You like Beetles?

Then take a look at this beauty: the Sugarcane Longhorn Stemborer, long horn borer ... in Latin, DORYSTHENES BUQUETI. Found in our garden in Notth East Thailand this afternoon. The antennae are 4.5 inches across! Which is your favourite? DW

Farewell Meow Meow

This is the cat we called Meow Meow: it came into our lives when it was about two weeks old and was wandering around the fields having been abandoned. So, the family took it in, we fed it, we played with it and looked after it. The dogs liked it and everyone got along. Nice cat. This photo is how it was resting one evening about a year or so ago ... in a funny mood! Tom cats disappear from time to time and so did Meow Meow: for three or even four weeks. We felt he was dead. Then he returned but with a large wound on its chest. Car or dog fight? Who knows but it must have hurt. The wound healed well though and the fur grew back over it. In the meantime, our Ginger tom cat arrived, also a two week old abandoned kitten and we took him in ... Ginger and Meow Meow got on really well: they played and ran and jumped like good young friends do. They both came into our house and we fed them both. After a while Meow Meow disappeared again but when he came back this time, with another wound, in the same place, something had changed. His eyes were vacant. He would wander around crying at times. We still fed him but he wasn't all there. The wound healed again nicely so most things just jogged along. Then Meow Meow and Ginger started fighting: some epic battles with fur and excrement flying: remember the day we accidentally locked them together in our house!! Ginger also disappeared for three weeks and came back very thin: whatever he was doing, eating wasn't his priority. He is home now and eating well again. Meow Meow got thinner and thinner and more and more listless. Sad to see. Such a happy cat a year ago and now, at about the age of 20 months or so he died. He died last night after a short bout of sickness and that is the end of Meow Meow. Everyone and everything who brings joy and leaves memories deserves an obituary. So hail and farewell Meow Meow: you are free now! DW

Excel Solutions for Accountants

That is the title of my new book on Excel and here is the Introduction to the three volume set: a total of about 200 pages.

Introduction to Excel Solutions for Accountants

Duncan Williamson

April 2015

This book will be published by www.bookboon.comearly in June 2015 and of course this introduction is subject to change between now and then.

This is the first in a series of three books with the title of Excel Solutions for Accountants.

The essence of the book is that we have chosen a series of topics that we believe are of direct interest and relevance to accountants: we know that from the work we do every day. That is not to say that everything an accountant ever needs or does is included in this book; rather it’s a general book aimed at the accountant who knows that Excel can be made to do a lot more than it does but he just doesn’t know what that might be.

We have taken a very hands on approach with this book and for everything we talk about there is something for you to do: there is a spreadsheet for you to work with, too, so that you can always check your work and your accuracy at every stage.

One of our over riding ambitions was to make this book both as direct and as easy to use as possible. You will not find massive files with hideously complex formulas in them, each of which might take you an hour or two just to begin to unravel. What we have done is to give you straightforward examples with non complex lists and databases so that you come to learn the techniques and functions rather than worrying about the database.

Part One of the book comprises the following

Accountant Specific 1Excel TablesDepreciationRatio Analysis 1Graphs 1Pivot Tables 1

You can see immediately from the titles of these chapters that the accountant is the target here!

Secondly you should see that four of the chapters have the number 1 after them: that tells you that in books 2 and/or 3 there is another chapter or chapters on the same topic. Take a look at the contents of books 2 and 3:

Part TwoPart ThreeAccountant Specific 2Accountant Specific 3Compound Interest and Discounting: the time value of moneyDashboardingData Validation and Form ControlsPivot Tables 3Ratio Analysis 2ForecastingGraphs 2BudgetingPivot Tables 2AGGREGATE, OFFSET and SOLVER

More than one way to skin a cat! We present one or more solutions to the problems we present in this book and from time to time we say: Excel provides more than one way to solve this problem. If you already know a better way to solve a problem than we are presenting, stay with it. Even if you think our method is better but are happy with your own method, stick with it if it doesn’t mean you are wasting time or being inefficient. Don’t be stubborn though: like the cost accountant who saw our solution to his problem but preferred not to follow our advice: that meant he preferred to wait 20 minutes every morning for his main Excel file to open and then wait a further 45 seconds or so every time he pressed the Enter key. Our solution meant no waiting time at all as we replaced his 30,000 volatile function workbook with a Pivot Table based solution that provided almost instant responses.

