Have you seen Mars, then? Never so close for 60,000 years they say. I saw it last night but my binoculars are only 8x40 so I couldn't see any canals, any aliens, or anything other than a slightly brighter spot in the sky than I could see with my naked eyes! That's why I'm not an astronomer: I don't have the kit! Remember the lunar eclipse of 2000 was it? It was cloudy where I was! The rest of the world saw something "brilliant" as far as I can tell. DW

It's been a bad week for sleeping this week. Wednesday morning woke up at 5:20 am for some reason. Thursday, woke up at 5:18 am; again for some unearthly reason. Friday morning I woke up at 7 am: wooohoo! Today, Dima was flicking his bedroom light on and off and then making all sorts of noises around 4:15 to 4:30 am then he went outside, into the garage ... In the meantime Mrs W, who has a nose problem, started sniffing and grunting at the same time as Dima started his peregrinations. I turned my deaf ear uppermost but to no avail: the light got me, the grunting turned into deep vibrations that penetrated my pillow; and curiosity took hold. Dima had gone to see off his friend Moh who is returning to Canada to live and just after he'd gone I got out of bed, drank a coffee, watched some news and now here we are almost ready to go and tax the car. How come no one told me that Dima was off for a pre dawn sojourn? Wonder what sort of petrol the car uses? Fancy not asking that! DW

A week ago they took away my BMW 520i to the scrap yard. Last night I took delivery of a smart looking metallic green BMW 730i ... hold your breath for the photo! Mrs W doesn't like it in the slightest. It's not a new car by any means but it's mine now and once I've taxed it and put some petrol in it, we're off. Mrs W doesn't like it but she has already planned a long trip to see one of her friends whose son brought some things back from Kazakhstan with him for her. C'est la vie! Plus ca change ... DW

Here's something to epitomise the standard of training in the UK's National Health Service. Took young Dima to the GP this evening to discuss his nose problem and his skin problem. We were duly summoned and arrived to find the GP and another chap seated in the surgery. "This is another Doctor (sic). He'll be sitting in." Now, we should have been asked if we minded if the other chap sat in; and even though we wouldn't have refused that's not the point. Still, I didn't make an issue of it. Then, Dima sat himself down in the victim's chair and I looked around for my chair. No one spoke and the Quack started his consultation. I saw a chair but it was piled with notes and books so I didn't feel like moving that lot. I then spotted a pink plastic footstool over the other side of the room so I went and got that, placed it next to the "other Doctor" (sic) and parked me bum! No one spoke, no one said, "Oh, sorry, please feel free to move the books ...". Just ill mannered people getting on with what they think is good for us. DW

Here's an entry from November 2002 On the personal front I'm nursing my back a little bit as I spent the afternoon lugging many kilogrammes of bark chippings from Garden Centre to car to garden and then all over my small garden. The chippings are the mulch for my Chrysanthemums, Roses, Peonies, Fruit Trees, Herbs and so on for the winter. Anyway, it took 750 litres of the chippings to cover the beds I needed to cover: they're heavy!! Let's hope I'm not bed ridden for a week or so and that the flowers, shrubs and trees all appreciate my hard work!! I want to report that bark chippings are a nightmare. Over the last year the birds that frequent my garden have made it their business to fling the chippings all over the place as they look under and around them for food. This means that the chippings that are generally covering a flower bed can appear overnight as covering for the lawn. Over the winter I got so sick of these antics that I left the chippings on part of the lawn for a few weeks only to find on removal that they had successfully killed all of the grass under them. Bleeders! DW

Here's the latest in the DW traffic survey for Abingdon: 26 August 2003. As I was returning the hire car that I'd been using over the weekend, I decided to carry out yet another of my world famous traffic surveys: how many occupants were in the cars driving towards me on the road that I was wlaking down? This survey took place between 0840 and 0848 today. I discounted all commercial traffic, hence what follows relates to private vehicles only: cars, that is; and I included a taxi! 1 car contained three people: 2.5% 3 cars contained two people: 7.5% 36 cars contained one person: 90.0% Another blow for traffic sodden Britain. We are a one occupant nation are we not? DW

