School Photo

We donated some English language books to Siri's old school yesterday and several teachers were dragooned into meeting us. That was good. We also went to see an English lesson in progress and I volunteered to talk to them ... I did that and learned something, Here is the photo they took to commemorate our visit! The Director and three English teachers ... What I learned was that they need my Kabul in the Classroom approach to teaching English! DW

When a Computer Dies ...

I arrived in Muscat on Saturday a couple of weeks ago. I had arrived via overnight flights so I went to bed to catch up on my sleep. I then spent a little time exploring the area around the hotel, talked to Mrs W and so on. Then just before I decided it was time to review my work for the following day, I connected my Galaxy camera to my MacBook Pro laptop and uploaded my latest photos. Then I decided to delete all photos on the camera as I had two backups of them. I started the process, using the computer's systems. The fans started working overtime: this has happened before and since I had an SSD and 8 Gb of RAM I was not worried. I had heard that whirring before. Then the laptop closed down. Let me cut a long story short: I was about 15 hours away from starting work, I had a meeting scheduled in about an hour from the melt down and it seemed to me that something had burned out in the Mac. I tried and tried to revive it as it is an expensive piece of equipment. I spent time on my phone gathering ideas from various computer disaster forums on the web. Nothing worked and nothing helped. The Tools of my Trade In my business, my computer is the tool of my trade: I cannot work without it. My course this week was Advanced Excel. I needed a computer. I had found an electronics shop in the department store next to the hotel earlier in the day so I went back and went back. I scanned the laptops they had for sale and the prices looked OK. NO Macs but that was fine for me. I bought this Toshiba Corei7 based computer. It looked fine and was a 64 bit systems running Windows 8. I have since upgraded to Windows 8.1 and that is better because W8 has a lengthy learning curve to get used to it. Now, all of my files were on that MacBook AND on my external HDD ... my 1Tb fail safe back up ... it failed too. I simply could not read it no matter what. I followed someone's advice and did a quick format of it and then downloaded some data recovery software and found everything ... all in code though so I really had little idea of what I was looking at. Then that failed too. I was completely alone. 12 hours to go. What on earth does one do now? They do not sell or support Apple products in Oman! The Cloud The Cloud is a wonderful thing and without gmail, dropbox and a few other online goodies I would have struggled to look credible on day one of my five day course. The upshot was that I found most of my materials but I know I had done a lot of work on upgrading the spreadsheet files from the resources that came with one of the books I use for some aspects of my Excel work. Gone ... I would have to re work them at some stage. Ten hours to go. I decided I would sleep and wake early as I normally do these days anyway. Especially if Mrs W is with me, I wake up around 5 and do my final prep then so that we can be together in the evenings after work. I woke at 3 am! Thai time 6 am ... that was fine for me. I started working with coffee in hand and everything went well. I put my day together and it went well. What About my Backup? The longer term problem is not solved: what about all of my files that seem to have gone from MscBook and external HDD? I know there is software that can help but I did not want to corrupt anything so I was wary and did nothing myself. It cost me a lot of time as I recreated my work but I felt better that way. I waited until I got home and knowing that we were going into the city on Monday waited until then ... there is an Apple shop there. We explained my plight and whilst they are only retail they kindly let me attach my SSD from my MacBook to one of the Macs and copy a few files over ... only a few but I was grateful for that. Tuesday, into town to the better IT shop there and they were flummoxed. Their initial efforts drew a blank. I showed them the software available and left them to it. Wednesday, they had opened my Mac SSD but could not open my newly, fully formatted 1Tb external HDD. There seems to be no end to this saga. I had decided I will spend no more money on the MacBook, having recently upgraded it to SSD and doubling its RAM. I know it would mean sending or taking it to Bangkok and who knows what they would find? So when I got home I looked for the copying software and installed it: it wouldn't work for me, telling me it couldn't find the disk format this software worked with. I found something else that supported several disk formats and I took a risk and bought it: not expensive but I bought it. Last night, then, almost two weeks after the system failure, I got most of my data files off the MacBook disk and as I type I have just uploaded all of my photos. Conclusions Several years ago I had two separate catastrophic failures and learned from them. I have at least three versions of just about every file I have created since then. I had my MacBook and two backup disks with me: my external HDD and my external MacBook timewarp back up disk. I lost the laptop and then I lost the external HDD and the timewarp back up was no use to me. I believed I was covered for all eventualities. I was wrong! What should I do differently? Make sure I use all cloud services in full from now on, that is the only thing I had not done properly. Lesson learned again! DW

Night in BKK ... Bus Home Now

I won't admit to booking into the wrong hotel yesterday of course but I spent a good and restful night in Bangkok last night.

