Along with all the other junk mail that hits my inbox, who is it that thinks that I desperately, many times a day, want to know all about 17 rich coffees; 17 flavor experiences? I like coffee but I don't need the stress of these adverts! The car battery died overnight and it cost me to get a man out to start the car for me and it cost me a lot to buy a new battery: well, a 3 litre engine takes some firing up! DW

A cost accountant's dream come true! The NHS has announced its strategy on average cost pricing today and I have put together a brief review of it. Moreover, they have posted a wealth of information on their various sites. They have also published their NHS Costing Manual that has some excellent real live information for cost accountants and for teachers of cost accounting. There's material enough here for hundreds of case studies and I am available to be sponsored (ie paid) to write at least some of them! There are many implications for economists in this initiative too. To download the pdf file I have now prepared go to my PDFs File page and click the relevant links. Anyway, a fascinating topic that could provide hours of endless mirth and merriment! DW

Good news on the computer front. My laptop has been repaired and the problem that caused the whole thing to go comatose? My brand spanking new version of Office 2003. When I get the computer and report I will consider whether to make a claim against Microsoft for time wasting, frustration, stress, loss of earnings ... My desktop has been saved. After numerous crashes over an extended period that seemed to get worse once I started using it (well, what's wrong with a bit of paranoia?) I eventually tracked it down to my Plextor CD R/RW drive. Proces of elimination got me there and whoopee! Can't write CDs until I get the laptop back, though and Master W is being profligate with our hard drive. I delete 1 Gb of stuff and he puts 2 Gb back on. Progress that hasn't spilled over onto the car yet. There's always something! DW

This is supposedly genuine: from a council house tenant to Islington (London) Council's Housing Department: This is to let you know that our lavatory seat is broken and we can't get BBC2 DW

Weekends come and weekends go but some just linger for ever. This weekend has seen this computer crashing every few minutes Mrs W catching a chill Master W losing his wallet/having his wallet stolen the fence between our house and next door blowing down This desktop computer (the laptop is away at the menders itself!) has taken to crashing at will on a very frequent basis now. It just hangs with no warning and no reason discernible as to why it crashes and what's causing it. I invested in System Mechanic and The Ultimate Troubleshooter software packages and given that and what we have noticed I took the following action: I have cleaned up the Registry every day for the last week I have stopped several background running routines I have tried to backup all sensitive data As a result of cleaning the registry I seemed to see that the CD ROM or DVD drives we have are causing more registry problems than anything so last night I disconnected both drives and will monitor progress. So far so good, touch wood, spit three times ... Such a situation leads to frustration on a grand scale and to paranoia. Every major task is under threat. We have wasted a few CD disks as we have tried to backup our data and whilst some disks have been written successfully others have suffered a mid write crash and have been ruined. If I could pin this down to Microsoft I could very well start an action against them for wasting time, for wasting resources, for stress and duress. I think more of us should do that, by the way: take these computer wasters to task more often. As a major victim at the moment I am seething every time we suffer a crash and yet we have no idea of how to resolve the issue. The only good news is that by systematically watching the crashing process, we MIGHT have tracked down the source. If it's a hardware problem that could be relatively OK since there is nothing that new in or attached to this desktop: computer itself is three years old, CD Drive the same, DVD drive two years old, printer two years old, monitor 7 years old ... SOFTWARE is a different story since I run Office and Windows XP with all updates and service packs, I am running the latest anti virus package and many of my drivers are new and up to date. Mrs W is a bad patient so she is on her last legs according to herself! Master W was gallivating with a young lady as he lost his wallet and only realised his problem as he got to the stage of buying her a drink ... Yorkshire or what? Our next door neighbour kindly took the fence issue in hand and rebuilt it for us. I helped by doing a tiny amount of hammering right at the end. Well done Paul! That was the weekend end then apart from having baked yet another glorious ginger cake ... email me for the recipe as it's so simple yet so delicious! DW

Do you ever wonder about how big things can get? Remember when Bill Gates famously said that a computer with 640 kilobytes of memory would be all that we would ever need? He was forgetting about Microsoft's capacity for writing ballooning software and storage routines! Anyway, 1 kilobyte represents 1,024 binary digits (bits) of data and here are some monsters to think about. Bear in mind that people often write 1Kb as 1,000 bytes and to keep things simple and that's what you're about to see here Kilobyte (Kb) 1,000 bytes 2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page Megabyte (Mb) 1,000,000 bytes 1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk Gigabyte (Gb) 1,000,000,000 bytes 1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with books Terabyte (Tb) 1,000,000,000,000 bytes 1 Terabyte: 50,000 trees made into paper and printed. Petabyte (Pb)1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes 1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001) Exabyte (Eb) 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999 See this page for the source of that fabulous information. What next? DW