Templates: we have tried at every stage of every chapter of this book to provide templates for you to work with and/or create. After all, what’s the point of programming a spreadsheet over and over again when you shouldn’t have to? Excel deals with some of the most predictable things you can do and templates are consistent with that. Therefore, take each of our examples either as a template or as your template in the making. We stress PPP too: paper, pencil, plan. The PPP approach means, don’t just dive in to a spreadsheet problem, take you time and plan it out on paper first. Then develop your solution. Then derive your template if appropriate.

A total of 18 chapters and by the end of all three books we believe you can easily call yourself an intermediate user of Excel. We also feel that you will have unlocked so much potential in Excel that you will want more and more from it.

This book has been written with Excel 2013 for Windows: that will mean that some of the things we have done will be a little bit different sometimes from what any other version of Excel might do. We have kept such differences to a minimum, however. Nevertheless, we would encourage you to upgrade to 2013 soon anyway.

Other sources of help for Excel: there are many sources of help other than Excel itself. Here are just a few examples of where to get help: just search for these online to get there!

excelmaster.co: my own Excel BlogExcel-G: online/email based discussion list for general level questions on Excel. There are about 1,000 members of this group and they are friendly and really helpful people. Please note, this is a general level list and anything too advanced should be directed at …Excel-L: online/email based discussion list for Excel Developers. This is the more advanced list and seems to concentrate mainly on VBA problems and solutions.OzGrid: this is a free and commercial site offering some brilliant resources.chandoo.org: this is another really useful site whose founder, Chandoo, has the objective of making you awesome in Excel! A lot of the materials on this site are free but some of them are commercial. Chandoo also offers online and offline courses.Jon Peltier: Jon seems to be the world’s foremost authority on graphs and charts. Again, this is a combined free and commercial site but there are many wonderful free resources on there.Mr Excel: Bill Jelen is a prolific Excel materials developer and explanator! Bill provides a lot of free and highly commendable materials, again both free and commercial.Charley Kyd: Charley has specialised in the past in dashboarding and whilst he still does that, he offers a lot of free Excel based materials too. Well worth searching out.John Walkenbach: John has been around for ages and he writes the Excel Bibles, among other Excel based titles. John is always comprehensive and has a lot of useful things to offerYouTube: there are many thousands of videos on YouTube now and more appear every day. Some of them are really very good and others will leave you wondering what on earth they were trying to say. It’s pot luck really but once you find a good YouTube provider, stick with them!

There are many more people/organisations/lists that can help you so these are just a few of the ones we recommend.

DW

Excel Solutions for Accountants

That is the title of my new book on Excel and here is the Introduction to the three volume set: a total of about 200 pages.

Introduction to Excel Solutions for Accountants

Duncan Williamson

April 2015

This book will be published by www.bookboon.com early in June 2015 and of course this introduction is subject to change between now and then.

This is the first in a series of three books with the title of Excel Solutions for Accountants.

The essence of the book is that we have chosen a series of topics that we believe are of direct interest and relevance to accountants: we know that from the work we do every day. That is not to say that everything an accountant ever needs or does is included in this book; rather it’s a general book aimed at the accountant who knows that Excel can be made to do a lot more than it does but he just doesn’t know what that might be.

We have taken a very hands on approach with this book and for everything we talk about there is something for you to do: there is a spreadsheet for you to work with, too, so that you can always check your work and your accuracy at every stage.

One of our over riding ambitions was to make this book both as direct and as easy to use as possible. You will not find massive files with hideously complex formulas in them, each of which might take you an hour or two just to begin to unravel. What we have done is to give you straightforward examples with non complex lists and databases so that you come to learn the techniques and functions rather than worrying about the database.

Part One of the book comprises the following

• Accountant Specific 1


• Excel Tables


• Depreciation


• Ratio Analysis 1


• Graphs 1


• Pivot Tables 1

You can see immediately from the titles of these chapters that the accountant is the target here!

