Westie

We met right here on GA. Back then it was a smaller community here, and we were both online here almost every day. These days I don't get to visit more than every couple of months or so. We did a "long distance" thing that meant visiting each other in our respective countries every 6-8 weeks, but that was incredibly hard. Not only was it difficult in terms of distance and time, but also it was incredibly expensive to buy flights and hotels etc. I got a job in London in 2012 (in time to see the olympics!!) and we moved here. Things were hard at first because Paya had come to London just as the worst of the job market hit post recession. It took a long time to settle into our lives here and really start to build a future. We came through all that though, and we've built a fun life for ourselves. We travel a lot (london is a great base for that) and we both have awesome work opportunities. Finally after 8 years together (at the time) we got married last year. We are about to celebrate 9 years together.

So, I would imagine that many members here wont remember who I am. i've not been active for a while because... well, life gets in the way sometimes doesn't it? 8 Years ago last week, I started a relationship right here on GA. I met Paya right here, and our friendship blossomed into something more. I was in the UK, he was in the Czech Republic. We had a long distance relationship for 2 years, before finally moving to London together 6 years ago. This is just a quick stop by to where it all began, to announce that yesterday - We got Married. Yes, another GA wedding. We were lucky enough that our friends from GA, Bleu and Jian, were at our ceremony as guests - I told them they were our GA ambassadors for the day. Now... not to rush away, but a honeymoon awaits. All the best. West

To add to this, by 1799 there were 106 admirals of the Royal Navy. Even if they were of an aristocratic background, with a large and varied aristocracy (which had it's own social levels within it), it is unlikely that Caroline would have met all of them. Especially since, if you were a Northern admiral, you might never spend time in London - as shore leave would require you to travel to the North of England to spend time with family there. There was a 'northern court' of aristocracy that rarely made it to London or spent any time with the royal family. I would argue that Caroline and George are now *so* exalted, that there is a lower rung of aristocracy, never mind admirals, that would struggle to get an audience with the Grangers.

And it's really excellent Glad to have you back! :-)

I'm sure he's just busy. I had mail from him as recent as the 27th June. Going quiet for a few weeks isn't unusual if work gets in the way.

Not at all. He is in this instance a made up character (I think). Prince Genarro (1 n, 2 r) - our character - has no entry that I can find in any of my usual sources. That said, Prince Gennaro Bourbon-Two Sicilies (note 2 n, 1 r in the spelling of the first name), can refer to two people. The first is the eighth child of King Ferdinand (the King we meet in the story). He dies aged 8 of Smallpox, and for historical reasons would more usually be referred to as Prince Gennaro of Naples and Sicily. The second is Prince Genarro, son of Prince Alfonso, Count of Caserta - who was a grandchild of our King Ferdinand and died in 1944. I would suggest he is a composite character that has no place in real history, but has been created to fit in with the overall era. Additionally, I think he was a convenient plot device at the time, but there is little evidence he plays a significant part in the story. I would suggest that as the junior midshipman, we will see very little interaction between him and the captain - as indeed we rarely do with the other midshipmen. Regardless, as Chapter 42 saw the ship transfer to Calvert - headed to St Helena - and the only officer to leave was Clifton, I suspect the Prince will be off stage for some time.

Hey, this is all good news, When we met you in London last year, there seemed to be a disconnect between you and your Ex; maybe it was one you weren't aware of yet, or maybe you were. You seemed like a confident guy, constantly having to restrain himself. You could see a huge amount of excitement in your eyes at being in London and seeing something new. But then I see you here and occasionally on facebook and you're like a man set free. Goals, dreams, that are yours and yours alone. Shared with your loved ones, but chosen by you. I really hope things continue to get better and better for you. West

Good things some to those who.... wait

Hmmmm.... Patience men. Like Granger, sometimes we will spend weeks becalmed on an ocean like glass, but eventually the wind will blow... Usually just in time to fight off and escape a bunch of xebecs...

We should start at the beginning. Not yet mentioned: Bob Jensen in chapter 19 of CAP, Fritz in Chapter 33 of CAP.

Ha!! I've been so busy with work lately (spending an increasing amount of time over on your side of the pond) that I got worried I was neglecting the beta reading. So I logged on to my emails with trepidation, imagining all sorts of gentle or not so gentle ribbing - only to find the only messages were for baldness cures and penis enlargements. Oh, and an interesting email from a Nigerian prince that apparently is going to make me millions....

I always find that some of the earlier stories still stand up quite well on their own. I am about to fly out to Montreal (from the UK) and usually make sure I have a couple of the old stories as ebooks for the flight. Whenever Mark takes a break, I often find myself reading the old books to get my fix.

