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

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

Andrew wrote as follows: hello again! I have been struggling to make sense of the college lectures on variance analysis, & am trying to revise for the costing paper of the central assessments for my AAT intermediate module. now I have found your variance trees for materials, labour & variable overheads analysis, & fortunately it is now beginning to make sense! best wishes Isn't that nice to know? The answer should be yes! By the way, the page Andrew was looking at is this one: well worth a look! DW

Well, is this the first casualty of the move from one web host to another. The files are in place somewhere but the last post in this Blog is dated December 2002 ... keep watching! DW

I'm back ... did you miss me? I've been off line for much of this week. Changed Web Host and took a trip to a seminar in London and then decided not to upload the site again until I had broadband installed at home ... broadband arrived today and here we are again! Welcome back! DW

Can you imagine a 6 foot 2 and a half inch 93 kilogramme frame slithering across the dance floor in a meaningful way to the Salsa rhythm? Neither could the young lady who tried to learn the basics of Salsa from me following on from my own one hour lesson of earlier in the evening! Went to a very entertaining Salsa evening at Oxford Town Hall last night. It started with a lesson for the uninitiated like me. Of course, I thought I did well and was ready to do a John Tavolta all over the knot end. My prospective partner had always been prepared (warned seems the operative word with hindsight) to learn from me but when we hit the floor it took her the length of time it takes light to travel one metre to decide that my Salsa skills were already worse than hers and she knew nothing. We then stood and admired the rest of the people on the dance floor for a while then made our excuses and left! Dima is a natural dancer and with his partner Joanne he did a lot better than me: at least Jo was prepared to stay on the dance floor with him for the entire evening! Mrs W can't dance at the moment because of a sharp pain in her hips. Dima is ballroom trained and was inspired by the end of the evening to ask Jo is she wanted to take Salsa and other dancing lessons with him and she gave him a tentative yes: hope it works out for them. Isn't it sickening to see people with such rhythm and talent only for yourself to realise that God didn't bless everyone with the same genetic complement?? It was hot and sticky there too so when we got home, at just after 12:30 am Mrs W ordered : showers for EVERYONE! Sir, yes sir!! Son Andrew answered the call and provided the solution to a sticky maths problem for us: all to do with circles, tangents and isosceles triangles. Here's the solution ... you can imagine the question! Myanswer is... (2y - x - 90)/2 Triangle AOC is a isocoles triangle, as line OA and OB are equal to the radius, therefore angle OBA must be (180 - x)/2. Angle CBO must then be 180 - ((180-x)/2 + y ), giving (180+x-2y)/2. Triangle OCB is also isocoles as line OC is equal to the radius, so angle OCB also equals (180+x-2y)/2. Angle OCT is also a right angle as line CT is tangential to the circumference. BCT must then equal 90-OCB, which is 90 - ((180+x-2y)/2), which equates to (2y-x-90)/2 DW

Went for a drive on Monday evening, Bank Holiday Monday: took Mrs W and Dima to a place on the Thames called Goring. Nice place with an excellent riverside set of pubs and restaurants. We parked the car and started legging it towards a pub for a drink and a meal. As we neared the place Mrs W said she couldn't stand the smoke ... what smoke? It sounded too lively, too! So we moved on and found a very quiet place on the river that served excellent food for carnivores. The food for veggies consisted of what seems to be the statutory veggie dish of the day PASTA. Everywhere I go these days there is often only one veggie starter, one veggie main course and the main course veggie alternative is just about always pasta. So I had that then: passable. Mrs W and Dima were delighted by theirs. The puddings were fine, though! DW

A friend of mine from the good old US of A has sent me a news clipping that had slipped my net: Know this chap?? Apparently a teacher has been arrested in the UK for possession of compasses, protractors, and straight edges. It is claimed he is a member of the Al Gebra movement, bearing weapons of maths instruction. DW

This is a first for me. Dima came home from his successful French Oral exam today to regale us with the story of the young lad, clearly not so well prepared, who decided to try to 'Allo! Allo!' his way through his own French Oral exam by ... speaking English with a strong but assumed French accent! He heard that another young lad did the same last week but in his German Oral exam. Five years and what have they learned? Andrew Hooper sent me a gift this week: some Handkerchief Tree seeds. Andrew read my page on this topic last week and got in touch. Apparently they are a bit difficult to germinate but I will give it a go and then wait the required 10 years for the flowers to appear! Good one Andrew! I wrote to the 'Friends of duncanwil.co.uk' this week and got an encouraging set of replies: these are the people who have received direct help from www.duncanwil.co.uk over the last 6 months or so. There are lots of them and their messages and my replies run into hundreds. DW

Ever needed to do some eMarketing? Here's one man's review of how he did it and the trials and tribulations he went through: an interesting read. This is redolent of what I'm going through at the moment, too! DW

Do you like Jerome K Jerome? I do and I always have. Rereading Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow reminded me of this from the chapter On the Weather: It always is wretched weather according to us. The weather is like the government: always in the wrong. In summer time we say it is stifling; in winter that it is killing; in spring and autumn we find fault with it for being neither one thing nor the other and wish it would make up its mind. If it is fine we say the country is being ruined for want of rain; if it does rain we pray for fine weather. If December passes without snow, we indignantly demand to know what has become of our good old fashioned winters, and talk as if we had been cheated out of something we had bought and paid for; and when it does snow, our language is a disgrace to a Christian nation. We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself. Bearing in mind that this book was first published in 1889, isn't it strange that we still think and talk the same way today about our glorious old British climate!? Then we have our own, still prevalent, view of ourselves, our habits and our expertise: Our next door neighbour comes out in the back garden every now and then and says it’s doing the country a world of good: not his coming out into the back garden, but the weather. He doesn’t understand anything about it, but ever since he started a cucumber frame last summer he has regarded himself in the light of an agriculturist and talks in this absurd way with the idea of impressing the rest of the terrace with the notion that he is a retired farmer. Sound like anyone you know? By the way, you can download this book free of charge from the Gutenberg Project: a fantastic resource for anyone looking into old and classic texts. Search for the book or author you are interested in and if it's there, it could be stored on your hard disk within minutes or even seconds. DW

