DW
12.11.21
HBTM
I don't normally do this but let's celebrate my birthday. Another year older and another candle on the cake!
9.11.21
Christmas 2021
Well, it is just 9th November 2021 and Starbucks in Surin has Christmas music playing, Christmas drinks and food are on the menu, too. That's early!
18.10.21
Quarantine
We spent a couple of weeks in Hua Hin, returning last Sunday and we have been in quarantine ever since. We already had a wall around 3 sides of the house then built a fence to close it all off last month. Easy to stay within and easy to keep dogs, chickens and people out.
OK, the chicken can jump the fence. The dogs learned to squeeze through the old gate we built years ago. The chickens will always come and go but I put up some mesh to keep the dogs out ... well, I think I have kept them out now!
DW
18/10/2021
28.8.21
covid-19 Arrived
Jungle Drums Were Silent
It was a heart stopping moment, to be told that someone exposed to covid-19 was living about 100 metres away from our house in a tiny village of just 45 houses. Normally, the jungle drums around here are very active and they can transmit messages within seconds of hearing or generating news.
This time, it took the drums over a week to share this news. In the meantime, goodness knows how many interactions there have been between the contacts and the rest of us, bearing in mind that the contacts own and live in a building with a shop attached. Hundreds, if not thousands of interactions in that week have possibly taken place.
That was a week ago, so about two weeks since the exposures happened and, touching wood, no one here is reporting any sickness.
Foreigners Out
The other aspect of this is the moratorium on foreigners like myself being eligible for any vaccination against covid-19: even if I were prepared to pay for it.
Other countries have given vaccinations to everyone and anyone if they were considered to be vulnerable because of age and health concerns. Not here: no foreigner should be vaccinated while there are unvaccinated locals. That is a policy that deserves to backfire. The point is that anyone who succumbs to covid-19 can pass it on to anyone because in the early stages of infection, no one knows they've got it. So, we all go our own way, masked or not, hands washed or not and blindly spread the virus.
Ah! but, you are a foreigner so keep out of our hospitals until we are all done.
Ah! I say, but most of you are not vaccinated either and I am in the vulnerable category so you'd better watch out. Whether I like it or not, whether you like it or not, we are sharing the same air space and surfaces. The virus couldn't care less who you are and who I am.
The moratorium is being ended now. The penny has finally dropped.When I will be vaccinated, though, no one knows yet!
Thailand covid-19 Confirmed Cases
I don't say that all of Thailand's covid-19 problems are because of their moratorium of vaccinations for foreigners by any stretch of the imagination and the graph below shows Thailand's confirmed cases record from March 2020 to August 2021. I am hoping that the signs of a downward trend will continue, for the benefit of everyone.
Singapore
Remember gold standard Singapore? The shining light of covid-19 best practice. Until they weren't. Singapore had an impressive regimen for dealing covid-19 cases in the early stages of the pandemic. Truly impressive. Then the infections started to rise. Then they realised they had a problem.
Then they realised where the problem lay: xenophobia. Like many countries, Singapore relies on what is called migrant labour in these parts. Typically, in this region, such labourers are housed in ramshackle dormitories where 8, 10, 15 people share one room or dorm. They are migrants. Foreigners. Let them take care of themselves.
It bit Singapore but credit to them, once they realised how stupid they had been, they took care of the problem. You can see the bite marks on the graph below that shows the confirmed cases in Singapore over the period March 2020 to August 2021.
DW
28th August 2021
6.7.21
Colour Blindness
Colour Blindness: ever thought about it as you create your webinars, handouts and other support materials? Me neither.
I came across a really good article on colour blindness this morning and that inspired me to create the file that is attached to this message.Make yourself colour blind aware or as many as 10% of your male audience might not see what you are saying!
Click on this link to see a PDF version of a PowerPoint Presentation I just created on the subject
DW
6/7/2021
17.4.21
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Philip Battenburg as he was, did extremely well for himself. Born into a royal family, he spent the first decade and more trolling around Europe at the behest of one penniless family after another.
Still, he had a title and as far as I know, he did no harm.
