Escaping from the misery of migraine

Melinda Briend-Marchal: Trained physiotherapist and chiropractor with magic hands.

I couldn’t bear it any longer: the agony, the anguish, the torment. If you’ve ever suffered from migraines then you’ll know how I felt. I was driving to a new spa at the Royal Phuket Marina on a mission to find relief and Melinda Briend-Marchal, The Pearl Beauty and Spa’s managing partner, was to be my savior.

At my wit’s end, I arrived at the spa and immediately sank into a white leather sofa while the spa’s receptionist plied me with hot tea. Melinda joined me and told me a little about her background.

“I am a physiotherapist and chiropractor. I trained in France and I used to work in the Four Seasons Hotel Georges V in Paris as a therapist. I then moved to St. Barthelemy Island in the Caribbean and worked for two years in a spa. When I came to Thailand I joined my three French partners and we decided to open a spa here,” said Melinda.

I was finding this fascinating and forced a smile, but the pounding in my head was relentless. Melinda told me that the spa, open since mid-February, is based on a concept of three ideas: the design, which is unique for Thailand, the training of the staff and the medical treatment offered.

She continued, “We want to do something different from other spas here: something trendier and yet more casual. We contacted a Thai interior design company and they did a very good job.”

Melinda explained that though she trains all of the spa staff in medical treatments to ensure that the spa offers the highest quality service, many customers request treatment directly from her. I started to feel faint. All this talk of medical treatment was like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey. I could almost grab it, but found some solace in another cup of hot tea.

My poor head! I thought it might explode. I was itching to get into one of the spa’s four rooms. There’s a room for Thai massage, two for scrubs, aromatherapy and facial treatments, and one with a whirlpool bath for a couple or people who want to have treatments together. I noticed there wasn’t a headache room, but I was still hopeful that one of the three therapists would be able to help me out.

I was given a copy of the spa menu and read about the four different types of treatment: Cure, Pleasure, Beauty and Health, with prices from 650 baht for a head and shoulder massage to 2,800 baht for facial treatments. I noticed a beauty salon service where customers can get pedicure, manicure and waxing treatments. Though the prices were reasonable, starting at 100 baht for nail polish, this was no time to be thinking of self-indulgence.

My mood picked up a little when Melinda mentioned chocolate body treatment. Now that I could go for. Apparently it helps the skin detoxify and moisturize, but who cares what it does when you’re covered in chocolate?

It got to the crunch: I called on the human fondue treatment and asked Melinda what she recommended to help with my migraine. She suggested aromatherapy with the warm scent of vanilla to help me relax before her own medical treatment method.

Great idea, I thought, and off I went with therapist Supaporn “Nang” Khanthong to a white room. I undressed and clambered onto the bed, sprawled out on my stomach, and peered through a hole at fish darting back and forth in a glass bowl under the bed.

K. Nang started to massage my back, dousing me in vanilla scent massage oil. She dug into my spine and shoulders, forcing the muscles to relax. Her hands worked on my arms and legs, and then, as the soothing music and sweet scent in the air made me feel like I was dreaming, I flipped over onto my back for her to massage my front.

An hour breezed by and the massage came to an end. The fate of my headache now hung in the balance as Melinda joined me to give the final part of my treatment. Her strong fingers softly massaged my forehead, temples and neck. I could feel the pain and tension flowing from my body. This lady really does have magic hands, I thought to myself.

As I slipped in and out of fluttering daydreams, Melinda told me, “You can’t treat migraines too much. There are many sensitive parts of the head and you need to get the blood circulating again. I don’t perform strong movements like a chiropractor does, but rather, I use a soft touch so I don’t hurt people and they feel more relaxed.”

And so my day at the spa came to an end and I gave myself a reassessment. Relaxed? Yes. Refreshed? Of course. Headache? All gone, thanks to the soft touch of Melinda. I thanked Melinda for the wonderful treatments I had received and bounced out of the door, ready to take on the world again.

The Pearl Beauty and Spa at The Royal Phuket Marina. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 8 pm. Tel: 076-360888. Email: info@thepearlbeautyspa.com Website: www.thepearlbeautyspa.com

PC group therapy: the doctor is in

And you think you have a messed up ADSL line? Fred Nesvold tells me this is his line, coming straight out of his apartment.

Our first PC Group Therapy session in Patong drew a dozen people. Attendance at the second one grew by almost 50%. At this rate, by the end of the year, we’ll need a room the size of Samui to hold everybody.

The folks in attendance ranged from absolute first-time beginners to grizzled Microsoft Certified System Engineers. And one card-carrying dummy.

I’d like to go over some of the things we talked about at the first two sessions. I can only scratch the surface: we covered a lot of territory. As befits the wide-open nature of the Group Therapy sessions, lots of people helped other people, shared their experiences and their expertise, and we solved a lot of problems.