I have no particular axe to grind over the war with Iraq but this report from the BBC left me feeling cold: working on the assumption that it's all true. I have always been suspicious of military types who want to rule the world and this doesn't help to assuage any of those feelings. End of social comment! DW

Dima took his first GCSE exam of the summer yesterday: he had to deliver a couple of speeches in German to the examiner! He's good at languages so it went well enough. He was "working" with his mother for the last few hours before the exam and they had some interesting exchanges of opinion! I found out the other day that network hardware has fallen in price by a factor of 12 or even 20 since I last looked and for the princely sum of GBP9 I bought an Ethernet network card for the desktop and hooked it up to the laptop: we now have an all singing and dancing home network that has already begun to show its worth. The reason for the fall in price is that they are now promoting wireless networks and they cost up to and over GBP100 a set. Now we can share the printer, files and even internet access so that whatever we do, there is no switching cables around, waiting for someone else to finish what they're doing to log on ... There was a pantomime attached to all of this however! I bought the box for GBP9 and installed the card ... went through the Windows routine of setting up the network protocols and so on. Wouldn't work. Spent an hour with Dima and still we couldn't get it to work. After a break went back to it and I found that since I was just connecting two computers without a hub, don't need it, I did need a Crossover Cable. I thought, I bet the cable I got with the £9 kit isn't Crossover. The following day I tried to call PCWorld where I bought the kit: first time their automated answering service was no help to me as I ended up in a department that had nothing to offer me. Then called again and was told to call their premium help line at GBP1 a minute. They told me that I needed someone else as they themselves know nothing about networking. I got through to someone who ASSURED me that I did indeed have a Crossover cable. Called the company that sold me my laptop and despite being barely able to understand what he was saying as he seemed completely preoccupied with something else, he did convince me that my cable was not Crossover. Went back to PCWorld and bought a Crossover cable having checked in person with them that the cable they previously supplied was NOT Crossover. Another GBP9 I should add. Connected the two computers with the new cable and IMMEDIATELY the network kicked in. What a palaver! DW

Part 2 of Tony's requests: Economic Growth this time Slightly unusual home page but it promises much You are promised a lot on the ins and out of growth, data sets, surveys, references, events, networks. It looks good but MAYBE not a 1st level resource. Biz/ed is a brilliant resource and you should find some very useful links here: they are not all relevant, however! How about this? In this analytical article, we examine the relationship between economic growth and the ability to travel - and how "virtual mobility" is changing the equation. There’s a massive resource of links and references from SOSIG The Centre for Growth … might be able to help The Bank of England must have something useful to say! There you are Tony: two excellent sets of links I think. DW

Tony bounced back with two requests: links on inflation and growth ... to help him with his end of 1st year University exams. Inflation A very basic introduction The Bank of England knows a thing or two about inflation: take a look some of the ways that the BoE uses probabilities in its inflation work including fan charts MoneyWorld gives you a database of inflation stats and a couple of basic definitions The ONS’s latest view of inflation plus a few useful links on the right hand side of the page From the UK Parliament is a pdf file on the value of the Pound from 1750 1998 Along the same lines but much more varied and comprehensive is Here you can find costs and values from Ancient Rome via medieval England to modern Britain … Norway, the USA and more. The Economist has an excellent glossary that includes inflation lots of links in the inflation section, too. Samuel Brittan says that Inflation Can be Too Low A slide based view of inflation, unemployment and expectations looks as if it aimed at MBA students from City University Under the heading of Revision Notes: Government Finances from learnDirect with related links on the left hand side of the page From the House of Lords: Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England - Report a LOT to read through, with the inflation control aspects to scroll for! An exam paper from the University of Exeter Principles of Economics ... no answers of course! From the Oxford School of Learning: generally aimed at A level but will apply to 1st year Undergraduate: Outline the Monetarist and non-Monetarist approaches to inflation This might be useful: an essay on Control of the Monetary Environment from the University of Essex Happy reading Tony! DW

Made a custard layer cake on Saturday and you can only imagine how good it is! DW

On Thursday evening I baked a coffee cake and finished it off with butter cream and a dusting of cocoa powder ... then I called it a Cappuccino cake. Marvellous! DW

I just spent 20 minutes telling you all about Dima's Leaver's Ball at which he looked very smart as did his partner Charlotte. I told you about the 6 month long saga of the evening suit. Then I pressed the wrong button and lost the lot. In the end, we have to say that Marks and Spencer came out of the process with their ceridbility dented and we ended up with a decent suit with just 4 hours to spare. DW

I am happy to announce that there are quite a few cherries on our old cherry tree this year and the apple tree looks as if it might be festooned with apples. The plum tree didn't blossom at all this year and the second cherry tree blossomed but it doesn't look as if there is going to be any fruit this year: we moved the plum tree and the second cherry tree is new this year. The pear tree has fruit on it, more than last year too by the look of it. There are birds in my garden that have taken a dislike to the marigolds I transplanted at the weekend: they've eaten or destroyed them, the bleeders! As a matter of interest, bark chippings are a great way of keeping the weeds down and keeping the soil most. They are also a great way for birds to want to throw them all over the place as they move them around in search of insects and larvae. Messy bleeders they are! DW

