I have spent the last two weeks in Ecuador. I took over 500 photos, and travelled to Guayaquil, Quito, Otavalo and the Galapagos Islands. I will post the photos to Flickr and write some blog entries about my experience as soon as I get some of my urgent admin backlog under control.
This article made think about how serious problems with security on different social networking systems are and alerted me to the fact that I could link my Flickr account to my Facebook account.
I need these things:
1. Funding - I will pay a good commercial rate of interest to anyone who can help to fund my China real estate investments.
2. Help with accounting. Some experience required, but no need to be fully qualified,
3. Webmaster support. Just the chance to improve your web construction and SEO skills,
4. Inbound links - ask me for the pages on my commercial site where I would most like links to, and the appropriate anchor text to use. I am happy to reciprocate from here or from it (herts-lettings.com).
5. Moral support and someone to bounce ideas off, about investment in China.
If you can provide any of them, then please get in touch. Send an email to steve.hemingway[at]gmail.com. Thank goodness google mail servers have such excellent spam filtering. You can also ring me on +44 845 299 0113.
何 铭 威
in pin yin: he ming wei
Fully notarised and registered in China. Necessary for me to own real estate there. I am practicing writing it furiously.
I returned from Galapagos just over a week ago. The place is very interesting, and worth a visit, but I thought I'd use this platform to mention a few of the things that I wish I'd known about before going:
This is a wonderful welcoming mountainside retreat near to Otavalo, Ecuador. It is a couple of hours from Quito, the capital of Ecuador, but is a million miles away in terms of ambience.
We stayed only one night, so there were many experiences that were on offer that we had to miss. We were however made to feel very welcome by Betty and by her manager, Jorges (spelling?), a Cuban playwright who is a great, friendly guy, but still quite new in the job.
Amazingly I was persuaded to go riding on one of the lovely horses they keep in the centre. There is plenty for everyone to do as you can see from the very complete website. Betty is a very capable and focussed woman and I am sure works very hard behind the scenes to make sure that guests have a great time.
The best thing for me is that there is communal eating, and you are properly introduced to the other guests. There is no choice of food though, so if you are fussy about eating this can be a slight problem. Actually I am sure they would have produced some very plain food, but we forgot to check about this.
The establishment is more than just a tourist facility: see
the page on the Casa Mojanda Foundation.
There have been a number of articles recently announcing a drop in the number of divorces, and a drop in the marriage rate (e.g. this UK Legal News story).
I went to a wedding last week. The bride and groom were both from the UK, and intended to live in the UK. But they got married in Cyprus, and have no intention of registering their marriage in the UK. A lot of people seem to want to get married abroad these days. They can guarantee good weather, and a much cheaper venue. By choosing the right location they can save the cost of travelling to their honeymoon. There is a lot going for the decision, as far as the bride and groom are concerned.
I am not sure about the benefits for the guests, particularly the poor, elderly and younger guests. Travelling abroad requires a considerably bigger committment than simply getting up a bit earlier on a Saturday, especially if the wedding is in the school holidays, as this was.
The newlyweds insist that their marriage is fully recognised in British law, but I know that overseas weddings are not always recognised in UK law (particularly immigration law). Also it is certainly not the case that lesbian marriage, recognised in Canada, for example, is equally recognised in UK law.
I am not entirely sure that the law should get involved in a private relationship between two individuals, unless they want it to, but there is certainly a long history of the state being the third party in any marriage contract.
I came across this the other day. I was at school with Eric. I vaguely knew (from Friends Reunited) that he was at JLP, but I hadn't realised that he'd spend his whole career there. It seems odd that someone so adventurous as Eric would end up with a stodgy grocer/department store like JLP, especially one that is essentially a cooperative.
Probably I'm being very unfair about John Lewis. In practice we tend to get our groceries from Waitrose, or Ocado, and although we complain about John Lewis WGC to the extent that we intend to buy something that they sell, we tend to use it.
Please feel to contribute your memories of Eric at Howardian, Oxford and later by adding a comment to this entry.
Stop reading now, if you are under 45 years of age.
Rod Allen, the creator of such priceless jingles as "This is luxury you can afford by Cyril Lord", "1001 cleans a big, big carpet for less than half a crown", "Nuts, whole hazelnuts! Cadbury's take 'em and they cover them in chocolate.", "For mash get Smash!" has died.
I can't say I had ever heard of him, but the jingles he produced have stuck with me since my childhood.
I urge you to read the full obituary.
It seems an eternity ago that Amazon came up with the idea of providing shop fronts for independent merchants to sell stuff on its website. At the time I thought that it was a bonkers idea, but I must say that for selling surplus-to-requirements books it really is pretty good. The monetary side is handled totally seamlessly, refunds are easy, the delivery note generated is good etc. etc.
There has been a hiccup with my shop recently - somehow I stopped getting any orders. I really don't know where they have been going, and I actually still don't know. I can view my orders on the Amazon site, although the navigation, ten years on, remains fairly atrocious.
