Mrs W finally got me into Homebase to buy some garden furniture but on Sunday we had decided to buy X only to find that the desk we needed to use to get the stuff delivered was not manned ... we waited 10 minutes and as no one appeared and I said let's come back tomorrow. Tomorrow arrived and we made our final choices and went to that desk again ... no one! We went to the information desk now and I asked, rhetorically, if there should be someone at the special order desk. Young whippersnapper replied that there was 'no one there'. I didn't like his tone, especially since I was in a shop (aaaaagh!) and barked back, 'How will I place an order then?' A very tall, pale and ginger haired young chappie was pointed at and I was entreated to bide my time and wait for him. Ginger nut did the business quite well I'd say and even offered to let me keep my money off vouchers so that I could use them again but it was more than his job was worth to do that! (I did ask and he did say he'd like to help!) During the admin procedures, though, he was faced with a problem that he couldn't process my money off vouchers immediately becasue only one person at a time in the entire shop can do that so I had to wait for 5 minutes as the other person doing that logged off that part of the system. Homebase, rethink that part of your strategy. On the way out as we paid for the plant food that Mrs W said we NEEDED, the young whippersnapper who had answered my rhetorical question so badly was the cashier who was serving us and he redeemed himself by asking 'Did you get everything you wanted?' I took him off the hit list!! We now await Friday and the delivery of our furniture. I'll report back. DW

Today's massive piece of advice: don't mess with your computer's registry. It's a good job I've got a capacity for staring at a computer screen ad infinitum! On Monday I decided, with Dima away, that it was time to sort out the computer and strip out all of the stuff we didn't need. I'd already offloaded 4 Giga bytes of rubbish from the hard disk over the weekend and decided to tidy up the registry. I used some trial software to analyse the registry and it told me there was a huge amount wrong but wouldn't do anything about it until I bought the software. So, I trolled over to Microsoft and found RegMaid. I ran RegMaid, free of charge, and it showed me what I thought were my problems so I deleted the whole lot. WRONG! What RegMaid had done was to show me the whole registry and not just the problems. I was then, apparently, to take the decision as to what was problematic and what wasn't. Now rebooting was a problem. I had to reactivate my Windows XP software and then reinstall all software. I called the Microsoft help desk as I had a particular problem with Outlook and whilst the chap tried, I had called at around 5:30 pm and the problem I had was a toughie for him so come six pm he told me to run detect and repair and he would call back tomorrow ... six pm is his finishing time and he clearly wasn't up to working even one second of overtime. I did what they said but if failed so I worked through the problem myself and solved it ... with a residual error that I solved later, again alone. The MS chap did call back whilst I was at work and away from the computer so we couldn't solve my remaining Outlook problem: I can't send any messages from it! DW

Oh, nearly forgot. Yesterday, Saturday, was another driving special: Abingdon Wembley Abingdon in the morning to take my laptop to be repaired. I went to www.rac.co.uk and got them to provide me with directions to my destination ... for the first time ever they let me down and sent me down a route that turned out to be daft! Two and a half hours that was mainly plain sailing but was too circuitous but I had accepted their directions without question. For the return journey I consulted my road atlas and found my own extremely direct route that took us just one and a half hours. Just goes to show, what? Dima was able to sleep for the last half hour or so! Then to get Dima and his companion Florance to France Abingdon Heathrow Airport Abingdon in the evening. I've done this journey many times now and usually go through Henley on Thames but be advised that last week they had the Regatta that caused some snarl ups and yesterday they were in the middle of another extravaganza and that caused a major snarl: that was me snarling, by the way. So, an hour and 20 minutes to get there and 50 minutes to get home, via the M40 this time as we gave Henley a large swerve for the return journey. Mrs W was able to sleep on the return journey this time! DW

It's gloriously hot here now. We took a detour from our weekly shop this morning to go to Homebase as Mrs W feels that we NEED a barbecue and a garden furniture set. We haggled over the furniture as she wants something vast whereas our patio is ten quid short of vast! I am absolutely indifferent to the barbecue since I'm a vegetarian, too. In the end, we agreed on a course of action but then Homebase played a blinder by failing to have their special order desk manned. So, they may well have lost our order. Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer and they are unable to organise their staff. Shareholders and management take note. They won't, of course. This message will have no impact whatsoever! DW

