I felt a bit queasy for most of yesterday: I think it was due to a bad beer from the night before. Then I couldn't keep my eyes open after 9:30 pm so tumbled into bed. Still, who am I to go to bed early? A car alarm blared away under my bedroom window at around 12:40 am. I went back to sleep fairly easily. Then my mobile phone felt neglected and beep, beeped me awake at 2:40 am as it told me to recharge its batteries, so I did that then. I couldn't stand it by that time so I decided to read for a while. Then I slept until just after 7 am. That happened to me overnight, then! I was dawdling round the second hand car market yesterday evening and found a very nice looking 20 year old racing green Bentley Mulsanne for £8,000: 160,000 miles ... horrifically expensive to run and maintain; but it would look swish in the supermarket car park!! Mrs W can't understand why I was even thinking of replacing our already old car with an even older one!! DW

I see from the Sky News channel that they are showing Jurassic Park THREE on the Sky network on Saturday. Firstly, I didn't know they'd made a third film. Secondly, why did they bother? Surely, we'd all become hacked off by the time the second one ran its course? Incidentally, I saw, and enjoyed, the first Jurassic Park in Bowness on Windermere when it first came out. A flea pit of a cinema I seem to remember and we stayed in the dankest bed and breakfast you could imagine. The views as we drove back to the North East of England, though, were stunning. I'd like to go back just for the views alone! DW

This came in this morning I'm happy to report: Hi Duncan Just to let you know that I found your steps to building a Box and Whisker diagram in Excel absolutely wonderful. Many thanks.... Alison HTH as they say! DW

Just got an alert from amazon.com to say that Managerial Accounting: A Focus on Decision Making by Steve Jackson, Roby Sawyers "... will be released on December 31, 1969. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives" Bearing in mind that today is 15 January 2003, I'm afraid I can't wait! DW

Spoke too soon as the problem came back and even though another attack on Narrator did make a difference, there was something else lurking so I did ANOTHER System Restore. Good old Microsoft! While Windows XP is good, I have had to do three System Restores since last November: never had to do so many! DW

This might be helpful to you! A couple of weeks ago my computer slowed right down and stayed slow: CPU usage was constantly running at 100% even when I was doing nothing and there were no additional tasks suddenly running in the background that I knew about. After a few days of that I carried out a system RESTORE. That solved the problem but it was a bit of a pain as I lost of a couple of software installs and some data files. I know I could have saved the data files by putting them into My Documents before restoring! Today, at the end of my seminar on Activity Based Costing, I was shutting the computer down when Narrator opened itself. I closed it Narrator and switched off the computer. When I came to reboot, the system was really slow and Narrator opened again. I closed Narrator but not the computer. The system ground along really slowly again ... 100%CPU usage again. Rebooted again and although Narrator didn't open the system was still really sluggish. So, I opened Narrator and unchecked all the things it wanted to do for me and closed it down. INSTANTLY my system got back to normal: CPU usage bouncing along at a normal 4% ... 11% ... 1%. Maybe I found the cause of YOUR problem, too? Made me happy anyway! DW

As I was in the shower this morning I decided it was high time for me to raise my left hand very sharply, smash it into the soap dispenser that's attached to the wall and take a lump out of my skin. So I did that then! DW

I keep getting electric shocks as I wander around the offfice. Everything I wear is made of natural materials: cotton, wool and leather but still, touch the arm of my chair and tzzzz, touch the case of my computer and tzzzz, touch the mobile phone and tzzzz! I've checked and I'm the only person so energetically charged! Nippy again but the forecast is for +10 degrees today. We'll see! DW

It was very nippy today. Sarajevo woke up to temperatures ranging from -18 to -22 degrees across the city. Fortunately there wasn’t even so much as a breeze or brass monkeys would certainly have lost their bearings! I’ve faced this kind of situation in Almaty and despite the temperature being so low, if one were to stand still, it wouldn’t feel too bad. As soon as one starts walking, however, any exposed skin starts to feel the pinch: people with big noses and protruding ears would be at a disadvantage, for example. It’s a good job last night’s power cut didn’t last more than an hour or we’d all be shivering wrecks by now. Speaking of micro climates, in the ten minute walk from office to hotel I came across three separate zones: Zone 1 = icy underfoot Zone 2 = wet underfoot but not icy Zone 3 = dry underfoot and neither wet nor icy The air temperature felt constant across all zones at the -16 it was reported to be at 7 pm this evening. I did some teaching today: my first since August last year I think. Haven’t lost it either! The topic was cost behaviour analysis and the audience was experienced accountants from industry. There were around thirty of them and it went well enough I’d say: blether and excitement from yours truly with standard materials plus a few examples taken from the consultancies we’ve done that made the session much more interesting. A fairly good response to questions, too. It’s Activity Based Costing tomorrow. At the end of the session one of the participants came and showed me a Overhead Cost Summary from … believe this or believe it not … 1945: that’s the year 1945 not 1945 as in quarter to eight in the evening! Very neat and tidy it was too: a pity it was in Bosnian or I’d have purloined a copy. Just finished reading Alice Little and the Big Girl’s Blouse by Maggie Gibson. This is one of the books I got for Christmas and I recommend it unreservedly to absolutely everybody. Alice is a lovable clot and the Big Girl’s Blouse is a nance! I’ll review it shortly but don’t wait for that, get down to the bookshop and splash out on 266 pages of fantastic nonsense. I was smiling and laughing virtually the whole time that I was reading this book and I can’t say that about many books, can you? For anyone who’s interested Big Girl’s Blouse in Russian is dyevushka na blouska. Translate the whole title and we get Alice Malinkaya i dyevushka na blouska. So there! DW