Paul wrote this over at AccountingWeb I have created an Excel file, but everytime I open it, 2 identical files are opened. They are shown as .xls:1 and .xls:2. Why is this happening, and how do I stop it? In Explorer, only one file is shown, as .xls Paul Sanderson Jim added I think that you have managed to set up two different views of the sames files (hence, why only one file in Explorer). I have accidently done that before and never been able to figure out how to get back to just one view. Mark told Paul and Jim how to get rid of it: You've opened a new window within a spreadsheet. Easiest way to get rid of the extra window is to open the file and close one of the windows by clicking on the "x" box on the top right hand side. Not the "x" to close Excel but the one below that. This closes the extra window. Then save the file. This will get rid of the extra window permanantly. I piled right in with how they got it in the first place and then confirmed how to get rid of it: One really useful feature of Excel is that it allows us to take a file, any file, and open two or even more views of it and have those two or more views on screen at the same time. This is useful where you are working with a large and/or complex file and need to see what is happening here and there at the same time. It's also useful when developing complex formulae and so on. However, you don't want it so here's how to get it and here's how to get rid of it: to get it: Open a file in Excel click Window in the menu bar at the top of the screen select New Window click Window again select Arrange choose Tiled (choose any of them but just choose Tiled for now!) hey presto what do you see but TWO views of the same file: one called book1:1 and book1:2 to get rid of it: close the one you don't want, and it doesn't matter which one, by clicking on the X in the top left of its screen and it will disappear like magic and you will be left with little old book1 on its own. So there you are! DW

Yesterday in Oxford I came across a sign in Longwall Lane (or is it Street?) that announced, appropriately for this august city I felt: Advanced Warning ... this road will be closed ... Now, plebs like you and I have to make do with Advance Warnings but in the city of dreaming spires they are just that cut above! In the consulting room of one of Oxford's hospitals was a measuring scale for measuring people's heights ... vertical, attached to the wall ... but at the top, the slidey down bit was a child's plastic rule that was hanging on to the thing by a scabby piece of sellotape (Scotch tape if you must). I wish I'd had my camera. More seriously, the doctor began the consultation by having us sit in silence as he read Mrs W's notes (for the first time by the look of it) and then announced he'd like to have seen Mrs W's X ray plates to help with his consultation but they were "lost in the system" somewhere: she'd never seen this man before and since she's only weeks away from a major operation, we felt it was laughable that he tried to make such light work of such a major omission. That's Modern Britain for you and yet people are fighting Tony Blair's NHS reforms! DW

Nick asked about an update to my easyJet case study and whether there is one. There isn't yet but following on from today's annojncement from the company of their pre and post tax loss for the 6 months to 31 March 2003, there soon will be. Here is what I said to Nick: Dear Nick, Whilst I am intrigued to review easyJet again since they are about to post a LOSS this morning for the first time ever, I don’t have anything in the pipeline today but could well have within the week. I said in my original assessment, or when I was introducing it, that I didn’t like the way that easyJet’s pricing policy was really just a scam and having researched some of their prices recently I have been proven correct! From their web site this morning: easyJet plc generated a loss before tax, goodwill and non-recurring items for the six month period [to 31 March 2003] of £24m which compares to a reported profit of £8.3m for the same period in the prior year. The loss after tax for the period was £46.9m, which compares to a reported profit of £0.8 million in the same period of the prior year. They have posted a PDF file of their interim results and a very quick look through them shows that their Operating Costs are all drifting upwards, contributing significantly to their loss. I really don’t like the way this company operates and never have. They sacked their founder Stelios a while ago and my prediction is that this company with either close relatively shortly or they will have to revise their mode of operation despite their Chairman’s claim in their latest review that easyJet continues to demonstrate that its business model is robust and that there continues to be strong demand for low fare, point-to-point services between major European airports. Their model may be robust; but their ability to manage that model is open to doubt! Anyway, go and take a look at the ratio analysis section that I recently wrote for Biz/ed: there as you will see that I use easyJet together with British Airways for some of my analysis. Then click on this and scroll down the list of companies in the database that I put together and you can do lots of calculations on the data relatively easily from there … for some reason easyJet is out of alphabetical order in that list. Do you know www.tutor2u.net? They recently put together a couple of case studies in PDF format and the report on the European Airline Industry although rather weak could be useful for you. Best wishes DW

I have now finished a new section for my commercial arm: introduction to bookkeeping and accounting: four PDF files, four Excel files. This is a general introduction that assumes some knowledge of bookkeeping but takes you through the ideas step by step with loads of exmples and the Excel files help to confirm uour learning and provide you with infinite practise: honest, you've got to see it to believe it. Only £10 ... designed to help you with your ACCA exams (Paper 1.1 eg), CIMA exams, University exams, A level exams ... and real life! Go to my eShop Window and see what it's all about. The best on the web at the price: you really would pay a vast amount more elsewhere. DW

Katie wanted to know where she could find out about absorption and marginal costing. Yours truly provided the following listing: Dear Katie, Here are a few links to get you started on absorption and marginal costing. This page compares process costing and absorption and marginal costing Here's an article from the examiner of ACCA Paper 1.2 that's worth a look A PowerPoint Presentation ... it starts with a spelling mistake! Rather a childish look at the topic, from Cambridge University, surprisingly: it's a PowerPoint Presentation. Test your knowledge with Drury on line ... an MCQ test on this topic A very short overview The ever brilliant Biz/ed has a worksheet with links to their virtual factory that might be of use A reasonably extensive and useful looking introduction An exam paper from the University of Teesside that will help you with your revision at least! I have a page on this topic, of course! Finally, this looks useful There you are Katie, a review of some of the basic sites that can help with absorption and marginal costing. Best wishes DW

Is all ecommerce this difficult? Trying to get a client up and running with PayPal has turned into a challenge for her! ecommerce is based on brilliant and simple ideas but I have found the reality to be a real struggle. Everything's click, click but the final hurdles are sometimes so huge! I've been in the ecommerce game for around 6 weeks now and already I have stories to make your hair curl!! DW

