We’ve just launched our new business, Nodestone. We’re bringing Lib’s and my businesses together to cover Social Web Education, Integration and Development under one roof. Exciting.
Please come over and have a look at nodestone.com.
I’ve just finished up my job with UBS in the city (of London), so now it feels like it is time for England, Part 2, or the next phase of our lives here.
I had the pleasure of cashing in my annual rail card yesterday, indicating the end of my daily commuting to London and a nine-to-five life, for a little while anyway.
Work-wise, I’m starting to look at new opportunities here in Brighton, put some effort into Scouta to bring it to a sustainable place, and seriously think about entering the web applications business proper with our own Presence Labs.
And there is the summer to look forward to as well.
A time for growth and change for all of us. Today is the first of May. There are Beltane celebrations planned for tonight and the moon is full. Who know what magic may be out there tonight.
Oh and if it seems a little quiet here, check out my Presence Labs blog. That is where all the technical stuff is going these days,…
And also the ValuesHacker podcast blog for values/ethics/future stuff.
On February 14th, I registered a new business name for a new organisation, Presence Labs, to operate under the umbrella of our existing Barking Owl and carry into the UK sometime soon.
Presence Labs is my new business focussed on Internet presences of all kinds, and particularly building tools to enable websites for the read/write web, blogs, RSS, tagging, social software, user generated content and all that stuff we tend to lump together under that (dare I say it) Web 2.0 word. Let’s call it next generation online presence or something.
And, of course, a new business needs a new blog and domain and website:
So, step over there for a look, if you please.
I noticed that the businessy sixdegreesy linkedin.com have opened up a bit, and now allows your public profile to be visible on the web.
I quite like LinkedIn for business to business networking and as a store for my ever-growing ever-changing CV. It makes a CV a lot easier to manage that the traditional word document type.
See my LinkedIn public profile here.
I finally made an updated list of the causes that us Barking Owls support over on the new Barking Owl weblog::
Oh, yes, yet another blog. This one is about blogs and people and serves as Barking Owl’s corporate blog as well.
Ages ago I wrote a post here that whinged about MYOB charging a lot for a new version of the MYOB accounting software every year, just in order to get updates to the tax tables used for calculating PAYG income tax.
There’s been an ongoing chat between a few folk in the comment thread about how to solve this problem. And now there is an open source solution to the problem: MyTaxTables is a project on sourceforge that allow you to easily convert ATO tax tables into MYOB tax tables. The developers are looking for people to test the software, so get on over there and help them out. It looks like it only works on Windows at the moment.
Congrats to the team for putting the software together (whoever you are) and huge kudos to the community that made it happen!
Margaret River now has a full online news service [http://news.mronline.com.au] which includes local news, community and club news, opinion columns, movie timetables and all sort of things. This is a first for a WA town I think.
I’m doing a pretty strange thing for me, I’m spending the weekend in the office getting a bunch of software written. Why? So we can spend the first days of next week in a caravan in Hamelin Bay.
Even though I work mostly by myself, It seemed I got a lot more than usual done today. I think that because the phone doesn’t ring and the rest of the colleagues aren’t on IRC to chatter to and ask me questions. The office is also quiet. There are a minimum of distractions from the doorbell ringing, people walking up and down the corridor and talking.
Fortune has an interesting article about blogs from a business perspective as a part of their Top Ten Tech Trends to Watch For. Say that three times fast.
We just downsized the car, replacing the old 1997 3.8l Commodore Wagon with a 2001 1.6l VW Golf. Why? Petrol seems to only go up (see my energy links), and maybe soon it will go up a lot. Also, seems really silly to be dragging the heavy and large Commodore around the place on short errands when there are only one or two of us in the car most of the time.
I guess there are normally two ways to change the car: just go to the dealer and do a trade-in on a car the dealer sells you, or go private and do all the work yourself. But there is another way. We engaged Auto Angels to arrange to buy us a new car and sell the old one. They focus on sustainable car ownership incorporating a finding, buying and selling service.
Here’s how it worked: Mark at Auto Angels spent some time with Libby working out what the new car was going to be. We worked out it was going to be a used Golf, low kms and specified three possible colours. Then Mark spent some weeks looking for the right vehicle, checking them out mechanically and so forth. When he found the right one to buy, he immediately placed a deposit on it for us. He called us to say he’d found the car. We were on holiday at Rottnest. When we got back, we did the paperwork, handed over the Commodore, and drove off in the new car.
Now, we got the new one for a good price, and got a good resale on the Commodore. And the whole process was zero hassle. Zero hassle. Zero hassle. You’ve got to love that. And there was none of that awful feeling I get at the car dealers where I feel like I’m being ripped off.
I have office space in a heritage listed building in Fremantle. The building is rather grandly called ‘Imperial Chambers’. Libby was doing some surfing the other day and discovered this photo in the Federal government’s Heritage photographic database.
While the photo was taken in 1985, the building looks much the same although the street-level shops have changed.
Looking at the photo, my office is about mid-way down the left-hand side of the corner.
The budget comes and goes each year, and we are used to small tax changes, at least in recent years. For all businesses this means that there will be changes to the tax deducted from employees wages. A lot of businesses use MYOB and other accounting packages to do this.
And then, a close to the 30th of June a fax comes from MYOB, suggesting you need to buy the new version in order to get the tax table changes. And that is over $300 for a whole new version of the software or sign up to quite expensive support that in the past has been quite useless. This feels like exploitation when the tax changes are small — a few numbers changed in the tax tables. And the tax table is in a file in the application folder (on MYOB AccountEdge it is, anyway)
Over $300 to update a table? I think not. That’s exploiting small business. Come on MYOB, just distribute the tax table change for free. That would be fair and reasonable.
Or somebody else will probably update the tax table and make it a free download. Anybody want to do it?