declanwmagee

Would that it was so, Rob - that's the "neutral" City Centre to the East of Millfield. I think (although I'm happy to be corrected) that the triangle between Peter's Hill and the Unity Flats was already rubble by 1971. I imagine there were similar maps of Sarajevo in the pre-war '80s, or Beirut in the pre-war '60s.

Example tile from the Belfast map. In order to put it into Google Earth I have to split it into tiles and match them all in terms of scale and orientation to the current terrain, and to each other. Lovely job of an evening for a semi-autistic coinie!

I collect Maps and Atlases that are especially interesting from an historical perspective. Favourites include "The People's Atlas", published in 1919, which portrays the Brave New World redrawn by Versailles, and descibes in the preface how these new boundaries will inevitably lead to an endless peace. Also, as an Appendix, has the full text of Wilson's Fourteen Points and the (facsimile) signatures of the Versailles participants. On the other end of the scale, I have a street map of Belfast issued to the British Army in 1971, showing all the areas colour coded Orange or Green. I am working on making a Google Earth overlay out of it because, significantly, all the interface areas are heavily redeveloped and streets that used to run from the Shankill to the Falls, for instance, no longer do... fascinating stuff...

Cripes! better do some research...everything I do is off the record, not just coins!

You have forgeries of those dates? That's interesting. Designed to fool the Edwardian spending public, or 21st century coinies?

Ive bought a few engraved coins of this seller, he seems to be very helpful in answering any questions and I don't think any of my bids with him have been shilled I've bought frequently from Anthony Stocker too, he's kosher!

I had to give an ebay seller a lesson in grading just the other day. Standard stuff: 1921 florin VF+ described as EF+. When I challenged him he said, and I quote: "Hi Declan just read your feed back although positive i never graded the coin all the coins i am selling have been bought from Colin Cooke who i believe is a very reputable international coin dealer i have bought these over many years all i can think is i have mixed coin up so would be happy to refund although i do think it was a very competitive price is it possible to change your feedback kind regards" I just told him that there was more to grading coins than repeating what a dealer says... Needless to say I didn't change my feedback. It wasn't negative, or even harsh, I just told him to watch his overgrading. An Anti-Overgrading Campaign would do eBay no harm at all.

Both 9s are slightly recut on my 1929. Not as clear as Terry's though. Also found it on 1932 and 1911 Hollow neck

Nice though Terry. Good photography too. I'm off to have a closer look at some of my G-V farthings

What's your rarest coin, ciandon?

Oh Patrick, be careful with all that! Show us a clear picture of your best coin, and the catalogue value you think it has...

have a play with cropping, onlyMe. You'll be glad you did.

Sure that's a HALF penny, Patrick? £5 for a Fine LT 1d sounds about right for dealer prices. Since I've been selling I've only ever sold 1 half penny, and that was a duffer, but 12 pennies have passed through my hands.

My coin collection stopped growing in about 1987, and wasn't picked up again till 2003. During that interval it must have occupied dozens of lofts, shoeboxes in suitcases under beds, even lived in a stack of chinese takeaway tupperware containers as I recall. It managed to survive through marriages coming and going, living out of the back of cars, several bouts of proper homelessness too. But come 2003, when I dusted it off and realised I was still interested, I was so glad I'd managed to hang on to it. Not much of that original collection is left now - it's all been upgraded - but my goodness it gave me a start. Don't sell it Patrick! You can always find another quid somewhere.

Well that's interesting. I bought this off him in December and was disappointed. His photos didn't show the somewhat ugly toning as well as mine do, so consequently I sold it quickly at a small loss. I have bought 3 off him that I have been pleased with though: 1836 halfcrown 1860 farthing 1902 threepence

Got to watch out for those fakes - can't be too careful... SimplePeople

Fake 1905 halfcrown? the 5 looks decidedly dicey to me... 1905 halfcrown

Tell your mother that one of the conditions of moving into the small bedroom is that she sets you up with a PayPal account. Then sell your worst coins and buy better ones. Never, ever, sell your best ones.

Just wait until I explain to you what that tiny room with the porcelain bowl is for! I think I've worked that one out - seems like a lot of machinery just to wash one coffee cup at a time though!

I'm back! House move completed on the day we said we'd do it - March 1st. Broadband connected on the 5th, and coin business back up and running now that I've built a desk at the weekend! Rather fun moving into a completely unfurnished place from a bus - it meant we were really starting from scratch. Everyone we know suddenly had lots of stuff they didn't want, so we have managed to accumulate everything in a matter of a few days. The first thing I had to do was build a bed, as the staircase is far too narrow to get one up. Still pinching oursleves every time we wake up here - not quite sure how we pulled this off - blag of the flippin' century. Strange things in the kitchen that you turn and they produce hot water out of nowhere. We don't even have to carry it in, it's just there!

You can also do ridiculously complex stuff within Excel with INDEX, MATCH, and VLOOKUP, without having to feed it out to MSQuery. I have, as Rob quite correctly alluded to, flogged Excel to within an inch of its life in order to avoid real RDBMS work! I drove myself close to the brink of insanity with dBase III about 20 years ago and haven't been back in that direction since learning Lotus 123 soon after that. It'll always be spreadsheets now.

Use software to change the background, Coin Watch. I use Serif Photoplus starter edition - free to download, not a trial. It has an elliptical select tool, so it will draw a smooth circle round the coin, cut out your background, then fill it with whatever colour you like.

With patchy success, I've been playing with Google custom search engines recently. I have a few dozen bookmarked dealer sites and I wanted to be able to search them for a particular coin. So you enter you search term into the Google box, like normal, but instead of searching the entire galaxy, it just searches the websites you specify. Like I say though, patchy success with it so far. Bit like my mechanics!

I spend far more than my monthly income on coins! Every penny I spend on coins has been earned by the coins, whereas my actual cash income is pretty small. I never convert coins to cash, and never spend sweat-earned cash on coins - the same money (always PayPal, I'm afraid, although not always eBay), just goes round and round. I did a calculation the other day. On average, the same PayPal pound gets spent once every 10 days. It comes in, buys coins, those coins go into the collection (if I'm shopping well), kicks out a lesser coin, which goes into the shop, which generates more PayPal. When you're looking at economies, they call it the Velocity of Money. Divide the money supply into GDP and you get an idea of how many times the same pound changes hands each year. For a western economy, it tends to be somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0. Think about that. That means that the vast majority of pounds floating about tend not to change hands AT ALL. The Velocity of Money in my little coin business was 36. The same pound changed hands 36 times each year, on average. As Josie would say...just posting!

plenty down here in our little frost pocket! Chicken footprints all over the place...