What's happening? I've lost the will to Blog by the look of it. All of a sudden I've gone from being someone who keeps a diary religiously on a daily basis to being someone who writes a catch up diary. Anyway, last weekend we drove many miles. On Saturday 5 July we drove from Abingdon to Bath then on to Cheddar Gorge, to Wells, to Stonehenge and finally back to Abingdon: a total of around 230 miles. A lot to take in in one day. Non drivers please note, for your edification and entertainment, you lot can sleep whilst your driver has to stay awake and alert: for hours and hours on end at times. The following day we took a spin to Windsor and Eton. Had a picnic in Windsor Great Park: well, the bits down the edge where they let the likes of us to sit on roughly hewn logs and look on admiringly at the vast expense of exceptionally expensive land that our glorious Royal family inherits for its sole usage from generation to generation. Don't let that comment stop them from bestowing a Knighthood or Peerage on me as and when they see fit! We arrived too late to take a tour round Eton College but we saw bits from outside. Good wheeze that, by the way. Set up a school hundreds of years ago and then wait for society to feel the need to have expensively educated children wherein the schools they attend are private and exclusive. Then allow the likes of you and me to wander round at £3 a head. Good business as lots of people are prepared to pay for the privilege of gawping in that manner on that pile of bricks. How about this: Dima has trolled off to France for a spell and I told him as he was leaving that if he didn't tidy up his section of the hard drive on family computer before he left, I'd kindly do it for him. So a couple of hours this morning were dedicated to that task: I deleted over 3 Gigabytes of games software. I also got rid of a shed load of programs that were just clogging up the system: media players, dating software ... what young lads get up to these days! In the middle of it all I wanted to uninstall the Office XP Media Content package that I'd installed ... all 610 Mb of it. I have used it but not for a while and I can always reinstall it from my pukkah disks if needs be. Anyway, I let the dratted machine whirr and click for around 10 minutes as it told me it was looking for components ... I stopped it ... it then took five more minutes to stop looking for those wretched components. It's still there, then!! In the middle of all of that, the computer hung and wouldn't do anything but make me wait. Thank you and come on down Bill Gates III. DW

Modise from South Africa asked me a question I'd never thought much about before: Hi, Can you send information on conducting a due diligence review. Regards, Modise Here is what I found: Juniper from the UK works on due diligence too: take a look as they give a few examples of what they have done in this area. SRK (UK) Ltd carries out due diligence work and the link here takes us to a fairly comprehensive opening page. The Miller Law Firm in the USA gives a checklist of what they do in their due diligence reviews. Schneider Downs provides a similar listing. ICF Consulting offers environmental due diligence that might help us to broaden our views of what the process involves. From Russia, Russaudit to be precise, there's a similar introduction to the due diligence process. That looks like a good start to me, Modise. DW

A follow up from Alvaro about Parameter Queries in Excel shows that we have settled this issue amicably! Thank you. I just realized that on Saturday. I had never worked with this command before. I do know how to solve my problem now. Your mail is giving me the certainty of it. I'll tell you just a little bit of what I'm doing. I'm the Maintenance chief at a microcomponents facility. One of my technicians is programming a database to control and manage the preventive and corrective issues. Because that database is just in the first stage, I don't want to make it hard for him, so I decided not to include yet the reporting module in the database, instead I'm consulting it with Excel. You know it is nice for charts. Well, friend, thank you very much for your help. Keep in contact. Well done! DW

George wrote to me from Texas as follows: I had a question regarding financial statement preparation in the UK - Are there separate books kept in the UK a la the US? US companies file financial statements for the tax authorities and outside investors and account with line items for the difference. I was wondering how similar circumstances are handled in the U.K. Thanks for your help. It's possible to answer this question in several ways, so I answered as follows in the first instance: Hi George, Whilst British Accounting Standards have many similarities to the FASB’s pronouncements, there are significant differences between them. However, to help you to get to grips with what is required of a British company and its accounting requirements, let me send you to the UK’s Companies House web site. Search through this site, asking for accounting, returns, filing and so on and see if that answers your question. If not, let me know what your remaining problem is and I’ll do what I can to help. Best wishes DW

