August 19, 2010

PAYE bureau

I have used paybureau.co.uk. They are a splendid lot, lead by the incomparable Riff Heber-Percy.

Basically they handle all the paperwork associated with PAYE. You say how much the gross pay for your employees is, and they do the rest, up to, but not including, actually doing the funds transfers. They produce security-printed payslips to dish out, and, critically, do the year-end filings.

A great service, all for a tenner a month or so. I wouldn't know what to do without them. Of course, it took a small incentive for me to write this. They have offered a bottle of champagne for a referral. So if you want to split a bottle of champagne with me, contact them, open an account and tell them I sent you. That's all you have to do!

This works great for consultancies where you set up a company as a vehicle to use for invoicing and to avoid IR35 problems. The sort of thing that you might otherwise use an umbrella company for.
Enhanced by Zemanta

August 17, 2010

Connecting to the web via a Socks 5 proxy

This is really quite straightforward and there are loads of pages out in the Interweb Thingy that explain how to do this, but I still screw it up whenever I try to do it from memory. The idea is explained here for Ubuntu and here for Windows+Putty ("Putty makes Windows usable").

The key things I forget are:
  • You mustn't use a port above 1024 unless you are root or sudo the ssh command
  • You don't use local host as the general http proxy, you set it as the socks 5 proxy (the last one in the list in Firefox)
  • You must connect as <remote user>@<web host address> and enter the two passwords when you run ssh in a terminal - the first to switch user to root, the second to login to the remote host on the ssh session.
I posted a link on Delicious about this and tell everyone who is willing to listen (and some who are not) because I'm thrilled that something so simple can bypass the Chinese sysadmins who run the Great F1rewall of China

Apart from being useful in China, this is useful in the UK too, for example to access services like Pandora, which are blocked to users from less developed countries. You probably don't want to stream audio if your web hosting company per byte of data. Much better to use Spotify or Last.fm. But you get the idea. If you want to get streaming content you may be able to use this technique that dispenses with a proxy server.

Someone was saying that actually the Chinese don't really care about their citizens reading subversive stuff on the web if it is in English: they just want the yokels to be kept in the dark about what democracy and free elections are all about.

Once again, if you read this, could you see if you can create a comment. If you can't then tell me. I tightened up the comment settings because I was getting spam, and now nobody every seems to leave a comment, even a spammy one.

Enhanced by Zemanta

August 12, 2010

Property buying in China

I think this is read only by those of you who know me personally. I am going off to China again on around the 8th of September for a couple of weeks to select suitable properties and other investments to buy in China. I will be in the Pearl River Delta area (I have just created a new website where you can find out more about this extremely dynamic part of China).

There is a lot of detailed stuff that I should explain about how all this works, but basically if you are interested in buying, say, an villa in Guangzhou, or providing debt to a Chinese company restructuring, or buying an apartment in Macau or Zhuhai, then I can arrange this for you, either for you to buy individually, or as a joint venture with me.

Just drop me a line to steve.hemingway@gmail.com or ring me on 02033 558557 to find out more.

July 2, 2010

Why it's a bad idea to fix someone's computer for them

This strip from Dilbert expresses a profound truth. 

I am a huge fan of Ubuntu. I find it much easier to administer my system than I did when I had Windows. But I dare not install it on anyone else's computer because then I'd be offering an infinity of free support to them. And somehow, pretty soon, a problem would arise that I couldn't fix. And then I'd feel really, really bad.

April 22, 2010

George Hamilton IV

Tony Byworth produced this article for the Knebworth Parish Magazine, which I reproduce with his permission. George will be performing in Knebworth on 18 May 2010. More details here.

George Hamilton IV, currently celebrating his sixth decade in the music business, enjoys his status as one of country music's foremost entertainers, both at home and internationally.

Although based in Nashville, Tennessee, both Canada and the British Isles could be equally "home" to him. But his travels have taken to far more distant areas and, back in the early 1970s, George IV set the pace by being the first entertainer to bring "live" country music to Moscow and Prague, locations known back then as behind the "Iron Curtain". It was such ground-breaking achievements that secured him the title International Ambassador of Country Music, an award bestowed upon him by the much respected trade publication, Billboard.