Secondly you should see that four of the chapters have the number 1 after them: that tells you that in books 2 and/or 3 there is another chapter or chapters on the same topic. Take a look at the contents of books 2 and 3:

Part Two	Part Three
Accountant Specific 2	Accountant Specific 3
Compound Interest and Discounting: the time value of money	Dashboarding
Data Validation and Form Controls	Pivot Tables 3
Ratio Analysis 2	Forecasting
Graphs 2	Budgeting
Pivot Tables 2	AGGREGATE, OFFSET and SOLVER

More than one way to skin a cat! We present one or more solutions to the problems we present in this book and from time to time we say: Excel provides more than one way to solve this problem. If you already know a better way to solve a problem than we are presenting, stay with it. Even if you think our method is better but are happy with your own method, stick with it if it doesn’t mean you are wasting time or being inefficient. Don’t be stubborn though: like the cost accountant who saw our solution to his problem but preferred not to follow our advice: that meant he preferred to wait 20 minutes every morning for his main Excel file to open and then wait a further 45 seconds or so every time he pressed the Enter key. Our solution meant no waiting time at all as we replaced his 30,000 volatile function workbook with a Pivot Table based solution that provided almost instant responses.

Templates: we have tried at every stage of every chapter of this book to provide templates for you to work with and/or create. After all, what’s the point of programming a spreadsheet over and over again when you shouldn’t have to? Excel deals with some of the most predictable things you can do and templates are consistent with that. Therefore, take each of our examples either as a template or as your template in the making. We stress PPP too: paper, pencil, plan. The PPP approach means, don’t just dive in to a spreadsheet problem, take you time and plan it out on paper first. Then develop your solution. Then derive your template if appropriate.

A total of 18 chapters and by the end of all three books we believe you can easily call yourself an intermediate user of Excel. We also feel that you will have unlocked so much potential in Excel that you will want more and more from it.

This book has been written with Excel 2013 for Windows: that will mean that some of the things we have done will be a little bit different sometimes from what any other version of Excel might do. We have kept such differences to a minimum, however. Nevertheless, we would encourage you to upgrade to 2013 soon anyway.

Other sources of help for Excel: there are many sources of help other than Excel itself. Here are just a few examples of where to get help: just search for these online to get there!

• excelmaster.co: my own Excel Blog


• Excel-G: online/email based discussion list for general level questions on Excel. There are about 1,000 members of this group and they are friendly and really helpful people. Please note, this is a general level list and anything too advanced should be directed at …


• Excel-L: online/email based discussion list for Excel Developers. This is the more advanced list and seems to concentrate mainly on VBA problems and solutions.


• OzGrid: this is a free and commercial site offering some brilliant resources.


• chandoo.org: this is another really useful site whose founder, Chandoo, has the objective of making you awesome in Excel! A lot of the materials on this site are free but some of them are commercial. Chandoo also offers online and offline courses.


• Jon Peltier: Jon seems to be the world’s foremost authority on graphs and charts. Again, this is a combined free and commercial site but there are many wonderful free resources on there.


• Mr Excel: Bill Jelen is a prolific Excel materials developer and explanator! Bill provides a lot of free and highly commendable materials, again both free and commercial.


• Charley Kyd: Charley has specialised in the past in dashboarding and whilst he still does that, he offers a lot of free Excel based materials too. Well worth searching out.


• John Walkenbach: John has been around for ages and he writes the Excel Bibles, among other Excel based titles. John is always comprehensive and has a lot of useful things to offer


• YouTube: there are many thousands of videos on YouTube now and more appear every day. Some of them are really very good and others will leave you wondering what on earth they were trying to say. It’s pot luck really but once you find a good YouTube provider, stick with them!

There are many more people/organisations/lists that can help you so these are just a few of the ones we recommend.

Cowardly Ratbag

Just before he ran away, some coward did this to my car.

Robin Red Breast

As children we sang about the Robin Red Breast at school. I never saw any anywhere. My sister and her daughter's family keep a bird feeding station and all sorts of birds appear there.

Yesterday a Robin appeared and stayed long enough for me to take photos of it. Here is one of them: taken through the double glazed window of a door!

DW

Froggie

I was looking for a cigarette lighter this morning to burn our rubbish and Mrs W said it might be somewhere on the entrance patio so I went to look. My walking books have been on the patio for months and I looked in them. aaaagghh! there was a frog in one of them. Mrs W came out to look as she is not such a creepy crawly coward and said it was no longer there. I looked again ... aaaggghh! There it was, still there! Mrs W got it out and it hopped off. I decided I was brave enough to take some photographs and here is one that I processed using Photoshop together with the original snap!

