Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Aug 27, 2011, 6:44 pm
Well, it's time for a review of a place we ate at today, and given I love my food, I find I haven't written enough about food on this site. Let's start to rectify this with a restaurant review. We went off to Detroit's, an American style diner in Castle Street, the West Midlands town of Worcest...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Aug 7, 2011, 4:02 am
Here's a photo of a residence in Canonstown in Cornwall. I was trying in particular to take a picture of the name of the building, which I snapped from a moving vehicle, so the picture isn't perfect. I took the picture whilst we were on holiday in Cornwall last week, as it is an example of the Corni...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Aug 6, 2011, 11:26 am
My previous explorations of Cornish were put off somewhat by numerous different orthographies used and proposed during the Orthographic Civil War, which raged from 1988 and ended, or at least called a ceasefire, in 2008. However, as one person pointed out to me in jest, they wouldn't be Celts witho...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Jul 25, 2011, 3:35 am
Last night I went hunting for Alcor and Mizar in Ursa Major. It is of particular interest as the two stars, Alcor and Mizar, are apparently visible with good eyesight to the naked eye as two separate stars, and the stars were used by Arab astronomers in the Middle Ages as an eyesight test. Unfortuna...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Jun 20, 2011, 3:00 am
This time in my occasional astronomy, we have a photo not of a natural object, but a photo I took of a man-made object, namely the International Space Station. It was taken on 19 June 2011 approx 2330 (Universal Time), about a mile East of Worcester city centre.
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 30, 2011, 7:36 pm
I use a white stick as a symbol cane (identity cane for US readers) and wear big ugly shades over my normal glasses, due to my eyesight going downhill over the last couple of years, with the intention of leading as normal a life as possible in comparison to when I didn't have eyesight problems. It h...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 30, 2011, 6:19 am
Well, after my last blogpost at how bad BT has been as a broadband and phone provider, we come to what I hopefully can call the final chapter on this (I had thought that this would be the penultimate chapter, but I received a final communiqué; read on for more info). I e-mailed Warren Buckley as pr...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 24, 2011, 8:16 am
Last night, I went back out to play with the camera and binoculars and hopefully get something on camera about midnight BST (2300 UT). I was buggering about with the zoom facility and managed to capture the image above. Again it's not very clear, but I'm happy with it, as it shows quite nicely the b...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 18, 2011, 6:51 pm
Again we turn to the Moon. I'm not sure what I did tonight with the camera (taken approx 11pm), but it seemed to photograph correctly for once. In this picture you can see it is just past the full Moon if you examine it closely, with the Moon's eastern limb starting to go into shadow (particularly n...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 15, 2011, 3:07 pm
I've just been officially uninvited from attending the Royal wedding later on this month. Apparently the Palace was not impressed by my proposed choice of attire.
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 12, 2011, 3:28 pm
50 years ago, Mankind headed into space for the first time. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin headed out for a 108 minute ride into space, making him the first human ever to boldly go where no one had gone before. We remember him today, and all the brave pioneers who have headed out into the cosmos ove...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 10, 2011, 5:54 pm
This afternoon, I had a chance to photograph one of the few celestial bodies I can see with the naked eye, namely our local satellite, the Moon. I'd tried photographing it at night previously, but with no success, as it came out extremely bright and no detail could be made out. Today I tried to snap...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Apr 3, 2011, 6:38 pm
Back outside for Saturn. I'd photographed this globe previously, but with Saturn in opposition this weekend, tonight was the best time to see it. What does opposition mean? Well, you've got all the planets and other objects going round and round the Sun and their position is continually changing in ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 23, 2011, 6:07 pm
Finally in my astronomy for the visually impaired, I took a photo of the stars Pollux (left) and Castor (right) in the constellation of Gemini. These two stars make up the heads of the Gemini twins in the imaginary constellation. Interestingly, in 2006, it was confirmed that Pollux has an extrasolar...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 23, 2011, 5:58 pm
Continuing with my astronomy for the visually impaired, I took a look at Orion's belt. This photo is a bit fuzzy, sorry, but I didn't know this until I got back inside. You should however still be able to make out three white spots, almost in a horizontal line about the middle of the picture.