In the end, he was married to our Queen for 73 years and died just over a week ago. I am not so churlish as to rubbish the man and his life since it was a life of service and he worked hard at what he did. The Queen is bound to be devastated and it may well have an effect on her own longevity since couples who have been together so long often go together. One dying in the morning and the other in the afternoon is not so uncommon.
They are now using the term Grandfather of the Nation and I reject that: he was never that. It's like the soubriquet National Treasure. He wasn't that either. A national treasure emerges over many years and, possibly, for many reasons. To my mind, no one ever appoints a national treasure: they appear by osmosis.
I never ask that anyone rests in peace since that suggests something that I do not believe. I do like to use this phrase, however
Ave atque vale, Philip: hail and farewell!
DW
17th April 2021
6.1.21
Blog Menu
Welcome to this blog. I have been using and ignoring and using this blog for a long time but now it is serving two purposes. It is my personal and my business blog at the same time.
The way I am managing this is that my personal posts are shown here as a Post whereas my business posts are all written o individual a Page.
This means that if you search for this blog, you come here and not to my business blog. However, the menu on the left of this page is my business blog menu ... the top level of the menu, at least. There are MANY more pages on this blog that are not included in any menu yet.
Please feel free to ask me about my other pages, there are hundreds of them, in case there is something in there that you want. Eventually, I will sort out this menu system and all will be well.
Duncan Williamson
30th January 2021
22.11.20
You Idiot ...
Since 1995, when I first connected to the internet, I have had web sites, blogs, I post prolifically to quora.com, I give away hundreds of files a year ... someone asks me a question and I do my best to answer it.
Unless I think a student has posted his homework question, hoping to get the work done for him, I answer questions honestly and in full. That can take me five minutes or even five hours, sometimes more. That's what I do.
Yesterday I posted a question on a discussion list about the ACF and PACF functions in R ... simple for anyone who knows R well but difficult for me I had spent a long time looking at the ACF and PCF help files, I had searched the web for answers, I had watched videos on YouTube. It could be that, in my ignorance, I didn't frame my question so well because the first two answers didn't answer my question. Of course, that can happen but one respondent said to me, before posting questions here, it is best to look at the help files first.
I was motivated to solve this problem by myself now and I did! I did it.
Blow me, though; but another smart alek posted an "answer" to my question by telling me that there are many tutorials I could search for and read ... and of course he didn't tell me where to find those tutorials or which tutorials I might find and read.
I doubt very much I will post another question to that list!
DW
14.11.20
Ludicrous Dashboard
I just saw a post on facebook in which someone shared their dashboard. Gushing comments followed: awesome ... fantastic use of screen real estate ... always love your work ...
There is a link to the video showing how the dashboard was created. He was also gushing about how he set it up to change things at the click of a mouse button. You know, linking one cell to another cell.
Here is my point: on every screen of this dashboard there are 12 or more metrics/values for each of seven departments ... 84 per screen. Given that he has used sparklines, images, sliders, values ... it is ludicrous to expect anyone to get any value from such a dashboard without having to zoom to, say, 50% or so, thus ruining the desired effect of the thing, surely.
Still, everyone else gushingly loved it. More than that, more and more Excel bloggers are adding more and more features to their own dashboards. Why? Because they can. Why is that so bad? Because it leads to clutter and will have performance implications. But more than that: what happens when Jack or Jenny breaks a link or changes something wrongly?
I suggest you go back to or stay with management by eye, from the old days. 15 ideas on an A4 page or equivalent was an excellent rule of thumb.
Duncan Williamson
14th November 2020
Comments on this Blog
I have just found a few comments sent to me here dating all the way back to 2015. I just saw them!! I have approved all of them so if you suddenly find me popping up to say, thanks for a comment you had completely forgotten about ... now you know why!
DW
14/11/2020
I am coming back here
People still come here from time to time, even though I haven't been posting here very often over the last few years and my main blog at the moment is my Excel blog over at excelmaster.co. Hoever, it looks like the covid-19 pandemic is forcing me out of that home and I will be using this blog as my main blog again.
You can always find me on www.quora.com, too, answering Excel and other questions. I work in fits and starts there but I have uploaded a lot more than 1,000 answers already.
So, welcome back here and I look forward to seeing more and more of you here as we move into the new year ... almost!
Duncan Williamson
14th November 2020
28.6.20
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