Another early start and now I am on the NHS Gold Class bus to Surin. I should be home by about 4 pm.

See night and morning photos ...

DW

Muscat Done!

A very successful week in spite of losing my entire laptop and external HDD!!

DW

Daughter Fran the Honorary Doctor ...

How about this Fran is being awarded an honorary doctorate by Anglia Ruskin University this afternoon. Try this link if you want to watch the ceremony: http://t.co/4uuJdihnJe I hope it works! This is a family first I think!! In the meantime, read about it here http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/news/honoraries_join_cambridge_celebrations.html DW

You Don't Need This

12 hours to go before a course starts and pffffttt!  Dead computer. Then my back up external hard drive died too. What are the odds of that happening? It did. Yesterday.

I bought a new laptop and with the help of Gmail and other things in the cloud, a catastrophe is now downgraded to frustration with the prospect of many hours of work to recover.

:(

DW

Meat Mayhem

I have been a vegetarian for about 25 years now. I still have Christmas dinner, though: it is my exception to myself.

In August, for a particular reason, I went non veggie for about two weeks. In fact, by happenstance, I had never eaten so much meat!

My body reacted with a vengeance.  I caught a chill from the air con, by coincidence and that was rough. But what was happening in my gut took me by storm and it lasted long after the last bits of dead animal crossed my lips.

I will never do that again.

DW

Scammed

I have done three jobs for a  Singapore based company this year. The locations were excellent and the delegates were very good. Evaluations excellent.

So far, however, I have been paid only part of my fees and I have just received some worrying information that suggests it is going to take some hard work to get the rest ... if I get it at all.

Last year I, along with several others, worked for a company that ran into trouble and we all lost money there too.

This experience is new to me but I never expected to be scammed by a company from Singapore!

DW

A to Z

This is my two day journey Breakfast in Brunei Lunch in Kuala Lumpur Dinner in Bangkok Breakfast will be in Dubai Tomorrow's lunch will be in Riyadh Not bad, that! DW

The Fountain Two

By popular request, here are a couple more photos of the fountain. I did take photos of the fountain with the house in the background yesterday BUT with the wrong lens. This time I used the right lens ... DW

Accra Done!

I went to Accra two weeks ago. I was working non stop and took no photos. Must go back!

Great people. Great experience.

DW

The Fountain

The fountains today ... macro lens, hot off the press.

Oh! Here's an Oleander Hawk Moth caterpillar ... that was BIG!

DW

9.2 out of 10

I have just been browsing to see how my latest book, The Bookkeeping and Accounting Coach, is doing. I have no idea how many copies have been sold but it is very widely available, world wide.

On one site, it shows reviews of 9.2 out of 10 after 10 reviews. I couldn't see any of the reviews but 9.2 is very good!

DW

The Bird and The Snake

You know already that someone broke into our house on Friday: unpleasant and unsettling.

On Wednesday I was working in my office when a small bird flew in and sat looking at me. I flapped my hand a little to try to encourage the bird to leave but it wouldn't. I stood up, grabbed a cushion and moved to try to encourage the bird to leave. It left. No stress. No harm. I closed the window.

Thursday, I was standing next to our fountain in the front garden when I noticed a metre long, slender snake on the ground next to me. Yikes! It moved. Yikes! In the end, after a short spell during which the snake and Ginger the cat sparred, I used a stick to help me to release the snake.

Friday, the snake came back. I was working on the advice of my son Andrew who said, never harm a snake. After a tussle, I got the snake out of the garden unharmed.

If you believe in omens, here are two. Feel free to interpret them!