Mario's a deep thinking lad from Italy and this is what we talked about. Dear Mr. Duncan I am an Italian student from Rome university and I am doing my final dissertation on cost of capital for telecoms and on the different approaches in calculating WACC. I was wondering if it was possible to have some research on the differences between the different CAPM's models (linear, non-linear and multifactors models). I found a study done by Wright, Mason and Miles on the subject but it seems to have a very statistic view about the CAPM's models. Could you please, if possible send me any presentation (power point) or study that explains in a more economic way why we should use a model rather then an other to better calculate the cost of capital for telecoms? Thank you in advance for all your patience and help Best Regards Mario I asked for a bit of time! Dear Duncan, I think that the only parameters that can vary are beta, risk free and ERP. What evidence can I use to make these parameters vary? Is it possible? Which are the latest methods for estimating the risk-free rate and ERP? There's some debate on-going as to what both have been doing recently, after a long period over which the ERP appeared to be stable. There's considerable room for disagreement about betas, related to the standard criticisms of the CAPM, and also disagreements about what frequency of data to use, whether to include parts of firms that are overseas or regulated, and so on. In contrast to all this, the debt-based component of the WACC is relatively straightforward to calculate; although regulators are suggesting that optimal rather than actual capital structure should be used for calculating the WACC for regulatory purposes. Thank you again Best Regards Mario Here's what I found: Dear Mario, I am sorry to be late but I have had a web site crisis! Anyway, I don’t know how much I can help but here are a few resources I have found on the CAPM: Revisiting The Capital Asset Pricing Model by Jonathan Burton looks non statistical at least but it is a bit old now! Aimed at investors so it is general but it has some graphs and basic formulae. Again for investors but with some additional links to people who seem to be important in this area business.com has a fair number of articles that you can access and I think at least some of them will be useful. Here’s a rather cheesy CAPM calculator but take a look at the links on the right hand side of the page! This is probably too basic for you but ... A mighty PDF file from Canada called The Capital Asset Pricing Model: Equity Risk Premiums and the Privately held Business. Another one from Canada This might be a useful link for you: to someone’s Blog! Worth a try: strike up a conversation with him at least! Specifically for telecoms, I found one, two (this is just a summary, though), three (79 pages from London!), four (Australian) and five , a whopping 154 pages from OFTEL in the UK I hope that’s enough to get you started, Mario. Let me know if you think I can help in any other way. Best wishes DW

Wow! A week has flown since I last communicated! Had a problem with my very first online payment via PayPal that is as yet unresolved and that could scupper everything I'm trying to do to earn a living. Bleeders! DW

Which animal will invade a garden over night and launch itself at some pots that contain potting compost replete with seeds that are germinating but that have yet to show their leafy heads and proceed to dig out the middle of every single pot? Well, when I find that animal, it's for it. I had a tray of 30 pots all so filled that were all so emptied on Wednesday night. Bleeder! I'll spiflicate it if I get it. DW

Celebrity spotting? Mrs W got very excited at Heathrow yesterday as we waited for Dima to get back from France and up popped Liz Hurley complete with baby and nanny(?). She needs to do some work on her bottom or her jeans as said bottom didn't fill the jeans in the same way that the rest of her body fills the rest of her clothes! Her husband/boyfriend, turned up later in a wheelchair and Mrs W wasn't impressed: Liz, you could have done better for yourself! DW

Lovely weather again although I'm as stuck in my office as everyone else. Since I work at home, though, I can potter around the garden for a break as and when I need a break. DW

Went to Bath on Easter Monday and was really surprised to see that the majority of building in the centre of the city are genuine Georgian: up to 250 years old or so. A marvellous looking place. The royal crescent and circus are spectacular and well worth the voyeuristic visit. I heard that one house on the royal crescent sells for £2 million: ridiculous! Had a decent meal at the Arabesque Lebanese restaurant in the Podium Centre: I like what I've seen of Lebanese food and this was a buffet worth trying out and it wasn't that expensive either. Had a shock at the Roman Baths: they wanted £8.50 EACH for us to go in ... we didn't. The city bus tour wanted £7 EACH for us to sit on their bus as they whizzed us round the city ... we didn't. Nice city, tourists beware of the serious damage that can be done to your wallet. DW

A message to small business people the world over. This is what happened last week. Our shower sprang a very small leak. I offered to repair it but Mrs W was aghast at that so she found a plumber/tiler to do the job. He turned up, kept his baseball cap on as he came in the house, quoted for the job and promised to return on Friday. Friday came and so did he: baseball cap stayed firmly on his head and when he said he'd finished Mrs W carried out an inspection and asked him to tidy up a small part of the work he'd done to a fairly poor looking standard. After rolling his eyes heavenwards he launched off into a tirade about customers like us! He increased his price, too, on the basis of materials costs. He won't be back ... ever! DW

A small crop of questions shows the value of www.duncanwil.co.uk! Katie still wants to know when my financial accounting pages will be ready to buy: Dear Katie, I'm working on it! I have spent a very frustrating time trying to sort out my eshop and have found ecommerce "experts" are almost useless in terms of what they will do for free. That is now behind me and I will be posting three management accounting sections for sale later today. I will then begin working on your suggestion and would estimate that within the week I will have a completed package. OK? Thanks for remembering: your exam in early in June isn't it? Plenty of time to stay with me and succeed!! Graeme is a Benford's Law geek like me and he asked Duncan, I have an interest in the practical application of Benson's Law to catch financial fraud. Do you have, or know of a a website that has a downloadable spreadsheet for Benford's law that I could run my own data series through? Regards Graeme Here's what I was able to do for him: Dear Graeme, I mess around with Benford's Law from time to time and develop my own spreadsheets. I have attached one of my spreadsheets: let me know if you find it difficult to work and I'll explain! Best wishes Finally for now, Frank wanted the complete case; power point presentation, tables for all days' output and the weekly combined total, solutions. Frank I sent it to him! More glorious weather forecast for today! DW

Good news everyone! I have now finally got my eShop open for business. If you are in the least bit interested in GCSE Business Studies examinations for the coming Summer series, you NEEEEEED to take a look here Case Study Shop Window for full details and Business Studies Shop to buy and pay by using the highly secure PayPal system It has taken too long to get this shop up and running but it's there now and over the next few days you will find three or four major new management accounting resources for sale ... watch this space. DW