Nikolai has written to me from Denmark to tell me something I didn't know. He wrote: Hi D, Excellent method for making box and whisker diagrams (boxplots) in Excel. Regarding the missing cross, it’s no big deal really since the dash is preferable to the cross as a median symbol. Anyway, in order to see the cross and other ‘missing’ symbols, background colour has to be set to ‘no colour’ and voilà, all missing markers are now available. The diagrams will look more professional if the markers for Q1 and Q3 are omitted, that is set marker to none. And to make the box plot statistically correct the whiskers should not extend to the minimum and maximum values but to the smallest and largest observations within 1,5*IQR (interquartile range, Q3-Q1). Observations between 1,5*IQR and 3*IQR are termed mild outliers and are marked with a circle (for example), whereas observations that fall outside of 3*IQR are termed extreme outliers and are marked with a cross. Creating a box plot that reflects true IQR, mild and extreme outliers will demand a bit more manual work as min and max observations will have to be compared to <1,5*IQR and then set as the range of the whiskers, and if there are observations >1,5 and 3*IQR, they will have to be included in the data table used for the box plots. Regards, Nikolai Graae I checked my work and found that all of my sources agreed with my method and I with theirs. Then I found a book that I have that agrees with Nikolai. So, very soon there will be a BoxPlots Revisions Page that will explain what Nikolai has shown me, how to use his knowledge and what it all means. Watch this space ... DW

For anyone who's hanging on with bated breath to see my revised palm tree photograph, wait no more! It's here, well, scroll down anyway and see a much better version than was here until today. Any plam tree experts who come to call, let me know what you think I should do with the thing. DW

Every now and again I get a question that I can't fully answer. This one came in from Costa Rica of all places and is as follows: Dear D, I'm an engineer trying to get a query from one of our maintenance system databases. I need to use the Parameters option of the Excel's External Data toolbar but it isn't active and I can't find the way of making it active. Can you help me? Thanks in advance. Alvaro Why did Alvaro ask me that question? Well, take a look at this page to see: Download Data from the Internet Using Microsoft Excel XP/2002 What did I say in reply? Here you are: Dear Alvaro, Here is what I think you are facing. Firstly, the parameter query option is a DATABASE option and will not work in an ‘ordinary’ Excel External Data Query. Take a look at this Help page from Microsoft and make sure that you are following all of the rules to do with setting up a Get External Data query properly: I know you probably are; but just in case. For more advanced, Parameter Query, work, you need to do the following:

• Data
• Import External Data
• New Database Query

You might be told that you have to install this feature but it should do so automatically. However, once this is up and running I am sorry to tell you that I have never used it and a quick look tells me that it would take me a while to get used to it! Finally, I THINK this is the answer to your question but if not, let me know and I’ll ask someone who does know. Anyway, I hope this has been of some use at least. Best wishes DW

UPDATED ON MONDAY 30 JUNE I scanned the diseased palm photo again and have posted it here: much better and anyone who knows about these things and can help, I'd be very grateful. I've got a couple of photographs to tantalise and inform! The first one is a palm tree that resides in my living room and it has some kind of disease. The spots are partly spots within the leaves and partly hard, compacted dust type things. No idea what it is but it grows healthily! Sorry for the HUGE gap that appears between the photo and the next line of text ... no idea what causes that but it has to be caused by the Blogging software: it doesn't like tables either. The second pic is of the side of my car now that Mr M drove into and along it. The latest is that the car may have to be written off as it could cst more to repair than it's worth. Oh the inconvenience of it all! What a bloody day that was. DW