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 23, 2011, 5:46 pm
Next we went to a neighbouring constellation, Orion. Using my personal astronomy for the visually impaired technique (which works for me, but may not work for you; I just do whatever works best for me) I took a look at one of the many interesting features of Orion, namely the star Betelgeuse, a red ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 23, 2011, 5:37 pm
Tonight from my location, a mile east of the centre of an English city, I continued with my quest to observe the night sky in spite of my visual impairment. My technique as always was find the target on the computer and get angles, etc. to know where to look, go outside and try to find it with my po...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 21, 2011, 5:50 am
After exasperation at the situation that Virgin cut my phone off unfairly, put my account with the debt collections department even though I'm actually in credit and they refuse to reconnect it until I drop any idea of leaving Virgin for another phone and broadband provider, I finally contacted the ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 20, 2011, 12:10 pm
After Virgin unjustly and incorrectly inconvenienced me greatly when they cut my phone off when they shouldn't have, you can't say that Virgin Media aren't responsive, but only in some ways, such as when it comes to the "National experts" getting in touch to get my phone working again, a team that d...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 20, 2011, 8:01 am
So what have we learned this weekend about Virgin this weekend? After they unfairly and incorrectly cut me off, I'm not going to get my phone service back. Basically, all time-frames and 48 hour countdowns are now scrapped and we're at a stalemate. On Saturday, three more calls with Virgin led me to...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 19, 2011, 5:46 pm
I have been for some time in correspondence with one of BT's directors, James Mycroft (previously referred to here as E). Unfortunately the correspondence bore no fruit, only a meagre offer of £6 off the next bill which is an insult. In response, I have now sent the e-mail below. Given my experienc...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 18, 2011, 7:20 pm
So we continue with my quest to undertake astronomy in spite of my visual impairment. Tonight, we had a wonderfully clear sky, no clouds, and rather cold too, so less distortion - the only shaking is not the atmosphere causing the stars to twinkle, but my unsteady hands. I had a good look at the ful...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 18, 2011, 9:02 am
So to chase up the reconnection of our phone line after Virgin Media wrongly cut us off unexpectedly, I called Virgin Media back. Firstly I was told again that the debt collections department were dealing, which again I expressed disgust at because I am not in debt to Virgin, I am in fact in credit....
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 17, 2011, 6:19 pm
Still with my phone cut off by Virgin Media when it should not have been (particularly with the lack of information flowing from Virgin to me, the customer), a call back from the Virgin supervisor did come, much to my unexpected surprise. In a nutshell, I was told that no recompense would be forthco...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 17, 2011, 2:10 pm
So today, I've made four phone calls to Virgin Media and still no joy. The crux of the matter is that my account is with the debt collections department. The reason for this is the international phone call made last week. As it registered as unusual activity, they've cut my phone off. As mentioned, ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 16, 2011, 5:04 pm
I called back Virgin Media to chase the reconnection of our line after they ceased our phone service unexpectedly, and find out what was happening to the call back I was supposed to have received from a supervisor in an hour. Virgin Media did not know this, but this was a fine opportunity to measure...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 16, 2011, 3:13 pm
I will write about the progress (or lack thereof) with BT another time, but only thirteen days after being convinced that Virgin Media were the best company and switching to Virgin Media as a phone and broadband supplier, things have come crashing down to sour my opinion of them. On the weekend we h...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 7, 2011, 1:13 pm
One of the most interesting themes in the exploration of Space is the survival of Mankind; in particular, our ability to explore and colonise new worlds. Whereas in olden times, the oceans, Americas, Africa and Australasia were variously for (European) Civilisations the new frontiers, it is evident ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 2, 2011, 5:07 pm
I'd hoped to steer away from writing about BT for a while, but the camel's back has been broken by a straw. I have repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly asked BT for my bill from January 2011 to be issued to me in large print, as I have a visual impairment, which makes it exceedingly difficult for me t...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 2, 2011, 3:00 pm
Our baby is continuing to do well, since my recent write-up of his linguistic advances, bt he surprised us even further with his words this evening! On further analysis of the recent our baby's spoken sounds, he does seem to be developing well with the bilabial and velar phonemes. His favourite cons...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Mar 1, 2011, 3:00 am
Just a small greeting to all my fellow Welsh.... Have a good 'un. May it one day be a Bank Holiday in Wales!
