At last, rubbishEnglish has a result! I was rummaging around the Public Records Office web site this morning and the following copy of an email I sent to them lets you know what I found. I am delighted to say that if you go to that page now you will see that the error has been corrected. On this page, at the point at which you suggest forms of identification for presentation at the PRO you include the phrase 'drivers licence'. There are two mistakes here that you will want to correct. Firstly, in this context, drivers is possessive and should be written driver's. Secondly, and much more importantly, the UK has a system of driving licences and it is the USA that has a system of drivers' licences. Please change the phrase to read 'driving licence' and you will solve both of the problems that I have highlighted in one fell swoop. DW Here's a fascinating thing, though. When you look at that page at the PRO you might realise the uncertainties of modern life. The Domesday Book to which that page refers is now over 920 years old and we can still read it, see it, copy it ... the laser disks that were produced in the mid 1980s have already had to be rescued as the pace of technological change almost meant that they were lost in an obsolete technology. Paper and parchment can survive thousands of years even when it is mistreated. Laser disks can survive millennia no doubt but reading them in a thousand years will definitely be a massive problem. Think of the Rosetta Stone, too, and how that has proven to be both primitive and advanced at one and the same time! DW

Ever heard of Tax Freedom Day? Apparently tax freedom day is an estimate of the day in the year when we all stop working for the taxman and start working for ourselves. For example, if we pay, say, a total of 30% of our income to the tax man in terms of income tax, VAT, customs duties and the like, then tax freedom day starts just after 30% of the year has passed: that would be around 21 April. If we pay 50% of our earnings in tax then tax freedom day starts on 1 July. Apparently, despite all her promised, tax freedom day started latest of all recent Government Administrations under Margaret Thatcher's leadership! Well, well, well. Never liked her! Thanks to Accountancy Age for that riveting information. DW

Ever been innocently driving along from A to B when all of a sudden a car comes towards you in which the driver is facing backwards as he winds up the rear window of his car such that he not only doesn't see you coming round the tight bend in front of him but as he is going in a more or less straight line, ploughs right into the side of you? That's what happened to yours truly yesterday. He sustained a bruised bumper and a smashed side light. I sustained major denting and scraping of the driver's door and the passenger's door on the same side. When I get the photo's developed I'll let you see. He admitted liability immediately since we were driving down a narrow lane that both of us know very well and I was being ever cautious: it's narrow, blind and dangerous. I just hope he does the decent thing now and doesn't claim something spurious in his defence. DW

I wasn't sure until I just checked but, steady yourself, I sat opposite Boris Johnson MP in a restaurant in London on Tuesday evening. An Indian restaurant. He dined alone and so did I. He had just about finished his meal by the time I arrived and as he let his dinner settle he read a serious looking tome on market economics. You'll know Boris Johnson as that clottish MP for Henley on Thames who can string very few coherent sentences together in a row despite his Eton College and Balliol College Oxford background. Thought I'd throw that in! DW

Andrew wrote as follows: hello again! I have been struggling to make sense of the college lectures on variance analysis, & am trying to revise for the costing paper of the central assessments for my AAT intermediate module. now I have found your variance trees for materials, labour & variable overheads analysis, & fortunately it is now beginning to make sense! best wishes Isn't that nice to know? The answer should be yes! By the way, the page Andrew was looking at is this one: well worth a look! DW

Well, is this the first casualty of the move from one web host to another. The files are in place somewhere but the last post in this Blog is dated December 2002 ... keep watching! DW

I'm back ... did you miss me? I've been off line for much of this week. Changed Web Host and took a trip to a seminar in London and then decided not to upload the site again until I had broadband installed at home ... broadband arrived today and here we are again! Welcome back! DW