Well, its a smooth read - but the de facto authority on English Manners is of course Debretts. Unless you are looking specifically at the aristocracy, in which case you reach for Burke's. I agree though that this is eminently more accessible - debretts books are obscenely expensive.

Ahhh, so in that context, to set "all" plain sails is to set the entire suite of "ordinary" sails on the ship. Most of the time, a ship would be under limited sail, because depending on the wind a larger sail can actually cause more resistance/drag, than it benefits from being set.

I'm not sure which common phrase you are referring to here - as there are two similar. "all plain sailing" and "all [under] plain sail". I will answer both here - but I suspect you mean the second one. I will explain that one last though, because the meaning logically follows from the first. The origin of the phrase "plain sailing" actually does not relate to the "sails" of a ship as such. While we now know the word "plain" to mean "ordinary" and "Plane" to mean a flat surface, up until the mid 1800s spelling was not considered too big of a deal, so "plain" and "plane" were used interchangeably. Anyone who has read Queen Victoria's letters for example will tell you that even at the apex of society, it was quite acceptable to spell a word 3 different ways in the same letter. "Plain" sailing actually uses both these meanings... that the sailing was "plane" - flat, without incident, calm. it was also "plain" - ordinary, nothing amiss, nothing untoward. Now, when a ship was "under plain sails", it takes a similar meaning as above - "ordinary". Plain Sails are the daily working sails of a ship, as opposed to sails that one might use for ceremonial purposes. It was in fact a point of pride in the navy that the British has "plain" sails - the French usually had pristine sails on their ships, which of course was taken to mean that they spent more time in harbour than doing any real "sailing". Hope that helps!

Oh... one final point. I would just like to wish a very happy 257th birthday to Admiral Horatio Nelson :-) being away made me lose track of days!

It's an interesting point that these days allies will work with "guest nations" - what you have to remember though is that even with current turmoil, we live in a time of unprecedented stability in Europe. Being an ally is a much more permanent proposition today than it was during the Napoleonic wars. Over a twenty year period for example, Russia was alternately Britain's ally, then enemy, then ally. Within the following 100 years, we would both go to war with Russia, yet also supply a wife for the Czar. What I'm trying to say is, that in a world where friendships could be broken in an instant, you allow foreigners only the smallest crack in the door of your armed forces. Those that do serve, you make sure owe their fealty to you and not their own country where possible.

Before I start, I should just say that I am replying to this from a train, currently between Bratislava in Slovakia and Brno in the Czech Republic, having started out from Budapest this morning. I mention this for two reasons - the first is obviously to brag, but the second is that I don't have a full access to my usual references. That said, I think I can answer your questions regardless with around 95% certainty, so here goes: Firstly, I'm not sure why you assume that the Prince is anything more than a tool used for a specific story element... I didn't get the impression he was anything important and apart from being "there" in the background, I doubt he would have any major part to play. If however he DID appear on deck in a Neapolitan Navy Uniform, two things would happen. The first would be a court martial: He is a kings officer improperly dressed. He is an ally, but in paid service to the British Sovereign, and so outside of his own territory he owed his loyalty, life, and honour entirely and absolutely to George III. I can think of a number of foreign captains who wore British colours, but I think it would be unthinkable - except in some very specific circumstances - to wear the uniform of another country. The second thing that would happen is.... (in relation to the pirates).... Nothing. If they recognised the uniform, they would know Naples to be a country in turmoil. The French were occupying most of Italy, and within 3 months of this chapter, we will see the fall of Naples itself - with a republic declared. The King (Ferdinand I) would have to retreat to his other Kingdom of Sicily to stage the fight to restore his throne. It is incredibly unlikely that the Oranians would feel any threat whatsoever from Naples, and indeed might welcome an excuse to further harass trade in the region. I'm not sure the Oranians needed to "know" about the treasure. It would be enough that they knew Granger was in the region - they would have been keeping an enhanced look out. Moreover, they pretty much made a day-job out of piracy anyway, so its more likely than not that they just stumbled onto the convoy.

Unfortunately, DMCA takedown only applies to servers in the US. If the server of the site you are complaining to is based in the EU, you will almost certainly have a higher burden of proof requirement before the site owner has to act. It's worth getting some information on the EU process if possible - I know one ISP that refuses to even read a DMCA notice if issued

His name is sean o'donnell and he is apparently a model/youtuber/social media celebrity type guy. I don't know that off my head by the way.... but from the joys of using google image search

Depends where in the UK, and your class. The Bunker, the Lav, the Khasi, the bog, the privvy, the wash-closet (W.C.), or as my dear old Grandma used to say, "The smallest room". Oh, and the word toilet itself... My grandmother used to use the phrase "attending to my toilet" and it meant her morning ablutions - nothing to do with the toilet itself.