DW

The Break in at No 125

Last night Namwan and I were both sitting on the kitchen patio surfing the web as our WiFi system is down and we get a good connection on the phones on the patio. Namwan had to go to the bedroom for something and as she opened the door, she was confronted by a strange man: someone had just walked into our house and had been wandering around. Namwan ran away immediately, sensible girl and shouted to me, My dear, someone’s broken into our house. At this stage I didn’t know what had happened so I ran into the house, Namwan had run outside to alert her parents and sisters and I armed myself and went in search of the burglar. I didn’t find him: he had run into the bedroom and opened and jumped out of a window. Was I ready to belt him with my metal shafted spade, I don’t know! I asked Namwan why she thought we had had a burglar when nothing seems to have gone missing and she explained that she had been two feet away from the small man in a green tee shirt. She had met him! Well, lots of milling around and I took off in the car to look for him … what and who I was looking for I had no idea! I found no one. A while later someone said that there were four young men on two motorbikes who had been interested in our house just before Namwan found the burglar. Then a little while later they came back: one motorbike with two or three men on it rode slowly past the house again but I was not there to chase them or I would have! We went to the next village along to see if there were people there who might have seen or heard about the likely lads … nothing and no one about. We bumped into Namwan’s brother in the village and she went and talked to him. In the meantime I said, although mother and sister are at home, I don’t like it that our phones and my laptop are on the settee and our front door is unlocked. I went back and tidied up! As I was returning to the village I spotted lights approaching through the trees so I stopped the car, left the engine running, turned out the lights and waited. A car went past, I turned my face to remain anonymous. Then a motor bike. The bike beeped its horn twice: a warning to the car driver that he had spotted me? After all, they had been to my house and must recognise the car! I let them go for 5 … 10 seconds then turned round and followed them. I spotted them at the far side of the village and increased my speed enormously to make sure I didn’t lose them: car in front, bike behind. Suddenly I was on them: I was going so fast and the bike was in the middle of the road that I had to slam on the brakes to avoid the possibility of running them over … much as I might have felt that that might not be such a bad thing! The tyres squealed, the boys must have been terrified! I easily kept up with the bike: light blue football shirt with number 13 in pillion position and a dark green tee shirt driving. I was making so sure that nothing bad happened that I didn’t make a note of their number plate! Then something flew off the bike and landed on the road in front of me. Something small and brown … they slowed a little and indicated left. I slowed and let them pull away a little as I knew I could catch them on the open road at any time. They stopped about 200 metres ahead of me and their car turned round to face me as I turned round to see what they had thrown or dropped. It took me about 10 seconds to find a baseball cap in the road … brown … small. I took it and drove off. I went back to the village where Namwan was and told her about the cap I was holding and football shirt number 13. By now everyone seemed to have worked out who these loafers were and a little later an uncle called the police who said they didn’t recognise the name they had been given but would check in the morning. I said I want to go and talk to the boy … Namwan said her brother and others would do that, if not the police! So we all milled around a bit more and as the loafers realised that I had got some evidence against them, they were probably not feeling so smart. However, at some stage in the evening, someone had met the boys and they had talked about going somewhere to pick up a knife or a gun! Scary stuff. Thailand is a peaceful place and when someone does something like this, the whole community gets involved. No one likes this kind of thing even though we think nothing was stolen and no one got hurt. I was happy to have found and chased them and to have given them pause for thought. I just hope it all ends here! DW

Kitchen Towel Mayhem

This is what happens when a young dog and a young cat are left alone with some paper towels ...

UPDATE

They did it again last night: half a roll but much more mess. Then I left them alone to drink my coffee and eat my yoghurt only for Namwan to come and tell me 10 eggs had crashed mysteriously to the floor.

It turns out Pongo chased and killed a chicken the other day ... crikey! She's a Beagle and that habit can't be broken I think.

DW

space ... there's nothing to it

I read yesterday about a space craft flying four billion miles in ten years to rendezvous with a comet. Here are my thoughts on that.

forgive the typo in that second screenshot.

DW

Cambridge 2

More Cambridge photos ...

DW

Cambridge

Cambridge is a very photogenic city ... take a look.

DW

Fran: the wedding

Daughter Fran got married on Saturday ...

DW

Oi! Oi!

Some people just don't see the world around them do they?

There I was posing and that old man just stuttered past.

DW

Luanda Done!

In the airport waiting to leave Angola where I have had a good week. I couldn't take many snaps but here are some.

DW

In flight snaps

The usual snaps!

DW

Buriramtastic: the video

Here is one of the videos I made of the Buriram v TOT CAT match the other day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up2TahzeqdQ&feature=youtu.be DW

Buriramtastic

I think the level of football is about English league 1 but the atmosphere was equal to the premiership. Organised singing that goes on for beyond 90 minutes.  We left at full time but the choir stayed and carried on singing.

Three decent goals but the opposition was very weak. Two goals were lobs. The second lob almost from the half way line that the keeper had covered.  The ball floated for a long time and as it was about to land in the keeper's arms, the poor lad slipped. 3: 0! The first lob was done really well.

I don't know any of the players but my man of the match turned out to be an Englishman: Jay Simpson. Well done!

Can you spot the ball in photo three?

DW

From Manaus to Buri Ram

Look at this! Find it on a map.

England Unwin

Here i am watching England about to lose to Italy in Manaus.

DW

Doha Airport

Doha Airport has been like a zoo for years. Until now.

After so many trips in which I thought, why do I need this. Moreover, why did we put up with it?

I suppose we were just waiting.

Well, it's definitely better and these few snaps give just a hint of what they have done.

Ginger as I live and Breathe

As I was walking through In Battuta Mall yesterday I saw a cat that looked like a fully grown version of our own Ginger. She saw me taking her photo and immediately came to me to say hello!

Nice!!

DW