Steve Guy is based in Oxford, UK

For more details contact:

• Legal English Help
• Legal English Help blog

Internet Addiction Problems

• Internet addiction can lead to various problems such as:
• Lost time / missed study
• Fear of making real social contact
• Irregular sleeping patterns – disrupted health
• Lack of exercise leading to obesity.
• Inability to focus on other things.

When challenged, many internet addicts admit that they spend too long on computer and wish they could have a more balanced life. Heavy internet use doesn’t give any lasting feeling of satifaction and users can often develop low self-esteem and become reclusive from normal social activities.

Cures for Internet Addiction

Take away the computer. Lack a heroin addict who can no longer take heroin, this measure will encounter resistance. But, living without a computer is best way for users to realise life can exist without a computer screen. SPending time without computer will force people to find alternatives.

Physical Exercise

Dump your kid on a mountain top and let them walk home. The adventure will do them good.

Encourage Self-Esteem

Losing yourself in a computer world can be a way to avoid real life issues. Boosting kids self-esteem may encourage them to go back into the real world. Don’t tackle the problem by saying they are a real loser for spending all the time on the internet.

Support any Other Activity.

Maybe your child used to be very good at some kind of sport or music. Keep talking about this as a way to motivate them to go back to old habits and old activities.

Email Templates can help:

• Answering similar questions.
• Save Time
• Create a professional, carefully thought out answer, which you can use again and again with minor personal touches.

Examples of Email Templates

Dear ,

Thanks for your recent enquiry regarding copyright issues.

Our copyright policy is explained on this page http://www.netwriting.co.uk/copyright

Basically, this means the content on the site can be reproduced, if you give credit to the original source. If it is republished online, it must include a link to this site.

Hopefully, this answers your question.

Kind Regards,

Tejvan Pettinger

http://www.netwriting.co.uk/

Following on from the very popular Uxbridge English dictionary, the new version offers a range of new words and an interesting take on their meaning.

Cursory; A place where children learn to swear

Mumps; Heaps of unwanted mothers

Halitosis; Bad breath brought on by a comet

Baccanalian; To bet on a martian

Chiropractise; To get ready for a trip to Egypt

Senile; What to do whilst in Egypt

Canape; Scottish inability to settle bills

Canneloni; Scottish refusal of your request for an Overdraft

Acne; A dyslexics walking stick

Warming; A Geordies chinese vase

Binmen; Post-op Transexuals

Groin; The ‘GO’ light in Birmingham

Thesauras; A disorder following consumption of curry

Amish; Similar to an Arm

Caesarian Section; Part of a salad

Navigate; Scandal involving road menders

at Amazon.co.uk

The Real Meaning of words – examples from original book

We use them subconsciously without realising:

• How frequently we use them
• How they add nothing to the conversation
• And how they can irritate people.
• How they can sound condescending

A common example is adding ‘you know’ to the start of sentences. ‘You know, people speak too much.’

Examples of Unnecessary Words

• Actually,
• I mean
• Well,

All these words can also convey a kind of condescension.

I am making a big effort to remove these unnecessary words. Speak less, say more. Silence is good.

From now on, no sign produced by Birmingham City Council will contain the punctuation mark.

Debates over whether Kings Norton really should be King’s – or even Kings’ – Norton may rage on, but they will be useless.

And nearby Druids Heath – which was never actually home to one, let alone many, druids – will never take on the possessive, no matter how furious local apostrophe advocates become.

The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.

However the decision was described as “absolute defeatism” by John Richards, the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

from: Telegraph

The simplest is when an apostrophe replaces a letter

• It is = It’s.
• I am = I’m

Singular Possessive.

An Apostrophe is used to indicate possession.

• E.g. Richard’s computer. (the computer belonging to Richard)

Singular Possessive ending in s

• Socrates’ discourses (the teachings of Socrates)

Plural Possessive

If many people are involved we put the apostrophe at the end

• The nurses’ uniform (the uniform belonging to the many nurses.)

Recently, they bough Feedburner. Last week, there was a notice that we would have to swtich over to Google Feedburner, so I made the switch. In the process, I seemed to lose about 40% of my hard won readers. On some blogs it was more than 50%.

• 8 Effective ways to increase RSS readership

vHost didn’t work well. The server crashed twice in our first 30 days so we got our money back. Though someone else said it has performed well.

Dreamhost VPS. This is quite easy to use and you can select how much CPU use and mysql database you want to buy. When I tried it, the VPS was very new and my sever kept going down and manually needed restarting by me. The effect was that I had far more down time than on shared hosting. Fortunately, I was able to move back to shared hosting. This problem may have been resolved by now, though.

Hostican VPS. So far so good. For VPS, we recommend choosing managed VPS, it is more expensive; I know some who had problems with DNS on a non managed Hostican VPS.

This is the 3 hosts we have tried. But, I’m still looking for a reliable, good value private server with high resource availability