Another Book

I have been commissioned to write another book. Working title: Excel for accountants.

15 to 20 chapters of high quality explanations with loads of examples.

Will keep you informed!

DW

Buriram United AFC Champions League Game

We got here 30 minutes late but Burian already two goals up.

Playing Seongnan FC from South Korea

DW

What Happens in a Cat Fight

I left the house yesterday and, as normal, locked the door. Then Mrs W and I went on a 20 mile waste of time drive since we were going to the market but realised, a couple of miles short of our mission, that neither of us had money or cards with us.

Home!

Dogs running excitedly around our house. Sisters shouted excitedly at Mrs W. Mrs W relayed the message: our tom cat and their tom cat were both locked in our house and were fighting ... they fight two or three times a week, sadly.

I opened the door and Ginger was there surrounded by six or seven clumps of his fur. It had taken a lot of effort to do that I'm sure. Ginger calmly left and settled himself at the front of the house.

I couldn't see or hear the other cat but I caught a smell. I followed my nose and got to the dining room. All I can say is that I am glad there is no carpet in there. Excrement covered half of the floor and it was on the wall, table legs and chair legs.

I can't imagine the battle that must have taken place but it was clearly hard fought and one of the cats was more nervous than the other.

As I left the dining room to summon Mrs W for help I met the other cat, Meow Meow. As I sometimes do with the dogs,  I clapped my hands as a way to get his attention and, surprisingly, he turned tail and skittered under the settee.

After a minute Meow Meow left the house and sauntered away: Ginger saw him, arched his back and hissed the hiss of a fearful or aggressive cat. I am not sure which cat Ginger is but I have seen him running and hiding from Meow Meow before.

In conclusion,  it took us a while to clean the dining room but I was sorry that I had inadvertently locked both cats in the house. I had no idea Ginger was at home let alone Meow Meow. I'll certainly make sure I don't do that again!

DW

I passed and what does a vegetarian taste like?

I passed my MOOC: my Data Analysis course with the University of Texas at Austin. 82% overall.

In Brunei I found pot noodles: vegetarian flavour. My question is, what does a vegetarian taste like?

DW

Two New Cases

Here are two new Excel based cases I have just prepared that I know some of you will appreciate.

UK Petrol Prices

I downloaded a file of all retail petrol and diesel prices for the UK from 2003 to 2014. The task is to prepare an interactive table so that the user just enters a date in one cell and the table then shows the

• retail pump price per litre


• duty per litre


• VAT percentage


• calculation of the cost of the petrol net of duty and VAT

This case involves the use of a variety of techniques including

• VLOOKUP()


• Data Validation


• IFERROR()


• Paste Special Multiply

Here's an example of my output:



 

This video summarises the case:

[wpvideo nw5NNOOh]

Sleep Requirements.

In today's Borneo Bulletin newspaper there is an article on the sleep requirements of people of all ages. They give the requirements such as, a new born baby needs from 14 to 17 hours a day ... someone over 65 years of age needs from 7 to 8 hours sleep a day.

The task is to turn a photo of the data into a table and a chart that communicates as effectively as possible: I prepared the following:





 

Please feel free to write to me at any time to ask for the spreadsheets that accompany these cases. At the moment they are live cases and I won't release them generally until the course has finished in a week's time..

Duncan Williamson

 

Wat Lan Kuat

Wat Lan Kuat, a temple near Sisaket in Thailand. Made of bottles. Take a look at these few snaps I took there today.

