are xxxA) who are too F****ing stupid to put that A field in address fields when they fill them in.... one of the jobs I did to pay my way through university was a parcel post delivery contractor and I still have my old "NOT AT THIS ADDRESS - RETURN TO SENDER" self inking stamp. Originally kept it as a momento of the job but it back on active service when I moved in to this house a few months back (if I hand write "return to sender" on business letters that use franking stamps the automated sorting system usually ends up returning them back to me (as for what ever reason the franking stamps are not over stamped with a postmark) the stamp I have is so big (meant for parcels) it obscures the franking mark enough for the sorting machine to spit it out for hand sorting... yeh I could just scribble over the franking mark but it's more fun to use the big official red "you fail at addressing letters" stamp

That takes care of the mail.

Doesn't take care of the debit collectors, police and bailiff who still occasionally bang on the door looking for "Mr or Miss NotAtThisAddress"

I guess Bill is still drinking the Redmond Coolaid... if you can use an iPad you can use the app store, if you can't work out how to do that... maybe you should send it back for a refund.
There's not exactly a dearth of word processing programs for the iPad, yeh you have to pay to get one of the good ones but hey! you legally have to pay for the bloatware called MS Office (which I would never want on a tablet of any brand or OS). Transferring documents between iPad desktop should be more transparent but that's more slack arsed cloud vendors, including iCloud, than anything inherent with the iPad.
As for the keyboard? I sit in meetings with dozens of people who, like me, have had no problem learning to use the screen keypad efficiently enough for good note taking.
however if I'm the designated minute taker at what I know it's going to be an extra long and verbose meeting I sometimes break out the Bluetooth keyboard (which was brought for controlling my laptop from a distance in training classes, using it with a tablet is just an occasional bonus utility)

exactly, or as I'd put it, I'll vote with my wallet.

Despite living within 6 Klm of the CBD of my state's capital city my only available internet option is 3g/4g broadband, and I'm in a reception shadow for that, AND of course every house here is trying to use that one cell tower, I can only (and only just) play online stuff like turn based games that have low bandwidth and can handle a large degree of latency (WoW lagged bad enough for me to throw in my subscription when I moved here (and nothing of any value was lost) but 9 months TF2 & Tribes free has not been fun).

So I guess me and a hundred or more households in my suburb will be holding on to our old "playable off line" consoles and PC games for a while yet.

taking a guess... ping is blocked on at least one network routing device on his network.
many organisations don't allow ping across subnets, where I work if a suspect device lives on a subnet other than our local (IT department) subnet we have to remote login to a switch or router or server on the subnet of the device we want to ping and run it from there.

could be worse you could live 12 klm from the Perth CBD in a prime middle class suburb but do not have even have a suitable copper connection... so 4G it is... and ...ow sorry you live in a reception shadow ..... well .... too bad for you. Copper upgrade is apparently more than half a year away, NBN is not even scheduled yet.

530 ms was the _best_ I got with about 10% lost packets. youtube is a case of start video, click pause immediately, comeback 10 to 15 minutes later to play from cache... ABC iview is a lost cause as is any other music or video streaming service that doesn't fully cache.

nor you of your arrogance

may I gently rib my co-employee and say "well duh Stephan, so the paranoid get paranoid being told that they are paranoid and blame the people that tell them they are paranoid? like we never saw that one coming"

I reject your, assumably US centric, academic evaluation system and substitute our own nationally recognised one.

work? about 3 hours ago (and about 20 times over the course of 8 hour working day).

Personal? I don't have a landline (copper) or fibre cable or any other physical line in to the house so it's mobile (cell) phone or VoiP over 4G data. Haven't had a physical land line phone for over 10 years.

a lot of travel wear has zip up pockets hidden behind the main pocket e.g. both my North Peak Horizon Utility pants and Vigilante brand travel jeans have a second pocket pocket that my slim wallet slips in to and then I've had sewn in a pocket that is attached to the inside that my passport goes in to.

and even better pack something like Ex Officio underwear so "two weeks worth" of underwear is 2 pairs, the one your wearing now and the one you washed and let dry overnight (or let dry in an hour in warmer climes) at your previous stop.