Tony replied and said: Hi Duncan, Once again, you hit the nail on the head. Thanks Tony There you go! DW

Flushed with success, Tony came back with a request for information on goal congruence in budgetary control systems. Well, without being too specifc, I decided to research goal congruence in general and let Tony pick the bones out of it! Here's an almost anaonymous page that compares the Balanced ScorCard with GE's famous 8 key result areas: when you go to that page you'll see why I say it's almost anonymous. This PDF file looks good: a fancy tile in academicese but the content looks good: Graham Francis provided an NHS based example for my book! This pave has a huge number of ideas that relate to budgeting and other things too. Again, semi anonymous ... people who put together such good resources have the right to tell people who they are: don't be so shy! Elementary but you never know: a presentation on basic budgeting Slightly more advanced but not the bee's knees! Chris Lamb's excellent listings service comes up with another excellent list, on goal congruence this time, of course. Some intriguing diagrams here! Another basic page, another PDF file. Finally, you might find this short page sparks something too! That should be useful, tony! DW

We've had a month of the best daffodils that I've seen: honest, I've found that watering them every day has made them tall and strong and long lasting. That was in the back garden and now the daffodils in the front garden have just started to open, along with the tulips that are there too. Marvellous! Dima's away for the Easter Holiday so Mrs W is giving ME all the jobs that either he normally does or that we normally share! What a life! DW

This morning, the BBC is talking about a meeting of firefighters in England today ... are they the same firefighters who have just swept through Iraq? Just pointing out the nonsense that can arise when clots start to steal language from another culture. We have firefighters x 2 now and they do completely different jobs. Let's go back to firemen and gun fighters! At least we know where we are with those two. DW

Steven wrote a rather cheeky note: Could you please let me know the web site for Canada which can provide information about the following: 1. evolution of accounting in canada 2. accounting standards setting boards in canada 3. accounting professional bodies in canada 4. governmant influence 5. environmental factors cheers Steven Cheeky because it looks like his assignment, nothing more or less. Still, given my come one, come all attitude, I am here to help; and this is what I have found for him. I couldn't find just ONE web site to answer this question, Steven, so here is a good essay to start off with AccountingEducation. It's a teaching guide has been prepared to provide users with an overall understanding of accounting and assurance standards in Canada. You can also go here which is the web site of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. There's the Accounting Standards Oversight Council of Canada, too that has a lot to think about. I did a search for accounting professional bodies in canada and found this page from Hong Kong ... scroll down for Canada ... if you're searching for other countries, take a look, there's just a few more! Here's a really useful page from IASPLUS.COM, that fantastic IAS/IFRS based resource that has generally useful pages, too. There you are Steven: a cracking start, I think! DW

Follow up from Tony. He replied as yet another satisfied customer: Hi Duncan, Thank you so much. The material you have found for me is exactly what i'm looking for. Thanks again, Tony Aw, shucks, I'm blushing! DW

Let me put on record just how useless the BBC weather forecasters are. There! Done! They promise sunshine and we get cloud. They promise temperatures that mean we can fry eggs on the pavements, t'flags as we call 'em up North and my new Peach tree ends up half dead from frost bite. They promise 'unusually warm for the time of year' and Mrs W sits in our South facing living room wrapped up in a blanket in the middle of the day. Rubbish. They also tell us 'right now' this and 'right now' that and the glorious weather we're having (as if!) will hold through Thursday ... what on earth does that mean? Rubbish weather forecasting and rubbishEnglish! DW

Tony from Liverpool wanted to know what I could tell him about the Behavioural Aspects of Budgeting This topic is one of those that a search on the internet that returns virtually nothing but syllabuses from Universities, tables of contents or seminar schedules. Here’s the best I could find. Firstly, though, take a look at chapter 14 of my book: Cost & Management Accounting published by Prentice Hall. There’s a set of basic lecture notes from Exeter University at Lecture 16 and Lecture 18 although the author makes the mistake of calling zero base budgeting zero based budgeting in lecture 16: an elementary and unforgivable error. Chris Lamb’s excellent service out of UNL comes up with this massive resource list under the heading of Behavioural Aspects of Budgeting: and under the heading of budgeting and budgetary control Under the heading of organisational goals and Investors in People have an introductory page on this sub topic, too. In spite of what I said at the start of this, here is an academic page that looks very useful as a starting point This is written in academicese so needs to be read carefully. It’s also long and needs to be filtered I have been hearing several people talking about participation and ownership recently in connection with managing change and here are a couple of pages linked to these ideas: not all directly connected with budgeting, but you can extend the ideas: firstly two from yours truly: e budgeting zero base budgeting Here’s a seminar schedule that gives a few ideas: just scroll down to BARRIERS TO SUCCESSFUL BUDGETING A PowerPoint presentation with some good starting points although the author makes the mistake of calling zero base budgeting zero based budgeting: an elementary and unforgivable error. Finally, you might find this useful Best wishes anyway, Tony DW

I took my life in my hands and reworked my template myself. I have lost all of the customisation I made but that wasn't too serious. So the glorious look and feel of this Blog is restored!! DW

Brian wrote, from Singapore I think since his surname is Ng! This is what he wanted to know and what follows is what I was able to tell him. Dear Sir, I would like to know the answers regarding:- 1)explain briefly the IAS 1 including fair presentation,accrual,consistency and going concern and suitable examples to illustrate the answer for each explanation? 2)Objective of financial statement to provide information to users.Who are the main categories of users of financial statement of their needs? List and describe the Qualities or Characteristic of useful information. Thank You for provide the answers to me. Hello there Brian, Good to see you visiting my IAS pages. Let me point you in the direction of my other financial accounting pages for your answer. I have a few pages on the basic introduction to financial accounting that I have constructed to apply both the UK accounting and IAS accounting and US accounting ... Go to my home page and choose the financial accounting section and then follow the links for accounting concepts, the going concern concept, what are the objectives of accounting. Don't forget to read through the IAS Framework page in the IAS section, too, though. I hope this is all OK for you but let me know of any further questions. Best wishes DW

