Forgot to tell you about Monday morning. Remember my broken sleep from last week? Well, at 5 am on Monday Mrs W's mobile phone rang and it took her yonks to answer the thing. 'twas a friend of hers from Germany who just wanted to say hello on his way to work ... thinking about coming over for a visit!! At least Mrs W was able to set off back to the land of Nod! Unlike yours truly, of course. Cursed or what? DW

Dima started back at school yesterday. A new school as I felt his old school was just too mediocre: poorly led and staffed by lazy teachers. A levels now, four of them: French, Economics, Ancient History and Government& Politics. What a mouthful! Did I tell you that daughter Fran has passed her driving test at the tender age of 18? 17 years ahead of me. Fran has an automatic car now and was fraught when her mother decided to drive it and, having set off in 1st gear, was puzzled when she couldn't find the clutch to change up to 2nd gear!! Complete lack of mechanical empathy or what?! DW

So I've driven the car around town now, I went to Southampton and back and I've been to Oxford and back. I washed it and waxed the thing too: never waxed a car before in my life! I have to say that the seats are very comfortable; the arm rest is a boon; but what I like most of all at this stage is the cruise control feature: I can just set the thing to tootle along the motorways at 70 mph and relax. Given the comfort and the cruise control, this car is a pleasure to drive. Off to Yorkshire for the weekend, after going to the shops with Mrs W! DW

Here's that long awaited picture of my car: If you have eyesight the equivalent of the Hubble Telescope you will see the reflection of a window in the rear window of the car; and if you squint a huge amount you'll see a reflection of me in it. Bonus, bonus! Can't afford to put a full frontal up here can I? After all, someone who didn't quite like my page on Zero Base Budgeting or my review of Legally Blonde could feel the need for road rage vengence! By the way, history repeated itself with this car. When I bought my first ever car, it got a puncture wiithin its first 24 hours ... so did this Beemer: a slow puncture in this case. So for the first time since goodness knows when, I changed the wheel on a car yesterday. Will get it repaired on Monday all being well. I did a bit of idle Blog surfing just now and the third Blog I looked at was called American Culture ... this is the honest truth [isn't that tautology, Ed?] is that it has daily entries but the entries I saw were all blank pages! What conclusion can we draw about American Culture then? Answers on a postcard! DW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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