Further recognition of his globe trotting activities came in 2006 when the United States Ambassador to England, Robert H. Tuttle, gave a special reception in London to celebrate George IV's 50th Anniversary in music and his unique contributions to the globalization of Country Music.

Although he always had his sights set on a country music career, things didn't quite work out that way at the start. Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he first caught the public's attention when A Rose And A Baby Ruth jettisoned him into the Top Ten pop charts, launched him as a "teen idol" and swiftly put him on tour with such as Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby Darin, the Everly Brothers and other iconic rock 'n' rollers. This period of his life subsequently earned him induction into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 2006.

George's country music ambitions became a reality when he moved his family to Nashville in 1959 and, a year later, became a member of the Grand Ole Opry (the weekly radio show that had initially fuelled his musical ambitions as a youngster and, as a member, he celebrated his 50th anniversary this past February) and signed with RCA Records. His breakthrough song came with Before This Day Ends and, in 1962, scored number one with Abilene, a recording that quickly became his trademark song. Fort Worth, Dallas Or Houston, another high chart success, quickly followed alongside such as Truck Driving Man and Break My Mind. In the late 1970s his recordings took on a more decidedly "folksy" approach and Steel Rail Blues, Early Morning Rain, Urge For Going and Canadian Pacific secured him the role as leader of Nashville's "Folk-Country" movement.

He made his first visit to Britain in 1967 and quickly built up a loyal following through record releases, several television series, concert tours and, for many years, handling host duties at the annual Wembley Country Music Festivals. He starred in a London West End musical, Patsy (the story of the legendary Patsy Cline), which later went on lengthy tours throughout the UK and Ireland.

George IV has found equal public support for his religious appearances, which commenced as a frequent musical guest of Dr. Billy Graham, and won him the Gospel Music Association's Dove Award in 1988.

With over a half century in the entertainment business, and a stack of awards to his credit, George Hamilton IV has matched hectic tour schedules with an equally vast amount of recordings - over 120 albums to date. And his stage persona is genuine: he really is as nice a person offstage as he appears onstage, always finding time to chat with his audiences. The chance to find out comes when he visits Knebworth, an area he knows from a previous visit, and presents a very special evening of songs and stories at the Village Hall on Tuesday, May 18.


You can read more about George on Wikipedia.

April 19, 2010

Calvert's Castration Strategy - Donate Now!

Andrew Calvert wants to kick Balls out of his constituency.

April 13, 2010

David vs the Great Clunking Fist

Ubervu allows comparison of mentions of a pair of terms on social media sites. You can see the comparison of Gordon Brown and David Cameron here. I'm not sure what it tells anyone.

David and Gordon seem to be level pegging on Twitter, but all but invisible on Facebook in comparison, whereas discussions about Gordon dominate the pair on intensedebate which seems to be a YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site).

On the whole, I don't think that people often blog or twitter lines to the effect of "What a brilliant job David Cameron is making of presenting the Conservative Party's policies" (except by people who are paid to do so), so I would guess that on balance David has won the war of the social media sites so far.

'Inhaling the Web'

I don't know whether Adobe's new news aggregator, Addictomatic.com was named with Bill Clinton in mind ('I smoked pot, but I didn't inhale') but it is not a bad service. It does hoover up references from lots of social media and vaguely interactive bits of the web in one place, avoiding the Google Search fault of giving a strong bias to old stories and web pages.

Here are a couple of pages of the leading contenders for Stevenage:

  1. Stephen McPartland
  2. Sharon Taylor

Not rocket science, but a worthwhile contribution to browsing convenience.

April 12, 2010

The Debt Clock

Another widget from the TPA (aka 'debt clock'):

How much do you pay in green taxes?

I'm too lazy to write anything, so I cribbed this from the Taxpayers Alliance site.