The way that second hand car salesmen answer the phone is fascinating. Here's a couple of examples: Ring ring ... Car Salesman 1: Yes Me: Is that XYZ cars? Car Salesman 1: Yes Me: Do you still have that XXX for sale? Car Salesman 1: No At this point I expect a follow up with some attempt to convince me that another car they have is well worth a look instead but I got silence! Ring ring ... Car Salesman 2: Hello Me: I see that you are selling a XXX is it still available? Car Salesman 2: Yes Me: Can I come and see it? Car Salesman 2: Yes Me: Are you open tomorrow [Sunday]? Car Salesman 2: Yes Me: What time would be best? Car Salesman 2: What time would suit you? ... Where do they get their training??? DW

Before during and after all the fuss over the SOBIG virus, I have had countless messages containing it. It started early last week with messages that were typically timed to arrive as America was crawling out of bed and booting up. Then the onslaught changed to a trickle and now they are coming in thick and fast again. They are all predictably infected and my anti virus software is catching them anyway. Was not best pleased by the behviour of SpywareNuker who offered to help me find Spyware and Adware on my computer and then behaved so badly that I wrote and told them they'd never sell their product to me even though they say they have found 284 incidents of Spyware on my system. The printer won't work from the laptop at all now. Need to investigate much further! DW

Dima got his GCSE results and he's done well, with 1 A* 4 A 5 B 1 C Perhaps the highlight in some senses was the B for Maths. His teacher had called us before they entered him for the exams and said there was no way on earth that he could succeed at the higher level exam. I said we are working on it and I want him to do it. I don't expect that teacher will call now to say, "Good lad, Dima. I was wrong!" I was disappointed at the C as it was in Geography as we put in a lot of effort to get the A his teacher had predicted ... where did it all go wrong? As a non native speaker of English, let all native speakers be aware that Dima achieved 3 A grades for English! DW

The car's gone. On Friday last at around midday I arrived home after a walk into town to find my car in the middle of the street waiting to be plonked onto a car transporter as it headed for the knacker's yard. It has served me well and the only thing it has ever really let me down on was the battery. As I was a way a lot for much of the time that I owned that car, it was standing idle; and the batteries I bought never liked that. We even used to turn the engine over every week or so but that just wasn't good enough. I was forced to write off the car and was paid what the insurance company thought it's worth. I will NOT, in any way, be able to replace a BMW 520i SE Auto for the amount of money they paid. Come on down our modern insurance companies! DW

More from my time back in Bosnia. As you probably know, I am a vegetarian (lacto ovo to be precise) and at the dinner that we had in the middle of the course I ran in Bosnia I was served, wait for it, MUSHY PEAS! I was so stunned I learned that the Bosnian for mushy peas is graashak: not the correct spelling but that's the phonetics of it all! I even found a tin of graashak in a shop later on, too; and we would tend to call them marrowfat peas. Still, eh? How about this for a poser? I noticed that a number of the cars in the streets of Neum have cardboard draped over two or more of their wheels. I asked what the cardboard was there for and Paddy replied "You can use it to carry the wheels home in it when you steal them"! Ask a silly question! Anyway, here's the picture. I did a lot of PowerPoint Presentations during the course and since I don't have a floppy drive on my laptop I needed to be able to transfer files by CD ... my translator/interpreter had an old laptop that had a floppy drive but no CD drive: that is until I happened to open the "wrong" compartment of its carrying case and found a CD drive for that very computer. Turns out that they had been looking for that drive for 9 months and had even turned the office upside down looking for it at one stage. The reason they didn't find it in the carrying case? The chap who was using the thing assured everyone that it wasn't there! Here are a couple of other views of Neum, by the way, as I think it's a lovely looking spot! Enough! DW