They've ruined the look of my Blog and they won't sort me out! I'll do my best over the weekend. As an indication of what I'm doing now, here's some correspondence I had with Katie. Hi, My name is katie, im currently doing ACCA part 1..I was wondering if you had any relevant notes on profit and loss accounts and balance sheets? Your website is really good, the best for accountancy. Any help would be appreciated as exams are so near. Many thanks. Dear Katie, I know the ACCA syllabus in part and know that I can download the whole thing from their site. I am currently building a commercial arm to my web site and am happily prepared to start the financial accounting section with your topics in mind. Depending on how it goes and how long it takes to mark up into HTML, it could take a week to 10 days to prepare the first section that would deal with P&L accounts and balance sheets then we would move into double entry ... around two weeks all in all from now. Each section would be comprehensive and would consist of the basic theory and underlying practice and will have loads of examples from me and for you to do, with solutions; plus end of section questions with fully worked solutions. Take a look at www.manacc.duncanwil.co.uk to see what a section generally comprises. I would then charge you just £10 and you would have full and free access plus email support for each section. Please let me know and I will move this job higher up my list of priorities. You would find that the sections would have a fair amount of ACCA focus so it would be targeted at your studies. Let me know what you think. Best wishes Hi That is a very good idea! In the meantime, you got any good sites on financial accounting? Katie Dear Katie, You are probably finding there my web site is one of a kind in that it is difficult to find a fully focused set of resources ... what you are looking for. That's why I am developing my own site in this direction now. Still, I did a search for Accounting resources on www.bized.ac.uk and came up with this In a couple of weeks, I will be sending you a message with my latest resources based on your message. Best wishes There you go: working really hard to be the best on the web at what we do! DW

There's something wrong with my Blog pages. As you might be able to see as you read this, the layout is manky. I've writen to www.blogger.com whose fault it is and can only hope that they can sort it out for me. Otherwise my perorations don't look so smart, do they? DW

The death of Cost Accounting? Dima showed me some of his notes from school the other day and it sounds the death knell for cost accounting ... my life is now in turmoil. If you want to calculate the cost of ingredients for a meal in a restaurant or at a food processing factory, go to your local supermarket, butcher's or green grocer's, work out the cost of the ingredients and mutliply the total cost by 0.7. To find the selling price of your product, take the cost you have just calculated and multiply it by 3 ... hey presto! Let's boil that down to an even better process: find your costs and simply multiply by 2.1 (that's 0.7 * 3) and whoosh, the selling price in a nonce! Have I been wasting so many years of cost accounting endeavour? DW

My good email friend Kenneth from Malta is a hard working young man who is finishing another post graduate programme and he is about to work on an assignment on Mergers and Acquisitions. I promised I'd try to find some useful web links for him: he doesn't need the answers spelling out for him, just a leg up to get started. The Mergers & Acquisitions Report from Thomson Learning seems to be a good starting point, although the meatiest part of the site is probably for subscribers only: as far as I can tell, registration is free and simple. Not sure how useful this is, UK Business Park page on M&A ... it's a massive list with promise of more lists from previous years! Grant Thornton has a site dedicated to M&A: that looks useful with links to here and there. RBA Information Services has an M&A section that provides links to real examples and useful looking links. The Ofgem is the regulator for Britain's gas and electricity industries and might give some good insights, too. Ananova is a news site that has an M&A news section filled with goodies ... again practical rather than theoretical. There's an American Site that gives a long list of M&A leads that might provide a researcher with some views on who is doing what: they ar relatively small business; and there are US and International links to follow. The Mergers & Acquisitions Advisor has a newsletter and other practical news and advice for its readers. There's a download section, too, that you need to register for to access ... looks free and simple so why not give it a go? The Mergers & Acquisitions Benchmarking Consortium has objectives and missions clearly stated; and there's yet another free and simple registration process to go through! is currently a free association of companies and organizations with mergers and acquisitions organizations. MABC™ conducts benchmarking studies to identify practices that improve the overall operations of the members. MABC™ Mission To identify "Best in Class" mergers & acquisitions processes, which, when implemented, will lead member companies to exceptional performance. There's what is called Mergers & Acquisitions Primer from Find Law in the USA that might be useful to start off any review of the legal aspects of M&A. Reuters Newsagency has an M&A section and down the bottom and left of the page this link takes us to there is an archive section that has a lot of information even in today's link is empty. VentureReporter.NET looks useful as it has a New Research section that takes us immediately to PDF files ... be careful as they take time to download if you don't have a braodband connection! You will need to spend time at this site to get the best from it I think. The Standford Graduate School of Business has announced an Executive Education programme and they publish their topics here: I always find the topics for high quality seminar programmes can be a good source of ideas and inspiration for research. This could be interesting: US Mergers & Acquisitions Calendar for March 2003 Well, Kenneth, that's a lot to think about to start with: a practical rather than a theoretical beginning. Best wishes as ever DW

Putting together this new web site is taking a massive personal effort. By the end of last week I was on the verge of collapse almost. Still, I'm about to announce another new section and I'm working with other people to get my new site fully operational so that you can buy what I am selling! Nera wrote from Jakarta asking what help I could give on ratio analysis and management accounting. Here's what I said: I have just finished a big new section on ratio analysis. When you go to that site you will see at the top of that page and right in the middle, the announcement for this page. When you click on that link you will go straight to the section. The ratio analysis section on biz/ed includes a special database that you can use for yourself and with your students. As far as management accounting is concerned, my site has a he section dedicated to it. I am now setting up a new web site for management accounting that you can take a trial of by going here. There is a lot of information on management accounting on my site. Look at the spreadsheet section of my site, too, for even more that will be useful for you. I hope this is OK but let me know if I can help you further. Best wishes

