Travelling to the US? Here are five dos and don'ts to protect yourself

Ah Paul's bald head

Sorry I'm slow

Paul still works there he's a great bloke who is part of the field team who implemented our software on site and did the customer training.

The last supper (I'm taking the picture)


The ones that are left work for Americans now, four of us in the picture plus myself are no longer there. (to keep the American link to stay sort of on topic )

That's good information there, I'm going to need a solution for calling the UK too, I was thinking about looking into get a SIP number but that could be expensive, Skype was great because you could just buy some minutes 400 minutes for about 7 quid and that was attached to a UK number in my case that was a Glasgow number so people could call me on that and it routed to Skype and I could call the UK and appear as that number in the UK.

Yeah Statutory State Pension it's just that SSP is also the acronym for the old State Second Pension, an acronym collision confused me.

You could have made that call to IPC several months ago (4 months) as you can apply before your birthday, with the IPC you have to choose from either a 4 week payment frequency or a 13 week payment frequency for your payments, I would recommend the 4 week frequency as you're spreading your exchange rate risk a bit better, you're more likely to benefit from upturns in the FX rate compared to every 13 weeks, at 13 weeks you could get stuck at the lousiest exchange rate every quarter just because that's the way the market goes, it could be 71 peso every time you get paid but have been up at 75.5 half way through each 13 week payment period, just depends on your luck.

State Pension if you retire abroad: Claim State Pension abroad - GOV.UK

My primary issue with international phone calls is that I want to be available to people in the UK mostly government agencies who want to call me.

When someone calls your roaming UK number when you are in the Philippines they don't pay the international part of the call, you as the receiver of the call pay that fee and last time I checked that was about £5 to £8 pounds per minute.

I had my doctor wanting to call me while I was away a couple of months back and despite telling them to call my Skype number the still called my actual UK mobile number, I had to get them to hang up and re-call on the Skype number that cost me about £8 that time.

As far as I understand a WhatsApp call to a foreign number will only work if that foreign number has WhatsApp installed on the receiving device, switchboards don't have WhatsApp installed and that's the problem, organisations like HMRC wont allow their people to make calls from personal devices in order to deal with HMRC matters and they don't, as far as I am aware, have any means to receive calls on their public phone departmental numbers for services like WhatsApp, I may be wrong but I can't see how it would work.

For outbound calls from the UK to someone in the Philippines again they aren't calling your mobile number they are call your WhatsApp verified Id which was verified using your mobile number but they aren't using the phone network to place that call they're using the data network (internet) to place the call.

So basically WhatsApp is WhatsApp to WhatsApp only basically what Skype was when it was introduced in 2003, there are no end of services that will let you make SIP calls back to the UK while abroad but for me the main problem is receiving calls while I am abroad.

I noticed that Skype will continue for a short time to allow me to use my Skype number (a UK Glasgow number) but only through it's browser based interface which essentially makes it pointless on a mobile phone and expensive if I have to dedicate a laptop 24/7 for incomming calls, running a laptop 24/7 is expensive in electricity (won't work if the laptop is in sleep mode) and doesn't fit in your pocket.

The Skype app could receive calls because their infrastructure would route the incoming call on the public telephone network onto Skype transparently and Skype would find me whereever I was as long as I had a data connection or WiFi. In the Phils on my SMART SIM I currently have 140GB of data that will never expire, SMART call it 'Magic Data' and voice calls use very little data plus in general signal quality in Metro Manila is excellent everywhere, it was a great solution for a relatively small price and now Microsoft have killed Skype.

It's incredibly clear that the USA is decending into Facism the whole world should boycott them as much as possible.

Plus this trade deal that is not a trade deal and which hasn't actually been signed yet or actually thrashed out, if at all possible I for one will never buy any physical American produce ever or ever again, sadly it's nigh on impossible to boycott all of their services, but I don't need Netflix already cancelled, Paramount+, I don't use any paid Google services, Amazon is hard to avoid though and I won't boycott Microsoft as I owe my entire career to Microsoft and at least Gates didn't kiss the ring.

All this crap about they don't need anything from anyone else and the rest of the world is screwing them, fine f*ck off America.

What I really mean is f*ck off MAGA, there are so many good decent human beings in America that are going to suffer terribly under this MAGA sh*t.

The ones that use their own proprietary protocols for VoIP are the ones that seem to have problems, I'm not an expert on this topic but I think the ones that use SIP protocol for session management are more fault tolerant.

Trump's one true skill in life is bankrupting Casinos, he bankrupted four of his own Casinos and now he's going after all the other ones in Vegas as no one wants to go there anymore

Can't say it's a bad thing the American people are poor enough already before they throw their money way in these tacky establishments.