Take a look at my Cost and Management Accounting Home Page. See? Good isn't it? The menu's different, you clot ... isn't it obvious?! I've found out how to put together a drop down menu and experimented with that page. It works quite well although my colour communications could do with a bit of a tweak, don't you think? All advice gratefully received! I intend to do this to all my section home pages before too long. More progress! DW

Update on the manky computer situation: I RESTOREd my laptop and got back on a decent footing with Outlook. Then the printer still gave me loads of grief: just can't understand this one; but then three reboots later all was OK and this morning computer and printer found each other without a hitch! What a life! DW

Just found out that my address book has completely disappeared from MS Outlook. I'd like to thank Borland for giving me the option to mess up my version of Outlook, I'd like to thank Microsoft for being such a monopolist and for failing to provide a decent working environment and I'd like to thank BT for being complicit in their own monopolistic desires. DW

This came in yesterday Dear Sirs, We are plaesed to inform you that we have created the very first italian web site dedicated to IAS. You can visit it at the following url: http://www.iasitalia.it Our goal is to promote the IAS culture and become a focal reference point in Italy for the e-ias community, sending out a free newsletter in italian about the latest IAS events. That's why we would love to directly collaborate with you and exchange news and links in our websites. We hope that you'll agree with our initiative. We send you our best whishes. the staff of iasitalia.it email: redazione@iasitalia.it So I took a look and there's some news about Switzerland, Ireland, Europe, the UK ... here's what it said about the UK: La Gran Bretagna estende l'utilizzo degli IFRS Dal gennaio 2005 tutte le imprese, quotate e non, del Regno Unito potranno applicare gli IFRS sia ai bilanci consolidati che a quelli individuali I clicked on the link anyway and was told La pagina richiesta è riservata ai visitatori registrati. With me so far? Don't worry Registrati ora: è gratis! If anyone goes there and finds the English language button, let me know! Otherwise, I genuinely wish them well as 2005 looms large and I know that the majority of British accountants aren't ready for it ... maybe don't even know that they really need to be ready for start up in 2004 so that they can begin reporting in 2005. DW

In the middle of my network problems, MS Outlook has decided that I don't need to reply to my email messages now. Come to that, why would I want to send new messages, too? Save yourself all the bother and don't send anything. Kuh! Why didn't I think of that before? Oi, why don't we disable receiving messages for a while, too? OK, go on then! That's the current position I'm in. Last week I INNOCENTLY took a peep at something called 3DAtlas (from Borland I think) and as I click, clicked it asked if I wanted to install Outlook ... since it's already installed I said no, of course. Wrong answer. So the installation of Outlook started apace in spite of what I said. I thought I'd ride this out until I could cancel the process and was duly given my opportunity. However, it reset my Folders settings so that messages were coming into the wrong group of folders and in order to reply to messages I had to move them physically. Until Monday, yesterday, when they saved me all the bother by preventing me from being able to reply to anything wherever it is. Along the way, I talked to a couple of people, on the phone at my own expense and may have found that BT (oh glorious BT) is in on this. BT provides my broadband service and I learned that it is they who have blocked the Tesco.Net account that I have not been able to send from my desktop for MONTHS; and I had been flagellating myself for having set something the wrong way, too. So, has 3DAtlas and MS together conspired to reconfigure my laptop such that BT has got involved and will now mean that I can only receive messages and not send anything and have to go right to my ISP web mail server to communicate with the world? That's a step back around 10 years I think! Of course, if you sign up for the half dozen or so email providers that BT supports, you're fine! This computer business is tiring don't you think? By the way, Windows XP, Office XP, firewall and fully up to date anti virus software (don't worry, it's not Norton) should mean that I am in the elite band of trouble free chappies but I'm not, as you can see. DW