Took some time out yesterday from work to take Mrs W to Broadway that's about an hour away from home: along the A44 from Oxford. A lovely olde worlde village, a glimpse of which is provided here with a couple of pics I took. We ate at the Italian Restaurant in Broadway and I have to say that the salad that came with the quiche I ordered had certainly never heard of Italy: no olive oil, no balsamic vinegar, no Italian style herbs: just a typical plodding English salad comprising iceberg lettuce, sliced onion and sliced tomato. Mrs W had, ahem, fish and chips! Chips that came out of the freezer and into the deep fat fryer, fish that came from a similar source! The public toilets in the car park just behind the high street deserve a mention: the normal British public toilet is a disgrace with its smell, its damage and its lack of decency; but here we had a clean and very well kept set up. The attendant was even listening to Radio 4 rather than that blethery Radio 1 or the soporific Radio 2. Whilst waiting to be served an ice cream in a shop, came across two products that came as a shock: a toffee cow pat: we used to call them cow clap in the North; but it means the same ... toffee cow droppings! mutton buttons: chocolate covered sheep poo! It has to be asked: who on earth wants to consume products derived, however tenuously, from animal excrement? These things cost around £3 each, too. Here's a couple of pics for you: Broadway's a nice place to visit and the drive there is interesting, too: especially when the sun shines as it did yesterday. DW

I am beavering away at my new web site and although I am making good progress I am stalling at the setting up of the ecommerce end of the thing. Currently in negotiation with a chap about setting up the site, it's relatively slow going. The technical content side of the site is going well and by early next week I should have section 2 finished: a major section on the behaviour of costs. DW

Grace is a student and needed some guidance on stock management (that's inventory management for our American cousins) and credit management. Grace wanted advice on the application of stock and credit systems in a particular organisation ... couldn't give the fine detail but there is a lot on the web to help. Here's what I said. Dear Grace, Stock management: Tesco is a brilliant case study for stock management: they are at the forefront of all developments in supply chain management, including stock control. Look here: I then searched for Tesco at this site and this page shows what they have. The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply is a good place to look, of course http://www.cips.org/ There's a link on the left that will take you to the "CIPS Purchasing & Supply Management (P&SM) Model" which is a good looking pdf file Take a look at this as it gives headings for you to think about if nothing else. Look here, too, as you can follow through a stock management system that they are selling ... some screenshots and descriptions that could be helpful. Cumbria County Council has a stock management newsletter that you can download at and it might be worth a look. Maybe you would like to look at web based systems. A nice bright and bold site comprising a presentation format. Credit management: You can start here at Credit Management; but will have to register to make much progress: registration's free and painless! This is a commercial site but a lot of content is free. I went to the Institute of Credit Management but couldn't see much of interest, perhaps you can. The Credit Protection Association could have a few things of interest. Another commercial looking site but some useful looking links, I think. Well, Grace, I hope that's been worthwhile and you have a lot of work to do now! Let me know how the seminar went ... don't forget to talk to me! DW

Fiona wanted to know which is better for mangaement information purposes financial or management accounting? Here's what I advised Dear Fiona, This is a popular and interesting question that faces many first year students. The basic rule is that while both financial and management accounting have the same transactions and documentation as each other (materials arrive, invoices and goods received notes flow around the organisation, goods are produced ...), it is management accounting that is the highly focused, internal management information system that provides management with the additional decision making information they need to manage their business as optimally as possible. Financial accounting is a stewardship, externally focused, reporting system. Fiona, you need now to go to my web site and look in the management accounting section where you should find all of the material you need: there's even a table that compares financial with management accounting that should form the basis of your answer. My own text book, Cost and Management Accounting published by Prentice Hall has this table in Chapter 1 and it also has supporting discussion: see if this book is in your library. Take a look at the free trial on my web site, too, Fiona, as I am launching a new commercial side of my site and that will effectively be a text book on the web when it's finished: text, examples, questions and answers, how to work with spreadsheets, real life tips and examples ... ideal for a student such as yourself both now and for the rest of your time as a student. The site will be modular in that you will be able to buy just what you need and no more. I have finished the first section, Introduction to Management Accounting, and once I've got the ecommerce part of the site up and running I will go live. Section two is nearing completion, too, The Behaviour of Costs. That's enough to get you started, Fiona. See how you get on and let me know if you need any more help. Best wishes DW

A glorious weekend that saw me milling around the garden watering things and pretending I knew what I was doing! Some more of my seeds are poking their heads through the soil now! On Sunday I made myself some soup and feel the need to share it with the world! Carrot, Carraway and Coriander Soup tablespoon of oil small onion halved then sliced medium sized carrot chopped into pieces half a litre of vegetable stock or water and vegetable stock cube carraway seeds chopped coriander leaves lightly fry the onion in the oil until it has turned transparent then add the carrot and heat through for a couple of minutes add the stock/cube and water and half a teaspoon of carraway seeds and bring to boil boil gently until the carrots have cooked through liquidise return to pan, add coriander and a few more carrawy seeds then bring back to boil then take off the heat serve immediately You'll be stunned at how delicious it is! Mrs W couldn't stand it. DW