DW

New Video! - Mean, Median and Mode in this Introductory Presentation

An introduction to measures of central tendency: mean, median and mode. We use Excel to discuss this topic and there are three exercises in this presentation. http://ift.tt/1xS5gnV

New Video! - find & replace

The Find&Replace menu in Excel contains some hidden gems. Things that you might never have seen before. Take a look here to see what you've been missing. http://ift.tt/1JrisW3

New Video! - ctrl+enter with the correlation function in excel

This video shows you how to use the =CORREL() function in Excel with the Ctrl+Enter technique. This is especially useful for Mac users who do not have access to the Data Analysis Toolpak http://ift.tt/1yWlzFO

Death of a Tree

We call it a shelf tree because we don't know its real name. It's a shelf tree because its branches stick out like shelves! Anyway, we bought a nice shelf tree and planted it. We cared for it. The cat learned to climb up it. Then the insects moved in. The tree lost a lot of leaves over a few days we we found the cause: insects. We bought insect spray and the tree revived. Then we noticed a top branch was looking a bit sick but we couldn't get at it. Today I was watering the garden and noticed a lower branch had weakened in the middle and was hanging loose. I told Mrs W and by the time it was time for a break she'd dug around the root and the tree had to go. We huffed and puffed a little bit and got the tree out. Dead branches allright. Sticky blobs on the bark. Holes in the trunk. I investigated one piece and found a lot of 2 mm sized ants inside. two MILLIMETRE ants had killed our 4 - 5 metre tree. When humans have been wiped out, I am sure that ants will rule the world. Here's what's left of our big shelf tree ... there are two smaller ones in the garden and I hope they grow and survive. DW

Hasselback Garlic Potatoes

Ever heard of Hasselback Garlic Potatoes? I just made them ... see my photo. They are very good.

I got the recipe from a friend on Facebook.

DW

Stewart ... Stewart!

Stewart is part of the family and has been since is birth.  He lives with his mother and although his father and brother met untimely deaths,  he seems happy and lively, if a little shy.

Stewart is young but is fully grown: that means he is fit and slim given his adequate diet.

I have to say that I have had misgivings about Stewart for a while now.  You know, when something happens and it's a bit off key. Or someone does something and you wonder,  did they really do that?

It all came to a head this morning for Stewart.  I was just looking out through the dining room window when I saw him and another young lad. They were engaged in the kind of activity that no one should see but between members of the same sex: well, it's just not right.

I didn't feel to be in a position to intervene in any way and the matter was over rather quickly. I did discuss what I saw with Mrs W but she was not so concerned as I was.

After all, Mrs W has been around dogs all her life and Stewart is just another dog as far as she is concerned, gay or straight!

Still, you don't see many gay dogs do you!

DW

First of January 2015

My diary. I have kept a diary since I was 14 years old. I kept all my diaries too and read them every now and again. Some trivial things. Some memorable things. Some sad things, some happy things.

When I moved to Thailand last year I threw away my diaries. Over the last few years I have relied more and more on electronic notes and journal items so my diary had become less important. Still, when my blog service provider disappeared without a trace a few years ago I realised that I need to have a diary strategy which is why I have this blog and it is why I use twitter and to a much lesser extent Facebook.

Like many people I take photos of food and people, buildings, landscapes and animals. I include some of them here from time to time. Here's a photo I took about an hour ago ... mother and two week old calf!

Anyway, I bought a diary for 2015 and I will use it for business rather than personal reasons. I think.

DW

Happy New Year

Hello everyone!

It is 20:35 on 31st December where I am and that means new year celebrations have started or are very shortly about to start somewhere.

I wish all of you a happy and peaceful new year. It is my resolution to post more pages here in the coming year. As you know, I post something as often as I can and I try to ensure everything is of high quality.

I have upgraded my screen capture video production software and intend to create and post more of them.

Do feel free to write to me at any time, by the way: I always reply to my messages and comments.

Best wishes

Duncan Williamson

Happy New Year

Hello everyone!

It is 20:35 on 31st December where I am and that means new year celebrations have started or are very shortly about to start somewhere.

I wish all of you a happy and peaceful new year. It is my resolution to post more pages here in the coming year. As you know, I post something as often as I can and I try to ensure everything is of high quality.

I have upgraded my screen capture video production software and intend to create and post more of them.

Do feel free to write to me at any time, by the way: I always reply to my messages and comments.

Enjoy the photo of the individual cheese cakes I have just made!! And the English trifle that has already been eaten!!

Best wishes

DW

Khan Academy

I am learning all sorts of things this year and will continue next year as well.

One of my sources of learning is the Khan Academy and I recommend it to you for all sorts of things including mathematics … plus science and computing. It’s FREE too!

Here my link to take you there, please take a look.

