Please come over and have a look at nodestone.com.

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.

And also the ValuesHacker podcast blog for values/ethics/future stuff.

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:

presencelabs.com

So, step over there for a look, if you please.

See my LinkedIn public profile here.

Oh, yes, yet another blog. This one is about blogs and people and serves as Barking Owl’s corporate blog as well.

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!

I’ve had the pleasure of developing and now hosting the news service for Kim Murray, proprietor of Margaret River Online, which is the most comprehensive tourist info/portal site for Margaret River.

We based the news service on an open source content management system with a bunch of extensions to suit the style of site we were trying to create.

Here are a couple of things we did to make the site work better:

• The site provides an RSS feed of news stories, which is used on the home page of Margaret River Online to give a ‘latest news’ box.
• Anybody registered on the site (free registration) can submit news which is moderated by an editor before being posted. Registration is made really easy, making it easy for the editor to get community members to write stories which are then edited into news categories and maybe onto the front page of the site.
• There are a minimum of static pages on the site. A club, society or opinion column writer has a category, and a series of dated entries under that category. It is like a bunch of multi-author blogs mashed together.
• We removed a lot of complexity from the handling of stories and comments to make the site easy to use.
• We’ve got the site hooked up to Google News. The Google news folk are really nice to deal with, by the way.

I really like the result and it will be very interesting to see how it goes as content is added and the community gets involved.

Link

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.

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.

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.

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?