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 28, 2011, 12:29 pm
It's good to talk, so the slogan of a famous company says. And so, now we move on to linguistic matters. With our baby, well over three months old, it is interesting to see how he develops linguistically. There is a whole field of linguistics dedicated to studying how children acquire language and t...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 28, 2011, 9:39 am
I've been writing about issues recently with a certain well known company and have decided to take my custom elsewhere, namely to Virgin Media. We are really looking forward to changing to being Virgin customers, and were given a date of by 1 March 2011 for the arrival of the equipment we need from ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 27, 2011, 4:33 pm
The BT person I have named E was answering e-mails, even on a Sunday, despite his out of office message saying he's not back until next month. This is most commendable. I like this chap. If I were in BT's HR department, I'd think about giving him a raise, as he seems to be pro-active, and I think he...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 27, 2011, 7:46 am
I'm still chasing BT now to find out how much recompense I'm to get for the dreadful experience we've had with them. I still don't know or have a figure. I never did get a call back last week from the Executive Complaints Department at BT to tell me how much refund and recompense they were offering,...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 21, 2011, 12:23 pm
It turns out that this blog appears to be on a BT watchlist. A visitor came from BT Corporate to this site from the following referring address which appears to be a BT intranet site: http://blog.intra.bt.com/blogwatch/ It's interesting to note from the image that BT are only using Internet Explorer...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 14, 2011, 3:40 am
Things had been going so well with the engineer. The engineer left at 10:45 am on Friday, and I thought the day had gone well, with a possible resolution date provided, of maybe late next week. Fair enough, as mentioned, the work needed some digging which would ause the delay. I then had a text mess...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 11, 2011, 7:32 am
The BT saga continues. Here's a quick recap of what's happened so far. After the first week ended (with the mystery of the missing broadband and also a missing e-mail) and having to deal with appalling call centres, we went into the second week where the line started to fail too, and also the treatm...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 10, 2011, 5:05 pm
Yet again the broadband was down most of the day today, with the router displaying the yellow light of death, as it has become known in our house. Not good. when it was up and working, download speed was 24kbps, and upload speed was 13kbps. I had the opportunity to speak again at lunchtime to A toda...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 9, 2011, 5:16 pm
This is an open letter to the staff at BT. This is almost a desperate, feeble plea, in fact, as I doubt it will get read by any BT employee that will have the power to do anything. Here's a simple request, BT. I'm an ordinary man, with an ordinary family, and I'd love to be able to have the ordinary...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 9, 2011, 3:19 pm
My wife was unable to use the broadband today whilst I was at work because of BT failings and the phone line has continued to be appalling. My wife describes it as the buzzing of bees on the line. A more cynical and suspicious man might state that BT is getting revenge on me for making a complaint, ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 8, 2011, 5:13 pm
Not only is the broadband down, but now the phoneline is giving up the ghost too. The hub arrived this morning. I set it up in six minutes and were rapidly on the net, but still with an exceedingly poor speed, which was no improvement. I returned from work to come through the door to see that the br...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 7, 2011, 5:40 pm
Here's a screen cap from a moment when my computer was briefly able to connect to the net (no thanks to the poor service from BT). It's 32 kbps download and 65 kbps upload. That's slower than the distant days before broadband, in the almost ancient days of dial-up. It's supposed to be in the region ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 7, 2011, 5:23 pm
Here's a photo of the lights on the rubbish router (excuse the poor quality, but my eyesight isn't great, and seeing the window on the back of the camera isn't easy), evidence of the rubbish service from BT. Note, all of them should be blue. The middle one indicates that the broadband connection is ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Feb 6, 2011, 4:13 am
BT are one of the worst companies I've ever dealt with. I may have written about the poor customer service as a Virgin customer, but they don't supply Virgin where I now live, so I had to go with BT. Come back Virgin, all is forgiven.... For the past week, I've been receiving extremely slow service ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Dec 31, 2010, 4:25 pm
I haven't been blogging for a bit, been busy with our new arrival our baby son, who was born late this year. Hello to him! So, what's the latest this year in the Damonic round-up? Family: My eyesight has sadly got worse, I met family in the USA, got to travel a bit, and this year, as mentioned above...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Sep 20, 2010, 6:43 pm
This month is a good month to see Jupiter and Uranus together in the same sector of sky. This photo shows at the bottom of the picture Jupiter (and very, very faintly some of the Galilean moons: from left, Europa and Io, Jupiter itself, and Ganymede) and Uranus at the top, taken at approx 2045 GMT,...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Sep 15, 2010, 9:54 am
I'm currently considering the future and direction of this blog. In order to decide where to look forward, let's first look back, as we first review each of the topics I presented in my first blogpost, back in 2006. Conservatism One of the unwritten political aims of this blog was to see a Conservat...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Sep 14, 2010, 9:22 am
No doubt if you're in the UK you'll have seen the latest advert for thinkbox. Watch it below. It's a great advert, but fails in one respect, in that it does not totally succeed in getting you to recall what the product is that they're selling, or give a thoroughly clear idea of the product. I come ...
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Damon Lord posted an article on Linguanaut.co.uk - Damon Lord's Blog - Aug 14, 2010, 4:00 am
Here's an interesting audio article about blind football and the Blind Football World Cup, which is currently taking place in Hereford, England, starting today, 14 August 2010. For more info on the World Cup, go to http://www.blind2010.com/ Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/interviews/audio_blind_fo...
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