 

Duncan Williamson

Two Videos … more to come

The menu system on this blog has fallen apart for some reason and until I get it sorted out I will communicate this way as well as through the home page and so on.

Anyway, two new videos in case you missed them that can be found in my OneDrive Public folder

how to create a positive and negative chart/graph. That is, making the positive numbers blue and the negative numbers red … or any colours you wish

Introduction to setting up a Pivot Table and drilling down in a Pivot Table. Pivot Tables are vital for anyone dealing with numbers and analysis and if you haven’t learned them yet … spend about 10 minutes with me.

You should see the respective Excel files there too!

Stop and start these videos as you wish until everything is clear.

 

Duncan Williamson

21st December 2014

Testing the Menus

I am not at all sure of how the menus are working now … testing, testing …

 

Dw

True Kindness

I was buying a diary and postcards in WH Smith in Muscat airport last night and wanted to pay in US Dollars.  It came to $6 and I had a $5 note and a $50 note.

I knew I would get the change in Rivals but I agreed to pay with the $50 note.

I hadn't seen her but suddenly a woman in the queue behind me said, you don't want to break that $50 note and handed over an Oman Rial note.

That was so kind and it has never happened to me before. I thanked her profusely and for the record, English accent.

DW

True Kindness

I was buying a diary and postcards in WH Smith in Muscat airport last night and wanted to pay in US Dollars.  It came to $6 and I had a $5 note and a $50 note.

I knew I would get the change in Rivals but I agreed to pay with the $50 note.

I hadn't seen her but suddenly a woman in the queue behind me said, you don't want to break that $50 note and handed over an Oman Rial note.

That was so kind and it has never happened to me before. I thanked her profusely and for the record, English accent.

DW

Impressive for an Ancient

At the end of today's session one of the delegates said my knowledge and skills are impressive.

Then another one said it's so unusual to see someone so old and aged knowing so much about computers!

Pass the walking frame nurse!

DW

Did you Check the Safe?

These days many hotels have a safe in the room that doesn't work. So itq's sometimes rare for me to put things in a safe but yesterday I did. This morning I got ready for my 6 am departure and checked out.  As I waited for my bill they came and said, your safe is locked, did you forget anything?

Well, I had: money and passport.

Praise their checking system and note that I have never left anything in a safe before.

I am in the taxi to the airport as I write this, sunrise ahead of us; and a five Baht coin has just skittered down the back of my seat. Mega photo!!

Dog Happy. Cat Says Where do you think you've been?

We are on our way home after a three plus week trip. When we arrive, the dog will come to say hello then run around excitedly for a while.

On the other hand, the cat will drift over and give us a look that says ... and where do you think you've been?

DW

Deaf or Super Confident ... Maybe Daft

We are in rather a nice hotel in Dubai and on the first morning we went to breakfast as is our wont. Some very tall men in the restaurant when suddenly one of them boomed in the direction of a fellow diner, Hi ... I was in your country recently ... I was in your parliament. I thought, poor man, he's deaf so the tall man has to shout. Then they stood closer and the tall one mentioned how everything was going really well and how he'd met so and so. We carried on. Tall man then shouted at someone else: another greeting. The whole restaurant and lobby areas heard this greeting. It went on like this. Then there was a lull until someone else arrived and saw tall man, who was now hovering over one of the food serving areas ... The new arrival asked tall man, how are you and how's things? Tall man replied, for us all to hear, good, good, good (machine gun style) goooooooooooooooooooooooood ... that final good lasted two seconds if not three. Then he announced he was very hungry but running late: may be an entreaty not to talk to him and leave him alone? Super confident? More front than Selfridges or really rather shy? These people inhabit the planet and of course he could be a really good man with a string of achievements to his name. Why do they shout at each other though? I wish I'd known it was coming and I could have recorded it to share with you! DW

Maputo Done!

I have just finished presenting a course in Maputo, Mozambique,  entitles Accounting and Finance Principles for the Oil and Gas Industry.  The evaluations from the delegates were good with many 10 of 10, 9 out of 10 and 8 out of 10. Of v ourselves,  there was one delegate who was not satisfied but she was just one of 18.

I saw a little bit of the city on the way back to the airport as I had to find A a Western Union branch so that I could send some money home. I did it! It started with the driver having a long confab with a hotel porter as to where I wanted to go. I thought, he doesn't speak English and he's never heard of WU.