I knew it was coming but I just didn't know it was going to be so awful: I've been Gatesed again. That's Bill Gates: I think that the only reason that Microsoft survives is because it has managed to secure a massive monopoly position. I don't use Linux or any other operating system apart from Windows but I know that I would like to. After more than 20 years of causing major frustrations, MS is seriously getting on my nerves. Here are two reasons why I say this: I have a digital camera and no surprise that I store the images on my laptop rather than the camera itself. When I connect the camera these days, it used to be perfect, Explorer opens and I can navigate easily to the relevant sub folder where the latest images are ... then when I click on an image to preview it, whoosh, Explorer flips over to the Control Panel. It's predictable so I'm not surprised any more. Then I go back to the pictures sub folder and everything's fine. This is a new diversion after 8 months without such a problem. I have a two computer network at home, this laptop and the family desktop. I am not an expert at networking and when I set it up it caused me heartache even though both computers are running Windows XP. Then it finally settled down and we share a printer and can transfer files easily, we share the internet connection ... all good stuff. However, I knew that when I came home from my recent trip that there would be trouble. I was shocked, therefore, on Sunday to find that having connected the network again I could print, share files and share the internet connection without a hitch. Until Monday, that is, when Gates' outfit decided that my network printer should no longer be found or findable: I changed nothing from Sunday to Monday. Then the desktop disappeared from the network, then the desktop came back but the laptop disappeared, then we were all happy again. Oh, now the printer's gone again. So, I connected the printer to my laptop as I really needed to print something ... it's a USB connection so that must be easy peasy. Wrong! The laptop wouldn't find the printer even though it was connected directly to it. I had to reboot twice for it to find the thing. I wasted three and a half hours on this network problem yesterday and have often thought that if we could all get back at MS for the time they waste they would be bankrupt within 6 months. End of this rant. DW

