The history of the pie must surely revolve around Britain. In a pub
restaurant in Chester le Street in County Durham I came across the story of the oldest known meat pie: from 52 BC.

I checked that story and was led to this site where the story is confirmed: http://matthew.mumford.com/Pie-of-the-Day.htm

Pie History Since the dawn of time, the pie has been central to the evolution and survival of man. The earliest recorded evidence of the pie was found on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, dating back to the year 52 BC. It was a huge example found (encased in mud) by a hitch hiker from Dumfries just by the turning for the A38 to Liskeard. This find later became known as "The Meat Beast of Bodmin Moor".

Archaeologists commenced on a huge voyage into the past, searching out other historic pies.

Several exciting discoveries have been made around the globe.

In China, on the border of Hong Kong, a party unearthed a bean spout & bicycle wheel pastry capable of feeding a whole village.

And in Egypt, where civilised man built the pyramids and used toilets, a
hieroglyphic covered pie dish was discovered next to the tomb of the pharaoh King Getifa.

True? You'd better believe it.

DW

You may notice that it looks as if all posts on the blog are coming from someone or something called OxBowBusiness. I am the joint own and manager of OxBowBusiness but every posting here is coming from me as a private individual. What's happened is that I have lumped my three blogs together under one heading within Blogger. Blogger said it's good for one. If I'd known it would have changed my identity I wouldn't have "upgraded" to their latest version. It's not serious because this blog is just a diary, a bit of fun; and here for the greater benefit of mankind. UPDATE I solved that problem and all posts have my name on them: I learned how to do that accidentally and I hope you have noticed my NEW LAYOUT. DW

Guess where I went yesterday. I went back to Sunderland for the first time since 1993. Of course, a huge amount of the city is exactly the same as it was then but there are many changes: the stadium of light (see below) the university buildings on the Wear shopping centres across the Queen Alexandra bridge ... Here are some snaps what I took, including one of a house I used to live in. I bought some genuine pease pudding from Ibbitson's in Jacky White's Market! Delicious it is too.

Then again, I really went up there to go to a meeting in Chester le Street: here's a pub sign for you:

Through an article in the Economist, I am playing around with some of the things I am finding there. What follows is a link to a PodCast on Web 2.0.

People are doing some very interesting things with Web 2.0 I think and let's see if the following link works as it should.

UPDATE: simply emailing the link didn't work so here I am manually! It didn't work manually either so I wrote a comment on the netvibes page and maybe someone can advse me. I did use another netvibes link on my oxbow site and that worked. It could be a blogger/netvibes conflict problem.

DW

A Film

I am easily confused as far as films are concerned. If ever a film hasflashbacks in it I have enormous bother sometimes trying to unravel today with yesterday or last year or whenever it was that they flashed back to.

That's partly by the way! I watched half of the film The Departed the other day and was absolutely confused because it stars both Leonardo diCaprio and Matt Damon. I find these two chaps so similar that I have to confess that I sat on the edge of reason for the entire film working out who was working with Jack Nicholson and who was trying to jail him!

Well, I didn't see the entire film because the DVD was either corrupt or it contained only the first hour of the thing. Wonder what happened in the end then?

A Database

I have been working on a product cost system for years now but recently I took a decision to put it into database form rather than in spreadsheet form. I have made really good progress in learning how to program the database but one thing had me flummoxed ... Until now.

I am getting ready for a presentation to a potential client for Thursday and was determined to program the stock sheets. For some reason I just couldn't get this bit to work. I know spreadsheets well and can program advanced things (apart from VBA). I used what I knew about =sum() in Access but it just didn't work. I've got three good books and the Help Files and still it wouldn't work.

Until I put the function in this format =sum([units received]).

That did it.

As I was about to get into bed last night I had another epiphany: I saw the way forward to the departmental cost schedule. I think. I am about to try that now.

Well done!

DW