A question on the general background to and meaning of deferred tax came in from my old friend Maggie. Here is a summary of what I have found. Firstly, a definition of deferred tax A liability that results from income that has already been earned for accounting purposes but not for tax purposes. From the ASB in the UK, a very useful summary of FRS 19 FRS19 has replaced SSAP 15 and here is an ASB summary of the status of SSAP15 A PDF document from a BOC annual report that has a brief word on how they deal with deferred tax in their accounts. Also from BOC All UK companies must adopt this new standard for accounting periods ending on or after 23 January 2002. Under the previous accounting standard, SSAP15, no provision was required for deferred tax that was unlikely to become payable in the foreseeable future. Under FRS19, provision must be made for deferred tax no matter how remote the likely payment date or the extent to which payment may be continually deferred by future investment decisions or transactions of the Group. Within BOC, tax is deferred mainly as a result of accelerated tax depreciation of capital investments. The effect of applying FRS19 alone in 2001 would have been to raise the underlying tax charge by approximately 6 per cent. Some indication of what is important about deferred tax taken from an advertisement for a Deferred Tax seminar: Tax in Company Accounts With the Emphasis on Deferred Tax Of particular interest to all involved in preparing or understanding the taxation entries in statutory accounts. The course will review the UK corporate tax system, including recent major changes, and their implications for accounting and disclosure requirements. Deferred tax is very much in the news with the change to full provision now being mandatory. Coverage will include a detailed review of the new Accounting Standard and its impact on different corporate sectors, including the effect on dividend cover, banking covenants, past acquisitions and the pros and cons of discounting. Programme • The UK corporate tax regime and recent major changes • FRS16 - Tax in Company Accounts • FRS19 - Accounting for Deferred Tax • The impact of the change from 'partial' to 'full' provision • Implementation • Quantifying the prior period adjustment • Revisiting past acquisitions • Discounting the deferred tax • Case studies Very useful notes from AccountingWEB entitled FRS 19 - Deferred tax: Appendix 1 (Notes to the Accounts) and this from the same source: FRS 19 – Deferred tax Solomon Hare gives expert guidance on FRS 19 – Deferred tax. There's a Word document to download from there too. Here'a an article from the ACCA on FRS 19 Deferred Tax by Paul Robins: it was published on 1 March 2001 so be careful just in case it's a bit out of date. That should be useful everyone. DW

Spraznikom: today is Nauryz as celebrated in Kazakhstan. Nauryz is the new year celebration that coincides with the Spring Equinox. In fact this gives rise to one of the good reasons to spend some time in Kazakhstan: three or four new year parties. 31 December, 7 January, 22 March and another one that I've forgotten. Anyway, to the millions of people from all over Kazakhstan, enjoy the day. I believe this is also a festival for all Muslims: let's hope for a happy day for everyone, despite the goings on in Iraq. DW

A question from a regular of mine caused the cobwebs of my economic knowledge to become firmly lodged so I hie'd me off to a library in search of the very simple answer. I found the answer I was looking for quite quickly and felt the walk in justified more than just a five minute read. So I looked at the Oxford English Disctionary, full version, letter 'F'. I bet you didn't know that the word flat occupies about three pages in the OED. It does! In Who's Who 2002 there is only one person called Utting and there are no Duncan Williamsons. David Beckham is there and so is that dunderhead chef Anthony Worrall Thompson ... he has hundreds of names all in a row and I was a bit surprised to find that he's older than I am. Debrett's Peerage is a fountain of knowledge and you can read about such luminaries as Jeffrey Archer and his appalling attempts at dressing up his schlastic attainments: a minor public school in Somerset and Brasenose College Oxford: it doesn't say that he was at Oxford for only a year and that he was on a sports not an academic scholarship. Peter Carrington is still there and there are Lords Spiritual by the dozen. There are Lords and Ladies that most of us never have and never will hear about. Since 1952 Phil the Greek (the Duke of Edinburgh to the rest of us) has been granted precedence over all men in the realm including, I was surprised to read, the Heir Apparent: that's Charles. That three feathered emblem that Charles carries around with him is nothing, apparently, to do with being Prince of Wales: they are not the Prince of Wales' feathers, it is the emblem of the Heir Apparent. That book costs £250 by the way and I am sure Abingdon is riddled with people who are fighting over themselves to read this mighty tome rather than the 10 - 30 other books that could have been bought for the same amount of money. DW

Some of the seeds I planted just over a week ago have germinated and I'm like a child when I see that. Childish enthusiasm will step aside when we start eating these plants! Aaaaargh! Planted loads more seeds last night to: herbs, climbers and flowers. Watch this space in June or July when I take some pictures. Sorry, they'll be here!!! DW

I went to Birmingham on Saturday to the Education Show: an exhibition for teachers to meet suppliers, government departments and each other! Three huge halls at the NEC filled with stalls that had all sorts of things on display. I came away with three carrier bags filled with booklets, papers and CD ROMS. I met a few people but I have to confess that the event didn't meet all of of my expectations. Never mind, I got a few ideas that could surface here in a while! The drive up was cold: really cold weather. The drive back was sweltering as the sun had broken through the mist and was boiling me half to death. I took a walk to Tesco on Saturday evening and had done the same the night before: 20 - 30 minute round trip including shopping. Then today, Sunday, Mrs W and I went to the garden centre to buy another cherry tree as our existing tree needed a cross pollinator ... now it's got one! We bought a peach tree too, plus an Azalea and some flower seeds. Cost a fortune and then Dima and I had to do some digging and moving. Mrs W, who's serioulsy into Feng Shui, was working on the positioning of the trees to bring out the auspicious and that meant digging up and transplanting three plants and then planting the three new trees/bush. Dima did much of the work, including spraying yours truly with ice cold water as we watered our new plants in. Half way through the digging we came across a major obstacle and big brick ... obstacle turned out to be a large piece of wood that took us ages to shift. Having identified it as wood, having thought that it was stone because of its colour and the sound the spade made when hitting it, Dima announced that it was probably a coffin or buried treasure. Of course it was neither! We came across half bricks and other stones, too that made or lives so much more interesting. We did a good job overall and the Spring and summer should help us to reap our rewards. Last year was disappointing as three of our then four fruit trees were hit by pests and didn't produce anything like anything decent ... the cherries blossomed madly but couldn't be pollinated, of course. I was also filled with glee when I spotted that some of the rocket seeds I planted last Sunday have germinated! Hooray! There you are, more slop and I'm kerry packered with all this digging and walking. DW