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When I was a new boy at 'Motor Boat & Yachting' we received an invitation to join an Inspection cruise of the Caledonian Canal aboard the British Waterways tug 'Scot II' Amazingly, no-one else could go, so I got the job: night sleeper to Inverness, being hauled by a streamlined locomotive through the Highlands while having kippers for breakfast in the fining car - all expenses paid. The voyage turned out to be an annual booze-up for local journalists, who did not look at the canal too much, but on the way the deckhand explained to some of us why the banks were starting to collapse. Stones, carefully laid on the shore, rested on planks a short way below the waterline. These, in turn, rested on elm pegs and these were rotting. Was anything being done? He said nothing was. Someone undertook to have a word about it, but when I went again some years later on a hire cruiser,embankment collapses were to be seen at several points. Lock gates, in places, were wound ope ny folk sticking poles in metal windlasses, then walking solemnly round in a circle. I don't know if that goes on (or if the elm peg matter was ever resolved)

If someone is a self-confessed poor speller, harping on about it and extracting the urine by endlessly referencing it does, I'm afraid, qualify as bullying and you should be ashamed of yourself. It certainly doesn't encourage someone to get more involved in the forum and, perhaps, get better at putting their meanings across in the process. It aint clever and it aint funny. You can disagree with what was written, which I did, but responses of such stupidity add nothing to the debate, or, in fact, to the various threads of the thread, especially as one of the valid points is that accurate spelling isn't that important. It just rather indicates that you're too thick to work it out.

It is a good idea to check you have the wires the correct way round with an LED bulb before you connect something as expensive as a router.

As I've said before, the important thing is that you get understood. But it has to work the other way, too, and you seem to be deliberately refusing to take the point of this thread, and getting a bit aggressive about it. Nobody has suggested poor spelling or grammar is laziness, though of course some of it is. It's only a skill like any other, though easier to learn when your brain's young and like a sponge. "So what" is because these things are interesting to some of us, so we are discussing them. If they don't interest you, fine, but we aint going to "move on" because you don't want to participate. Reasonably good spelling and grammar helps communication, and it's hard to achieve much these techy days without that. There again, being able to understand and write musical notation you'd think would be essential for a composer, but Lennon and McCartney did pretty well without it.

Three alternatives?

They were not very nice to poor Toad when he was incarcerated, but Badger, Ratty and Mole soon sorted them out.

Battery voltage in on the red and black next to eachother as marked on the stabiliser. Stabilised voltage out to the twin socket yellow plus and black next to it negative. Normally I would expect the centre pin on the cigarette lighter plug to be positive but that will depend upon how you connect the wires from the stabiliser. you may find the blades on the sockets are different sizes. That is the bit that you must get correct. You need to test the plug that normally goes into the router to ensure you know if the centre pin is pos or neg, its usually pos but one can't be 100% sure. There may be a little diagram on the router that tells you. When you connect the plug and plug it into the sockets double check you have the polarity correct otherwise it will be new router time ----- probably.

You are, perhaps, not making a distinction between the spoken and written word. The spoken word can be colloquial, with all sorts on 'mistakes', and people will still appreciate what is being said as they have some form of contact with the speaker. However, the written word is usually read without the author being there. It needs to be well written, with correct punctuation, if you want to put over your ideas in a way that shows people that you have spent some time on putting those ideas into an understandable format, and it also suggests that your research is sound. The modern media, such as that which we are using here, comes somewhere in between, which is a good reason why you should never rely upon what you read on a computer screen.

As a teenager I had a friend who worked in Allders, a large department store in Sutton, Surrey, sadly long since closed. One day a woman came in and asked him "where can I get felt?" Apparently he had trouble suppressing his giggles whilst directing her to the haberdashery department.

I know a few boats that have 47kg cylinders (Dutch barges or ex working boats) However I think Alan had a caravan park or still does and was just pointing out how expensive small gas bottles are? I for one used to fill them myself from our pump as it saved a fortune!

Of course, if you think about it, no words actually mean anything real anyway, however they're said or spelt. Somehow, we allocate certain meanings to certain noises (or shapes on paper), but something that writes is no more really an aunt's pen than it's la plume of a tante. It's all just consensus, and so is spelling and grammar. The crucial thing is whether your meaning gets across. And I gather that at the atomic level, most of everything isn't there anyway, which is why nothing matters much except whether you enjoy life or not, so picking on someone cos they don't write proper is a bit of a waste of time, whatever that is. I think I need another drink.

Not in my experience they aren't. Personally I feel social media and the Internet are doing more harm to spelling and grammar.

Isn't this an example of what he was complaining about? Ok the posters comment isn't exactly an easy read but if it bothers you so much ignore it Scousers and those of us from the posh side of the water add a Y to words, chippy, offy (offie?), kwiky

Fine, but no one is. We're just discussing stuff. But pointing out a weakness is not bullying, otherwise how is one to know about it and improve? Harping endlessly on it, however, is, if it's something beyond the ability of the person to change. We get this in the band, someone gets told they're playing something wrong and instead of trying to put it right, they go off in a huff saying they've been picked on. I decided life's too short!

trombone broken?

I have spoken to CRT. The moorings will be restricted but available.

"Two choices" when they mean "a choice"

Probably about 25-30 boats past already this morning, including the first Wyvern. ...and not a single one called Probate.

Yes, pushing buttons in cabinets, these days. I think this chap is about as solemn as it gets.

CRT used to publish information regarding the number of days lost to emergency closures. However, they fudged the figures by excluding closures 'beyond our control'. They finally abandoned this after I published information taken from the stoppage database showing that - Number of closures and days lost to closures were increasing year on year. CRT failed to make target every year. They were excluding a higher proportion of stoppages each year (80% in the final year of publication). From 1 April, I have started tracking the number of closures showing on CRT's stoppage database -

I have a 1940 "Motor" annual that describes the cars adapted to run on coal gas. Special filling points were provided in larger cities to refill them from the gas mains. Another alternative to petrol was the producer gas trailer, basically a trailer-mounted coke furnace that, from memory, had to be alternately supplied with water (to make steam that reacted with the coke to produce a hydrocarbon gas) and air (to heat up the coke again and generate carbon monoxide). A point about liquid fuels is that we are used to comparing them in terms of volume, such as miles per gallon. The true comparson used by engineers is by comparing mass, as a given mass of light hydrocarbon will yield approximately the same energy as the same mass of a dense hydrocarbon. But the volume needed to store a given mass of hydrogen is many, many times that for a heavy oil like diesel, quite apart from the problem of the ability of hydrogen molecules to seep through parts other fuels cannot reach ( to parody Heiniken). I remember a chapter in a school chemistry book on hydrogen that started with "The gas the earth lost". Apparently hydrogen molecules are so light that they can easily overcome the gravitational attraction of the earth and so escape into space, one reason for the absence of free hydrogen from the earth's atmosphere.

But meaning as use is "real", you've just described the later Wittgenstein's language games (probably intentionally). If by "real", you instead mean whether semantics can impact our world, that too is easily demonstrated by institutions such as marriage or money. There is no it's "just" consensus, because consensus has created semantic spaces that have shaped our world just as much as physical phenomena. We can do many things with words.

And a follow up about a tunnel trip, http://darley135.blogspot.com/2018/03/weregoing-through-tunnel-push-boys-push.html