Take another tip from me: if you are sharing your living space with at least one other person, eg wife, children, Marley's ghost (that's Jacob, not Bob!), it's well worth your while rummaging around those apparently inaccessible places from time to time. A year ago I heard from Mrs W that she was so sad that whilst she was packing to go to Almaty she inadvertently threw out Dima's NEW mobile phone. They realised too late what she'd done, tried to call the number just to check ... all was lost. At the turn of the year, Dima got a new mobile from O2 and all was calm. On Wednesday evening of this week I was spreading myself all over the settee when my hand drifted South and connected with an interesting object ... Dima's lost mobile phone. Far from having been chucked out, it had simply slid down the back of the settee and remained there, silent, ever since. Since Mrs W is a hoarder of some things, we had kept that phone's battery charger and within half an hour or so had revived the thing. I have now told the two that I intend to sell one of the two phones that Dima has ... find out what's for sale and make me an offer by writing to me at duncan@duncanwil.co.uk! Seriously, I mean it. I'm waiting. DW

Take a tip from me: never wait four years to catch up on your bookkeeping! I have just decided that since I have returned to the UK on more of a permanent basis than not that I ought to get my profit and loss account and balance sheets up to date ... the tax man will want to get to know me better! I have operated a parallel filing system that has kept all of my documents, statements and such like together (Mrs W has done her best to keep the system randomly distributed around the house, of course) so it's not been a massive nightmare, just time consuming. Anyway, after a day and a half, I am about to use PIVOT TABLES to get my accounts drafted. Then I intend to use Sage Line 50 to archive them and then use that as my ongoing bookkeeping and accounting supremo! I'll let you know how I get on! DW

Happy Birthday Fran our national and international swimming champion is 18 years old today, 16 June 2003. Lots of love and many congratulations from all at www.duncanwil.co.uk! DW

I get messages from all sorts of people from all sorts of locations about all sorts of things. Over the weekend I got two unconnected messages about two of my book reviews: Firstly, Hello, This will sound weird considering I don't know you. But, I am halfway through reading "The Partner" by John Grisham and have a report due Monday (!!!) and I just need help around the last half of the book. I saw that you wrote a review for amazon.com and thought you might help? thanks in advance!! WMK Secondly, Hi there Duncan, I just came across your minor tribute website to Robert Tressell, and thought I would first of all say congratulations, and that you've created an interesting site on an extremely good book, and an extremely interesting man. Secondly, I am doing a brief university paper on a novel of my choice, in which I am required to apply a traditional literary criticism, a history of the book, and a history of the reading of the book. I have chosen the RTP as the case study for the paper. (for a number of different reasons). Although I have most of the information that I need to complete it, I would like to somehow find out a little more about the original publishers...how they marketed the book, what group of people they targeted in order to sell the book etc etc... As well as this, I would like to find out more about what type of people read it, how much it cost them to buy it, how many copies were originally sold etc etc. I have managed to come across a copy of 'one of the damned' by Fred Ball, but unfortunately it is located in a reference library here in Brisbane and I can't borrow it out. I'm not sure if you've read this book yourself, but if you haven't, I would highly recommend it. It really is an extremely interesting read. Finally, any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated, even if it is a link to a website, or any books that you could recommend to me. As I said earlier, I've got nearly all the information that I need (and the paper is nearly due), but anymore information that you think would help would be great. Thanks very much in advance DL Brisbane, Australia As far as WMK was concerned, I had to say I read the book over a year ago but can't remember the full details except that the twist in the tail at the end of the book is ... well, you wouldn't want me to reveal that, now, would you? I was happy to hear WMK reply, though, as follows: You'll be surprised because that actually did help.. Quite a bit really. Thank you so much! I'd be screwed if not for that, now I'm only partially screwed, but I'll find a way. ;) Thanks again!! WMK HTH as they say! For DL of Brisbane I said that I'd put him in touch with Reg Johnson, the widower of Robert Tressell's grand daughter. Reg maintains the Tressell family papers ... Reg replied, as I couldn't give his email without permission: Many thanks for your message of this morning. It was a pleasure to hear from you. I appreciate your passing on the message from Declan Law of Brisbane. The world of Tressell never stands still and we never know where the next enquiry will come from. I will of course be pleased to help Declan in any way possible to research his material. If you could let me have his e_mail I will write to introduce myself and welcome him to the world of Tressell. Currently, I am in contact with six other students who et their sights on attaining their PhDs. Interestingly, some of the info DL seeks will be answered in the new book 'Tressell'. This goes to the printers tomorrow and should be in the bookshops later in he month. It will be an interesting and informative addition to the Tressell story. Your own website is a valuable contribution to spreading a greater understanding of Robert and the RTP. ... Another interesting devlopment is that tomorrow a new website is to be launched. This is presented by the London Metropolitan University, custodians of the TUC archives. A major part of this will be the complete Robert's original manuscript together with much other information. It has been a pleasure to help them with research material for the site. This will lead you to other pages on the site. I have mentioned your site to Alex Bromley, the Project Manager, and suggested that he has a look at your site. It is possible that he may want to mention your site as a 'link'. You may hear from him. Time to stop chattering on, looking forward to keeping in touch, best wishes, Reg So I put Reg and DL in touch with each other and hope it helps: good of DL to write anyway as it helped us to learn more from Reg about movements on the Robert Tressell front. DW