Can you imagine a 6 foot 2 and a half inch 93 kilogramme frame slithering across the dance floor in a meaningful way to the Salsa rhythm? Neither could the young lady who tried to learn the basics of Salsa from me following on from my own one hour lesson of earlier in the evening! Went to a very entertaining Salsa evening at Oxford Town Hall last night. It started with a lesson for the uninitiated like me. Of course, I thought I did well and was ready to do a John Tavolta all over the knot end. My prospective partner had always been prepared (warned seems the operative word with hindsight) to learn from me but when we hit the floor it took her the length of time it takes light to travel one metre to decide that my Salsa skills were already worse than hers and she knew nothing. We then stood and admired the rest of the people on the dance floor for a while then made our excuses and left! Dima is a natural dancer and with his partner Joanne he did a lot better than me: at least Jo was prepared to stay on the dance floor with him for the entire evening! Mrs W can't dance at the moment because of a sharp pain in her hips. Dima is ballroom trained and was inspired by the end of the evening to ask Jo is she wanted to take Salsa and other dancing lessons with him and she gave him a tentative yes: hope it works out for them. Isn't it sickening to see people with such rhythm and talent only for yourself to realise that God didn't bless everyone with the same genetic complement?? It was hot and sticky there too so when we got home, at just after 12:30 am Mrs W ordered : showers for EVERYONE! Sir, yes sir!! Son Andrew answered the call and provided the solution to a sticky maths problem for us: all to do with circles, tangents and isosceles triangles. Here's the solution ... you can imagine the question! Myanswer is... (2y - x - 90)/2 Triangle AOC is a isocoles triangle, as line OA and OB are equal to the radius, therefore angle OBA must be (180 - x)/2. Angle CBO must then be 180 - ((180-x)/2 + y ), giving (180+x-2y)/2. Triangle OCB is also isocoles as line OC is equal to the radius, so angle OCB also equals (180+x-2y)/2. Angle OCT is also a right angle as line CT is tangential to the circumference. BCT must then equal 90-OCB, which is 90 - ((180+x-2y)/2), which equates to (2y-x-90)/2 DW

Went for a drive on Monday evening, Bank Holiday Monday: took Mrs W and Dima to a place on the Thames called Goring. Nice place with an excellent riverside set of pubs and restaurants. We parked the car and started legging it towards a pub for a drink and a meal. As we neared the place Mrs W said she couldn't stand the smoke ... what smoke? It sounded too lively, too! So we moved on and found a very quiet place on the river that served excellent food for carnivores. The food for veggies consisted of what seems to be the statutory veggie dish of the day PASTA. Everywhere I go these days there is often only one veggie starter, one veggie main course and the main course veggie alternative is just about always pasta. So I had that then: passable. Mrs W and Dima were delighted by theirs. The puddings were fine, though! DW

A friend of mine from the good old US of A has sent me a news clipping that had slipped my net: Know this chap?? Apparently a teacher has been arrested in the UK for possession of compasses, protractors, and straight edges. It is claimed he is a member of the Al Gebra movement, bearing weapons of maths instruction. DW

This is a first for me. Dima came home from his successful French Oral exam today to regale us with the story of the young lad, clearly not so well prepared, who decided to try to 'Allo! Allo!' his way through his own French Oral exam by ... speaking English with a strong but assumed French accent! He heard that another young lad did the same last week but in his German Oral exam. Five years and what have they learned? Andrew Hooper sent me a gift this week: some Handkerchief Tree seeds. Andrew read my page on this topic last week and got in touch. Apparently they are a bit difficult to germinate but I will give it a go and then wait the required 10 years for the flowers to appear! Good one Andrew! I wrote to the 'Friends of duncanwil.co.uk' this week and got an encouraging set of replies: these are the people who have received direct help from www.duncanwil.co.uk over the last 6 months or so. There are lots of them and their messages and my replies run into hundreds. DW

Ever needed to do some eMarketing? Here's one man's review of how he did it and the trials and tribulations he went through: an interesting read. This is redolent of what I'm going through at the moment, too! DW

Do you like Jerome K Jerome? I do and I always have. Rereading Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow reminded me of this from the chapter On the Weather: It always is wretched weather according to us. The weather is like the government: always in the wrong. In summer time we say it is stifling; in winter that it is killing; in spring and autumn we find fault with it for being neither one thing nor the other and wish it would make up its mind. If it is fine we say the country is being ruined for want of rain; if it does rain we pray for fine weather. If December passes without snow, we indignantly demand to know what has become of our good old fashioned winters, and talk as if we had been cheated out of something we had bought and paid for; and when it does snow, our language is a disgrace to a Christian nation. We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself. Bearing in mind that this book was first published in 1889, isn't it strange that we still think and talk the same way today about our glorious old British climate!? Then we have our own, still prevalent, view of ourselves, our habits and our expertise: Our next door neighbour comes out in the back garden every now and then and says it’s doing the country a world of good: not his coming out into the back garden, but the weather. He doesn’t understand anything about it, but ever since he started a cucumber frame last summer he has regarded himself in the light of an agriculturist and talks in this absurd way with the idea of impressing the rest of the terrace with the notion that he is a retired farmer. Sound like anyone you know? By the way, you can download this book free of charge from the Gutenberg Project: a fantastic resource for anyone looking into old and classic texts. Search for the book or author you are interested in and if it's there, it could be stored on your hard disk within minutes or even seconds. DW