Recent shenanigans by local Internet Service Providers provoked several questions about Domain Name Servers: the ISPs here in Phuket had people change their Domain Name Servers, and several people in, uh, “therapy” wanted to know why. The short answer: the ISPs don’t know what they’re doing. The longer answer requires a bit of explanation.

You and I work with the Internet by typing in names like phuketgazette.net or smtp.mail. com. Computers on the Internet don’t understand names – they need so-called “IP addresses”, which are numbers that look like 203.146.21.166 (the IP address for phuketgazette.net).

Whenever you type a Web address into a browser or an email program, your computer has to reach out to a giant telephone book, to translate phuket gazette.net into 203.146.21.166. That telephone book is called a Domain Name Server. Its sole purpose is to translate domain names into IP addresses.

When you pay for an Internet account, the company that provides the Internet service is supposed to give you automatic access to a telephone book – a Domain Name Server. Your programs are rigged to consult the ISP’s telephone book whenever they need to look up a telephone number.

Sadly, some ISPs still haven’t figure out how to automatically offer a telephone book for your programs to use – in computer lingo, they don’t have a functional default DNS server. Instead of fixing their problem, they force you, the customer, to reach into the bowels of your computer and manually specify the location of a telephone book.

If you’ve ever received a notice from your Internet Service Provider – or if you’ve ever watched over the shoulder of one of the guys who installs your ADSL line – and you’ve been instructed to go into the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog and type in a Preferred DNS server number, you should know that the only reason for doing so is to cover up for the mistakes of the Internet Service Provider.

You should also know that if you move your computer somewhere else, or switch to a different Internet Service Provider, having a DNS server number hard-coded in your computer can cause all sorts of grief.

What can you do? Vote with your feet. If a technician monkeys around with your computer and gives you a manual DNS server number, or if you get instructions from your ISP showing you in great detail how to manually change your DNS, get a different ISP. Life’s too short to deal with bozos.

Flushed: In a related DNS question, one of the people at the PC Group Therapy session asked about “flushing the DNS cache”. That sounds both mystical and scatological, but in fact it isn’t as interesting as you might think.

As your computer looks up all of these typed-in addresses, translating them into weird-looking numbers, it keeps a small stockpile of numbers that it’s already looked up. It’s kind of like jotting down phone numbers so you don’t need to look them up in the phone book. That stockpile of already-looked-up IP addresses is called a “DNS cache”.

Unfortunately, from time to time, the stockpile of already-looked-up phone numbers gets messed up: you type in phuket gazette.net and, somehow, you get sent to outermongolia.info.

When the stockpile gets scrambled (in computer lingo, when your DNS cache becomes corrupted), you throw away all of the already-looked-up-entries (“flush the cache”) and start all over again.

Some people think their computers go faster after they’ve flushed the cache. In fact, the computer runs just a little bit slower, until it’s filled up the cache again. The difference is hardly perceptible.

Well served: Shortly after the second meeting, Paul Spring (Email: admin@thaiservers.com) let me in on a surprise announcement that should be of interest to any companies or individuals who want their own Web server.

Paul runs Thaiservers.com. He hosts both of my websites, and he’s done a great job of it for years. For example, one morning I sent Paul an emergency email at 3:04 am about a domain transfer.

He got the new server up and running, and sent me back a confirming message at 3:35 am that same day.

Thaiservers works with a very capable “server farm” in the US. That’s why my sites stay up so well: Paul provides help here in Phuket, but the servers are in the US.

Paul’s worked out a deal with his server farm to provide an exceptional package for folks who want to have their own Internet servers. Mind-boggling, actually.

One of the packages includes a Pentium D930 3.0 GHz with 2 x 2MB cache and 1GB of RAM, 250GB SATA II hard disk, 100mbps direct connection to the Internet, 2,000GB per month bandwidth, Linux, Cpanel and WHM.

Total price: a little over 10,000 baht a month, including round-the-clock support in Phuket via email, mobile phone and SMS.

Paul runs, maintains and updates your server to make sure it’s always in tip-top condition, hardens the server and plugs bugs in the operating system and control panel. You own the server. You can change anything that you like.

If you have a computer question, I would like to invite you to join me on Sunday between 10 am and noon at my Sandwich Shoppe in Patong. Have something to sell – a computer, an Internet service, a hardware repair center? Looking for a job, or freelance work?

Come by on Sunday, and every Sunday for the foreseeable future. No rules. No holds barred. No commitments. No guarantees. Let’s just get together and see if we can solve each other’s problems.

If you can’t make it this week, not to worry. I’ll be there next week, too. And the next…

When he isn’t writing computer books and magazine and newsletter articles, knocking Microsoft around on his website, or swinging a butcher knife, Woody Leonhard (woody@khunwoody.com, www.askwoody.com) runs Khun Woody’s Bakery and the Sandwich Shoppe in Patong.

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