At last, rubbishEnglish has a result! I was rummaging around the Public Records Office web site this morning and the following copy of an email I sent to them lets you know what I found. I am delighted to say that if you go to that page now you will see that the error has been corrected. On this page, at the point at which you suggest forms of identification for presentation at the PRO you include the phrase 'drivers licence'. There are two mistakes here that you will want to correct. Firstly, in this context, drivers is possessive and should be written driver's. Secondly, and much more importantly, the UK has a system of driving licences and it is the USA that has a system of drivers' licences. Please change the phrase to read 'driving licence' and you will solve both of the problems that I have highlighted in one fell swoop. DW Here's a fascinating thing, though. When you look at that page at the PRO you might realise the uncertainties of modern life. The Domesday Book to which that page refers is now over 920 years old and we can still read it, see it, copy it ... the laser disks that were produced in the mid 1980s have already had to be rescued as the pace of technological change almost meant that they were lost in an obsolete technology. Paper and parchment can survive thousands of years even when it is mistreated. Laser disks can survive millennia no doubt but reading them in a thousand years will definitely be a massive problem. Think of the Rosetta Stone, too, and how that has proven to be both primitive and advanced at one and the same time! DW

Ever heard of Tax Freedom Day? Apparently tax freedom day is an estimate of the day in the year when we all stop working for the taxman and start working for ourselves. For example, if we pay, say, a total of 30% of our income to the tax man in terms of income tax, VAT, customs duties and the like, then tax freedom day starts just after 30% of the year has passed: that would be around 21 April. If we pay 50% of our earnings in tax then tax freedom day starts on 1 July. Apparently, despite all her promised, tax freedom day started latest of all recent Government Administrations under Margaret Thatcher's leadership! Well, well, well. Never liked her! Thanks to Accountancy Age for that riveting information. DW

Ever been innocently driving along from A to B when all of a sudden a car comes towards you in which the driver is facing backwards as he winds up the rear window of his car such that he not only doesn't see you coming round the tight bend in front of him but as he is going in a more or less straight line, ploughs right into the side of you? That's what happened to yours truly yesterday. He sustained a bruised bumper and a smashed side light. I sustained major denting and scraping of the driver's door and the passenger's door on the same side. When I get the photo's developed I'll let you see. He admitted liability immediately since we were driving down a narrow lane that both of us know very well and I was being ever cautious: it's narrow, blind and dangerous. I just hope he does the decent thing now and doesn't claim something spurious in his defence. DW

I wasn't sure until I just checked but, steady yourself, I sat opposite Boris Johnson MP in a restaurant in London on Tuesday evening. An Indian restaurant. He dined alone and so did I. He had just about finished his meal by the time I arrived and as he let his dinner settle he read a serious looking tome on market economics. You'll know Boris Johnson as that clottish MP for Henley on Thames who can string very few coherent sentences together in a row despite his Eton College and Balliol College Oxford background. Thought I'd throw that in! DW