Jon, I've told you this before, but the very fact that you're so "nice" let's people who are most definitely not nice try and take advantage. They mistake "nice" for "weak", and then they are more shocked and offended that you don't automatically roll over than they would have been if they already knew your answer would be **** ***. You need to stand up for yourself, whether it be in relationships, work, or at school/uni. A little bit of belligerence (not too much) can go a long way.

I can see you are a linux evangelist, and I can sympathise with your point of view. That said, I think there is a significant amount of bias in some of what you say that I would like to balance out. To be clear, I have also spent some time playing around in the 'alternative' OS world; OS/2, Linux (Red Hat, ubuntu, fedora), and some playing around with unix and solaris (not great for desktops). In my work, I am an IT professional - but I should caveat that by confessing to being at a leadership level rather than 'on the tools' so to speak, so for most people my opinion on this would probably be worth less than a trained monkey's. So, onto Windows. Yes, $100 a pop - but for anyone running Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 it is (currently) free. So for anyone already on a recent version of Windows, your investment has already been made. Windows is a de facto standard, which means that for most people there isn't a learning curve. For people like you and I, the learning curve might not seem like much for linux, but for a huge number of people even a minor change in the environment can be tricky to navigate. The new UI in windows 8 and it being an utter disaster shows how a relatively minor conceptual change can damage the ability of people to adapt. Onto the spyware and security aspect. As you rightly pointed out, around 1% of users have a linux distribution and they tend to be tech savvy. Conversely, there is a smaller pool of users, and those users are less likely to be fooled into downloading malware or spyware. Therefore the possible return on investment is much lower for the creators of such packages. As Linux becomes more popular and accessible, that situation will reverse considerably. It is more secure for now. And while yes, Windows does send information back to Microsoft, that is completely within the users control and can be countermanded by changing settings. Microsoft could and should make this process much more intuitive, but you do them a disservice by claiming they are notified "every time you do something on your computer". In terms of software availability, yes - it is "easy" nowadays to compile into multiple OS environments. But compiling the same code for 3, 4, or 5 operating systems is not fool-proof and for a commercial product to run to the same standard on each it WILL require customisations. Not least if you are calling a custom class or method within Windows that doesn't exist elsewhere. Theres only so much you can achieve (efficiently) with software like wine. There IS an overhead to maintaining different distributions, and so a commercial company will of course look at return on investment. A good example is the popular Steam gaming client for Windows. It has 781 MILLION games on it for Windows. It also produces a version for Linux, which has recently hit a major milestone of 1,000 games. Whichever way you sell it, using linux limits your choices at the moment - and while that might not be an entirely fair state of affairs, no amount of grandstanding is going to change the reality of that in the short term. So, yes, there are many drawbacks to Linux for a standard user, and they should be aware of that before they step - like Alice - through the looking glass into a world that is vastly different from their expected reality. I agree with you very strongly about security. Windows is notoriously poor in this area, but it must also be said that a massive volume of security issues stem at least in part from poor user behaviour. Not installing anti-virus, scripts on websites (as you alluded to with your firefox comments), or downloading without checking the trustworthiness of the source. I'm not completely wedded to firefox - it has some behavioural kinks that I don't like. My browser of choice is actually opera, though I use chrome at the office. All three though have something in common - install the right plugins and change the right settings and you are vastly reducing your level of risk. On the web side, the company I work for has moved to make sure all our sites are standards compliant, which hopefully should ensure that whatever OS or browser you are using, you get the same experience. That doesn't always work in reality, because compliance to a standard is an elastic concept for both google and microsoft. I am impressed at the moment with the new "edge" browser from Microsoft, but the lack of plugin availability for blocking ads, scripts and other nasties means it is not (yet) something I would recommend. That said, from a performance and resource control point of view, it is miles ahead of any version of internet explorer. I have just bought myself the most expensive laptop I have ever owned. It's Alienware, and sometimes I feel sick about how much it cost. But I can tell you, based on my own experience, professional judgement, and a fair amount of gut feel - it will remain a Windows-only machine. I'm not saying you are wrong in what you say, but for my own activities, Windows remains by far the better option right now. West

Reminding me that my age now starts with a 3 is not a nice way to start the day...

It's a nice achievement, but I'm always uncomfortable celebrating this kind of thing - like the gold/diamond Jubilees etc. I know the queen herself dislikes these celebrations, and I can see why. From our point of view, we are celebrating her reign. But from her point of view, her reign started with a tragic and traumatic event - the death of her father, to whom she was very close. So to her, it must seem an awful thnig that we are not counting the years since she became queen - rather it represents a rather macabre count of "it's 63 years since your father died".