We set off and could not find the WU shown on the map. The driver's English was excellent now and he was very helpful.

I saw an exchange place, we stopped, I got out, dashed over there and found there was WU in IBM bank. We found a branch and I went in. The receptionist said our conversation would be difficult because of her poor English but she was being modest. She came with me to talk to the driver and explain where the IBM bank branch was which did have WU inside and we found it.

It seemed like a lifetime of filling in and signing papers, all for about 60 quid. WU took 20% by way of a fee. Thieves. Still, I needed them in this mini emergency.

When I left the building, no mini bus, no driver.  I thought, what the hell do I do now? I moved around a bit and found the van parked behind another van that had stopped at the lights ... I had forgotten that traffic lights are called robots in this part of Africa.

That was it, now we carried on to the airport. Interesting to see the city. All low lying buildings all the way to the airport. Many cars. Pavements. Kerbs.

Maputo do be!  A good few days. I chatted to a young Peace Corps volunteer who had just finished his stint in irrigation up country. Good luck to him.

I'm Doing it

I know you're asking, where are you?

I am here and working and in the next couple of days there will be a post on monthly as opposed to annual financial ratio analysis, on THREE ways to solve simultaneous equations using Excel methods including array formulas and SOLVER and more.

So, where have I been? I've been to a graveyard. My Macbook Pro graveyard.  It died on me at a really inconvenient time, taking a backup drive with it, causing me massive inconvenience and waste of time.

Something seems to have overheated and burned out and having bought a replacement Windows laptop, the Macbook will have no more money spent on it. Dead. Bereft of life. It is no more.

My macbook journey was enlightening but I will not be repeating the experience: they are premium products with a premium price and I have reverted to my cheaper strategy of buying something decent and serviceable that doesn't need a mortgage to buy it.

So, watch out for the updates.

Sunglasses ... I need them ... but where to buy?

Ever since I developed my minor eye problems I should wear sunglasses in bright weather.  I did. Then either I lost or broke them.

Because I wear prescription specs I need clip on or flip up sunglasses. But where to buy them?

I bought a pair years ago in duty free at DXB. I accidentally lost them in Siem Reap. I found a replacement pair in Siem Reap too. That was about three years ago and all was well.

Then they went. DXB? No more clip ons there. Everywhere I went I looked. No one sells them.

Two days ago I looked online for these things and found loads. I mean loads. Ordinary and designer alike.

Yesterday, re energised, I went to a sunglasses shop and found a pair of magnetic clip ons. They come with their own plain glass frame as they were magnetic clip ons. Some progress.

As we walked along we passed a small shop that had a few sunglasses in so Mrs W said, try in there. I said, no chance! She went in. Can you believe it? They had several pairs and for 480 Baht I bought a pair ...

You never know, do you!

DW

Do you Believe in Curses?

I don't mean voodoo type curses but things that conspire against in certain situations?

Burnley played Everton yesterday and I found it being streamed live in 365sport.  I am a subscriber so, a little late, I decided to watch it.

Slow ... sooooooo slow ... kept getting the blue wheel of death. That was on the phone.

Opened the laptop and logged into the hotel's wifi system. You have opened too many connections ... no I haven't.  Tried again. The same. The same. The same.

Called the help desk and she was expecting my call because within seconds she told me she had reset my connection.

It didn't work and using the BBC text service I could see the goals were going in. Frustration unbounded.

Tried again. It didn't work. I rebooted.

It worked. Blue wheel of death. It froze. Blue wheel of death. Half time. It froze.

OK! You win voodoo child, I'll stop trying to watch it and do something else. I didn't even see a ball being kicked.

Modern technology is the best and the worst. Liberating and restraining.

Here is an uncurse: for some reason they were showing the whole of the 2009 - 2010 Burnley v Man Utd game on TV here and I switched on in time to see Robbie Blake's wonder goal. I love watching that goal!

Swings and roundabouts of life.

DW

Cash Flow?

Talking to Mrs W the other day about cash flow: something she'd neither heard of nor thought about. She came up with these names as she struggled to understand the concept:

Cash Slow
Cash Fly

Made me laugh!

DW

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