I have no particular axe to grind over the war with Iraq but this report from the BBC left me feeling cold: working on the assumption that it's all true. I have always been suspicious of military types who want to rule the world and this doesn't help to assuage any of those feelings. End of social comment! DW

Dima took his first GCSE exam of the summer yesterday: he had to deliver a couple of speeches in German to the examiner! He's good at languages so it went well enough. He was "working" with his mother for the last few hours before the exam and they had some interesting exchanges of opinion! I found out the other day that network hardware has fallen in price by a factor of 12 or even 20 since I last looked and for the princely sum of GBP9 I bought an Ethernet network card for the desktop and hooked it up to the laptop: we now have an all singing and dancing home network that has already begun to show its worth. The reason for the fall in price is that they are now promoting wireless networks and they cost up to and over GBP100 a set. Now we can share the printer, files and even internet access so that whatever we do, there is no switching cables around, waiting for someone else to finish what they're doing to log on ... There was a pantomime attached to all of this however! I bought the box for GBP9 and installed the card ... went through the Windows routine of setting up the network protocols and so on. Wouldn't work. Spent an hour with Dima and still we couldn't get it to work. After a break went back to it and I found that since I was just connecting two computers without a hub, don't need it, I did need a Crossover Cable. I thought, I bet the cable I got with the £9 kit isn't Crossover. The following day I tried to call PCWorld where I bought the kit: first time their automated answering service was no help to me as I ended up in a department that had nothing to offer me. Then called again and was told to call their premium help line at GBP1 a minute. They told me that I needed someone else as they themselves know nothing about networking. I got through to someone who ASSURED me that I did indeed have a Crossover cable. Called the company that sold me my laptop and despite being barely able to understand what he was saying as he seemed completely preoccupied with something else, he did convince me that my cable was not Crossover. Went back to PCWorld and bought a Crossover cable having checked in person with them that the cable they previously supplied was NOT Crossover. Another GBP9 I should add. Connected the two computers with the new cable and IMMEDIATELY the network kicked in. What a palaver! DW

Part 2 of Tony's requests: Economic Growth this time Slightly unusual home page but it promises much You are promised a lot on the ins and out of growth, data sets, surveys, references, events, networks. It looks good but MAYBE not a 1st level resource. Biz/ed is a brilliant resource and you should find some very useful links here: they are not all relevant, however! How about this? In this analytical article, we examine the relationship between economic growth and the ability to travel - and how "virtual mobility" is changing the equation. There’s a massive resource of links and references from SOSIG The Centre for Growth … might be able to help The Bank of England must have something useful to say! There you are Tony: two excellent sets of links I think. DW

Tony bounced back with two requests: links on inflation and growth ... to help him with his end of 1st year University exams. Inflation A very basic introduction The Bank of England knows a thing or two about inflation: take a look some of the ways that the BoE uses probabilities in its inflation work including fan charts MoneyWorld gives you a database of inflation stats and a couple of basic definitions The ONS’s latest view of inflation plus a few useful links on the right hand side of the page From the UK Parliament is a pdf file on the value of the Pound from 1750 1998 Along the same lines but much more varied and comprehensive is Here you can find costs and values from Ancient Rome via medieval England to modern Britain … Norway, the USA and more. The Economist has an excellent glossary that includes inflation lots of links in the inflation section, too. Samuel Brittan says that Inflation Can be Too Low A slide based view of inflation, unemployment and expectations looks as if it aimed at MBA students from City University Under the heading of Revision Notes: Government Finances from learnDirect with related links on the left hand side of the page From the House of Lords: Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England - Report a LOT to read through, with the inflation control aspects to scroll for! An exam paper from the University of Exeter Principles of Economics ... no answers of course! From the Oxford School of Learning: generally aimed at A level but will apply to 1st year Undergraduate: Outline the Monetarist and non-Monetarist approaches to inflation This might be useful: an essay on Control of the Monetary Environment from the University of Essex Happy reading Tony! DW

Made a custard layer cake on Saturday and you can only imagine how good it is! DW

On Thursday evening I baked a coffee cake and finished it off with butter cream and a dusting of cocoa powder ... then I called it a Cappuccino cake. Marvellous! DW

I just spent 20 minutes telling you all about Dima's Leaver's Ball at which he looked very smart as did his partner Charlotte. I told you about the 6 month long saga of the evening suit. Then I pressed the wrong button and lost the lot. In the end, we have to say that Marks and Spencer came out of the process with their ceridbility dented and we ended up with a decent suit with just 4 hours to spare. DW