Long, long time no see ... been away in a marvellous little haven called Neum: take a look at the atlas to see where that is. OK, there's a bit of a clue early on but get the atlas out anyway it'll do you good! The Trip Home 16 August 2003 I was late leaving the hotel as I was saying goodbye to the boss! Then there was a bit of faffography as the driver lugged my suitcases up the stairs, we delivered a letter to another hotel and so on. The road from Neum to Dubrovnik Airport is long and winding and a just as we thought we had broken the back of the journey and estimated an arrival time of 2:20 pm, we got stuck in a queue behind a slowly moving lorry … we lost around 10 minutes and gained loads of stress as my flight was due to leave at 3:15 and I didn’t want to get there just to be told that they had closed it!. There are some shear drops on the passenger side of the road to Dubrovnik and I was horrified at some of them. As we passed above Dubrovnik itself I had an attack of vertigo as two large multi storey blocks of flats sent me into a tizz! Then there was the lunatic father with his two sons standing on the wrong side of a roadside barrier, on a ledge, overlooking a hideous drop. We arrived at the airport at around 2:30 pm and since it’s such a small airport we got inside fairly quickly. We couldn’t find the check in desk for Vienna, though, so I asked and was directed upstairs. Suitcases flailing, we dashed upstairs to find Customs, Passport Control, Duty Free Shops … Departures! Back downstairs and I said “I’ll ask at the information desk and you ask elsewhere …” As I arrived at the Information Desk a young lady just beat me to it and asked a question that seemed simple but took HOURS to answer. Well, two minutes anyway. Then my driver found the check in desk: just where the lady was whom I’d asked for directions but four minutes before. Now they had a Vienna sign up there. I wasn’t tempted by anything in Duty Free and we took off 15 – 20 minutes late and thought that making my connection would be difficult. As we were descending into Vienna they announced that people heading for Paris should run and for passengers to somewhere else, “Sheesh, you’ll be lucky!” As we were leaving the plane they said anyone for London should contact the people outside the aircraft. I was directed to a minibus where it transpired that I was the only person going to London immediately. I was given 5 star treatment as I was whisked across the airport and escorted via the service lift right to my check in desk. 5 star turned to 1 star when they very politely told me that since my flight was late they had assumed that I wouldn’t make it and so they bumped me off the flight, “You were too quick for us” they said. They held out a glimmer of hope as they had three no shows and expected that one of them would definitely not show. Otherwise, I would have to wait for the 7 pm BA flight. A five minute wait and then suddenly I was whisked away again and was the last passenger to board the London bound A321 Airbus that really was heaving with people: following the flight on the Tiny Tyrolean Twin Turboprop, this was a huge plane! As I got to my seat I found it occupied by a young lady who turned out to be American. Just as she launched into a dramatic fond farewell speech to the friend by her side, I said “Where’s your seat, I’ll sit there?” “32D” says she. As I toddled off she and her friend mouthed it large in now unmistableable cross Atlantic drawl, “Aw, that’s real kind of y’all” or similar. I felt it wasn’t appropriate to given them a syntax or grammar lesson as: • I needed to sit down • the Yanks have just paid my salary for the last two weeks, housed and fed me so praise be As the pilot had announced a small delay (I HOPE to get my bags on board) they played Austrian Airline’s signature tune … a bit too enthusiastically. Spookily, as I’d observed to myself in Dubrovnik airport that I hadn’t seen a man with a pony tail for two weeks, an elderly man with a PIG TAIL stood up and ponced his way to tell the stewardesses that it was all too loud. They turned down the volume! Well done Austrian as despite having flung me off the flight once and having significantly shanged my seat, they still brought me my veggie meal of cheese sandwich and tiny bunch of delicious grapes! The truth is that I covet the non veggie puddings that everyone else gets but would have to eat meat to get at them! Can you believe that a young lad, six or seven years old, walked past me wearing a Newscastle United shirt? He was lucky to survive! His hair was cut in a steppy way, too! Now that I was back among my own, let me record that we are a stricken breed: pig tail man Newcastle United shirt spindly legged woman of advanced years with black ankle socks, shorts, leather shoes (needing polishing) a tee shirt of yore … and wrinkles under her knees floral print dress woman wearing flip flops earring man with silver trainers: I ask you! Austrian put the television on without any sound. That was fine for “Just for Laughs” which was visual comedy but the interview with the mega surfer was lost on everyone but the lip readers among us! Then there was the couple in the queue at Vienna: she berated him for wandering off and leaving her alone for 20 minutes. He took the abuse for a while but then retorted with “I don’t know why you’re talking as if you’re the victim because when I did get back to finish me chips, they’d all gone”! Silence was the reply! Pig tail’s party at the carousel at Heathrow: one says to the other, “Don’t panic if your bags don’t arrive now, it doesn’t mean that you’ve lost them. They’ll be on the next flight. So don’t think they’re lost. No, they’ll not be lost. They send them on the next flight. That could be tonight.” I had my back to that lot when that happened so I’ve no idea why this chap repeated his message and I never heard anyone else speaking or replying … except that I turned round to see pig tail pick his nose and eat the proceeds! I sat next to two Korean girls on the London flight and they spoke to each other in English. One spoke English public school English and the other one spoke like an American. English English said “I love being back in England. (pause) You don’t have to pay to use the toilet”! Where has she been? Tried to get a drink from a vending machine at the Central Bus Stop at Heathrow having retrieved my luggage with no bother, only to find that they wanted £1 per small bottle. Anyway, both machines were empty so I went to WH Smith’s … where a bottle cost me £1.09. Modern, hideously expensive, rip off Britain, welcome home! Then my mobile phone was cut off! Home James on the X70 to Oxford to be met by my kind Italian neighbour who gave me a lift to my door! Here endeth my trip home! DW

This is priceless and true and I got it from the News Quiz programme on BBC Radio 4 last night. An amendment slip relating to a Sexual Offences Bill being tabled before the House of Lords contained this: Page 32 paragraph 3 line 3 extract genitals inset penis I wonder if anyone even thought what they were doing when they wrote that? DW

It has been very hot here over the last week or so, prompting the newspapers to declare Britain the 'new Mediterranean'. It all came crashing down over night and this morning I woke to deliciously cool temperatures and lashing rain. The good news is that the garden gets watered free of charge and effort ... and so does my Italian neighbour's garden that I am tending during his three week sojourn in and around Bologna! DW