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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