December 2006

Vantis in trouble

December 28, 2006 Asides

Richard Murphy comments on a Sunday Times report that Vantis is in hot water with HMRC over a dodgy tax scheme aimed at entertainers and sports persons. Apparently, the devout Muslim Yusuf Islam (Cat Stephens to you and me) is caught up. I wonder how many other enterprising firms of professionals have fallen into the same trap? Once again the Channel Islands are the focus for attention.

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Global Neighborhoods

December 28, 2006 Tax and Ethics

We only have to think about how the Enron scandal has been dissected or look at commentary surrounding the KPMG trial to see that plenty of people have plenty to say about the moral veracity of our institutions…. Such campaigns, reaching a global audience in the time it takes to click a mouse button, would have been impossible to conceive as impacting those in power just five years ago. Yet they are acquiring power by dint of the quality of work to which they can point…. Whether they will succeed is another matter but if they only achieve partial success then I believe they will set in motion a train of thought and action that will be difficult to halt in socially aware society…. On business models, I think Shel’s onto something: A case in point on how this is achieved is illustrated at Hitachi, one of the 100 largest companies on earth, which entrusted a 31-year-old mid-level employee to use social media to bolster its worldwide Data Systems division.

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Jersey's despotic rulers

December 27, 2006 Tax and Ethics

That’s not my hyperbole but the inference any reasonable person can draw from a ‘end of term’ report by Jersey Deputy Shona Pitman after her first year in office…. And by a Minister at that who should, and surely would have been censured for his laxity, had the States not had a leader who appears to lack any leadership qualities, when it comes to reining in the dysfunctional or recalcitrant amongst his ministerial team…. Why are spending cuts always targeted at those at the bottom of the employment ladder where savings are by nature smallest, yet no far-reaching ‘benchmarking’ exercise is undertaken across senior and middle management across the States?… To put this in perspective, according to the States of Jersey’s official figures, the finance industry, which profited to the tune of £1.05billion in 2005, represents 50% of Jersey’s ‘gross value added.’

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Ignore at your peril

December 27, 2006 General

When professional trainees get treated like Andromeda Adesmos (I kid you not), then it is hardly surprising that finding trainees is tough work: Boss is being a pain again – lots of drafting to do, only to find he writes up something *completely* different when he sends out the letter. I think I’m going to mention it to him because if it’s a matter of me being crap, then I really need to be told where I’m going wrong. If it’s just preference, why the hell is he getting me to draft the damned thing in the first place. The worst thing is he promises to mention everything that I can think of (bearing in mind I know more about my job than he does) then disregards all the salient points.

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3CA has new site

December 27, 2006 Innovation

David’s company organised the design and content management (CMS) side of things…. Despite claims to the contrary, I’ve just not seen Joomla demonstrating the kind of scale necessary to be serving thousands of pages in realtime that other systems can muster, without customers having to shell out for ‘extras’ in the form of plug-ins…. I like the idea of keeping away from technical jargon so that people feel as though they have some empathy from the site owner…. When I spoke with Stuart just prior to the holiday season break, he told me local people like to know who they’re dealing with and want to be addressed in local terms.

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New threads – design update

December 27, 2006 General

What i’ve done here can be achieved by anyone willing to read around stuff like Wordpress plug-ins, basic CSS and Javascript…. I was going to use the UnNamedOne theme as the starting point for the 2007 look but found lots of problems early on. Basically it kept breaking and I don’t know diddly squat about AJAX (which was causing at least some of the problems) so it got ditched…. I’ve no idea but I do have a lot more control having hand coded the entire sidebar as you see it plus lumps of the header to pull in some special code I’ve used to create the sidebar navigation…. In this element, I’ve combined the tabbed code used in ‘Navigate Stories’ with Grazr code created from my collections of del.icio.us bookmarks plus a specific set of feed links that are appropriate for readers.

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Things they do in Saskatchewan

December 26, 2006 Humour

No words are necessary.

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Trump the Chump

December 22, 2006 Humour

Renegade basketball team owner and billionaire Mark Cuban beats up Donald Trump over the state of his blog: Donald, your blog sucks…. First of all, rule number one of blogging Donald is that you are the one that is supposed to write the posts on the blog. Less than half the posts on the front page of the blog have your name as the author let alone are written by you …. This might well be my last post before the holiday season kicks in – see you on the other side.

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Which do you prefer?

December 22, 2006 Marketing

As an aside, this is a great example of current generation SaaS aka Web 2.0 with lots of AJAX goodness that’s pleasing on the eye. The service works flawlessly and can be recommended to any professional looking to impress the new client. If you are really smart, you could put this optional service into your startup offering. Note: It looks for a US address but will accept any major credit card.

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Looking back at 2006 from 2025

December 22, 2006 Humour

This version was the first to use IIC (Implanted Internet Connect) devices, a technology that drew heavily on what was at the time new generation RFID technology jointly developed by NASA, IBM and Accenture…. This work has its roots in fuel cell technology being developed in 2006 by Ovonic but which received little attention at the time…. Again, this has its roots in 2006 when SaaS providers like Salesforce.com (acquired by SAP in 2008) and NetSuite (acquired by Oracle in 2007) were tentatively seeking to extend their reach through ISP partnering arrangements…. This is delivered from a network ‘grid’ of orbiting satellites predated by the network of surplus oil tankers Google (as it was in 2006) was secretly acquiring for offshore network building experiments around the coast of South America.

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