1949threepence

This is actually my current specialism, except I also collect varieties. If I was going for dates only and no variety, I'd go for GEF minimum. As I collect varieties, some of which are extremely rare, I've had to settle for near fine in some cases. ETA: No, collecting by date isn't "obsolete" - and even if it were, I'd still collect by date as it's what I like doing. Don't allow your collecting preferences to be influenced by what others tell you, or what you hear and read.

That's true. However, as Peter would say, it's now a thrower.

Amazon had a cloud issue yesterday, which caused considerable disruption - link Draw your own conclusions about trusting anything important to the cloud.

Not in person. Made a couple of e mail bids, which are obviously in the lap of the Gods, as unable to influence the outcome on the day, if circumstances prevent actual attendance.

Absolutely. They've got to get up very early in the morning to get one past us. Even if one doesn't spot a scam/liar, another one or several will.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not decrying cloud per se. It's a fantastic resource, and I know that the storage is replicated. But anything that I personally consider valuable, gets stored on a memory stick and held in a place only I know about. It's probably my suspicious and sceptical nature that's at the root of it

If you're interested, you can obtain a copy of the Christie's catalogue for the Freeman sale of 23.10.84, from The Fitzwilliam Museum. Only a copy, but better than nothing - link Scroll down to Christies and you'll see that the sale is there. There is an e mail address you can contact.

Yes, it does use the so called "cloud", which is just a somewhat confusing name for personal stuff being stored on various third party servers who lease out space to domain owners. The obvious idea is that you either don't have a hard drive for personal storage, or if you do, space on it is saved, because your documents are stored elsewhere. It's OK for unimportant material, but there's no way I'd trust it with anything important. Quite apart from information being compromised by hostile elements, there's always the possibility that something will go badly wrong and whatever you have there will be lost.

As far as bulk transfer of many thousands of e mails from one platform to another is concerned, experience has shown me that this is always a king sized pain in the arse. However, you might find this link useful.

To compromise you could set up an entirely new account, and keep your old one running as an essentially defunct account, but one you could still keep checking. You could use a web based e mail account such as hotmail, who now call themselves "outlook" and are a lot better than they used to be, or g mail. Just change your advertised e mail address to the new one so that more and more customers get used to it. But you would still have the reassurance that the old one isn't dead in case any long standing customers send to that. Why don't you have a website, out of interest?

It could be a bot or some other form of malware, but to be honest it has all the hallmarks of a spammer who has spoofed your e mail address and the undelivered messages are backscatter from that. I agree about running a virus check, and I'd also as a matter of urgency, change your password and e mail account name.

Yes, agreed. It's beginning to get on my tits now, as well as driving me cuckoo

A little bird told me it's actually 16.25. Although I didn't want to beak in, I just couldn't help having a gander.

Unofficial counterstamping of coins was especially common practice during the Victorian & Edwardian eras. Sometimes it was an entire name, like J.T.Smith, or other times it was a slogan such as "votes for women". Obviously various individuals, for different reasons, obtained letter/number punches and deliberately counterstamped coins. It could be done officially as well, as explained here

To be honest, cultural philistine that I am, I wouldn't have known. But having spotted the error, maybe you should tell them.

I agree. There are many instances of doubling and they are so variable in nature that it would be very difficult to separately classify each type. One interesting feature of Obverse 4 is that the L C WYON is much more easily visible than on other types, but at the same time, the L appears as an I on most of them.

Cheers Terry - foolproof method. That's really useful to know .

That is bad, although I must admit, I find Obverses 2 & 3 very difficult to tell apart. I couldn't do it from a photo. No excuse for them though. There's the distinct danger that a buyer might be thinking they're getting a Freeman 10, when in fact it's a 13, and they've already got one.

Fake news I can live with - just so long as it's not fake coins

Although they shouldn't be that self important that they can't courteously acknowledge someone else's time and input. I can't be the only one to notice that customer service standards have declined quite significantly over the last 10 or so years, to a point where some organisations now get quite defensive and hostile when shortcomings are drawn to their attention (not saying LCA do)

Was it this one, Bob?

Were you the negative feedback? On checking my feedback, I note that I have actually bought a coin from him in the past. It was my 1869. Bought 2nd October 2015.

What you mean literally photographs the screen? That's plain odd. Why not just take a screenshot?

Although a very nice coin, I think the vendor may be somewhat ambitious with the price he's asking. I mean, c'mon, you're 'avin a larf my son link

I don't know, unfortunately, as I've never used them. What you say though is enough to put anyone off. The process shouldn't be this time consuming, difficult and inconveniencing for the end user. The steps should be sequentially laid out, as well as crystal clear, with a helpline to someone who can speak English and knows what they're on about That way there's no confusion.