At the moment I am selling only books. I may look to selling some high-tech gizmos in the near future, but I'll have to think long and hard about chosing Amazon over eBay. Books are a no-brainer, because in Amazon all one has to do is enter the ISBN. I wish I could obtain a cheap USB bar-code reader that would automate even that process!
It seems almost unbelievable that any page on the web should make reference to a piece of graffiti I remember from Oxford in the 70's. But in fact the mighty Wikipedia has not only the page with a picture, but also a (plausible) explanation of what the graffiti is about, which was an enlightenment to me.
You can tell that I have not been very productive today.
You probably arrived here because you had an email saying that I'd tell you what the family has been up to this year.
Bear with me as call centre operatives say. I'm working on putting some content here!
Do you have a commercial (humanitarian effort) project that needs funding of $150+ million? Do you meet these requirements? 1. 150+ Million 2. 25%+ profit margin 3. Strong resume supporting the individual(s) doing the project 4. International projects are acceptable. 5. Projects can be Business or Real Estate Based. 6. No projects that are: Casinos, Commodity Based, Mining, Oil, Bio Diesel, Ethanol, Pornography, a Country with a Dictatorship, and or a Threat against the US. If you meet these requirements and are interested in getting more information, please send me a phone number where you can be reached in order to set up a conference call to decide if we are a good match for each other. Serious Principle Inquiries Only!
I received this invitation a couple of weeks ago. After a number of conference calls, and very many emails, I have reluctantly concluded that this is in fact a scam. I haven't got to the point of proving this, but I believe that the end result of the process will be a request for some up-front fees that will not result in any kind of funding being forthcoming. I am not 100% sure that it is a scam so I have not cited the name, telephone number and email address of the person who contacted me. There is a 0.1% chance that this is entirely genuine, but there are a number of factors that make me too suspicious to risk going forward with an application for funding.
Unfortunately I have unwittingly promoted this proposal to a number of very busy people, which has caused me significant embarrassment. I tried to find phrases from this fishing letter on the net, without success. If you receive an email like the one above (perhaps with the spelling of 'principle' corrected) then I would be interested to hear your view, especially if the invitation leads to equity funding that actually materialises.
Somehow this blog entry has managed to end up as the #1 search result for "Steve Hemingway".
This page seems to be all that remains of the Peter Young scandal that filled the newspapers ten years ago. I knew Peter very well, and I still can't believe what he did.
There are a lot of Peter Youngs in the world. There are even two Peter William Youngs, born on the same day in the UK (I would guess in '58 or '59). Peter will remember how he came to know that fact, the second one, I believe, having being born in Scotland.
Peter is by far the most famous person that I've ever known well, personally. We kept in touch for quite a while after leaving Jesus College, but I haven't seen him since 1996, when his world collapsed and I went off to live in Singapore. I hope things have improved for him in the last nine or ten years. I imagine that the strain that he was under in the mid 90's was intolerable.
| www.flickr.com |
I famously don't like Flash. Hmm.
I may put this (smaller) in a sidebar somewhere, or put it on Mingwei.co.uk.
Our family is a fan of Lovefilm. If you would like to try it then you can get three months free membership by visiting this URL and entering the code 'PRGLFRAF4' (don't include the quotes).
This is offered to you, my thin-on-the ground readers, as a token of my appreciation. I don't think this will work outside of the UK. I don't want any thanks, but perhaps you could email me if you do claim one of these vouchers so I can remove this entry when I've heard that two people have claimed.
I am still alive, but a bad cold/fever is making me feel close to death.
My good friend Simon Phillips runs a farm in Devon where he breeds prize-winning Ruby Red Devon cattle. The animals are slaughtered periodically and he sends out freezer packs each consisting of 1/8th of a cow! The meat is hung for at least a fortnight before being butchered and vacuum packed. They are delivered un-frozen, but unless you are running a restaurant you will probably want to freeze all bar a few pieces.
Anyway, with his last pack he enclosed a sheet saying that he now has the capacity to take on a few more customers. He is offering a referral fee of 25% off the next order, but I'd be happy to split this with anyone who is interested in trying out this truly fabulous beef.
Just contact me at steve.hemingway@gmail.com to indicate your interest.
I can't believe that I did this. I just wiped my blog!
I was cleaning up my filesystem, and was a bit overenthusiastic. This resulted in me losing my Movable Type directories and files. Fortunately Pair Networks were up to the job and restored the whole user directory within less than an hour. This is not part of the regular service - backups really are taken to to cope with total server failure, but my cock up was undone with minimal fuss. I could even have telephoned, but I chose to raise a ticket.
I'm not making many entries. You might think this is because I have nothing to blog about. Actually the reverse is the case. I have loads to say, but no time to say it. My life has been hectic of late.
I don't know what to do about this. Blogging is not my top-priority activity of the day. It is rather something I do when I have run out of important things. Most people take the sensible option and don't blog at all. I just feel that blogging fills a small social niche in my life that others fill by being a member of a club, or going to the pub (not that I never do that, although I don't think I've been for around three weeks now).
Every day I think of some subject that I come across and think 'that would make a good subject for a blog'. Unfortunately, that's as far as I get. I never write the couple of paragraphs. I don't suppose the sum of human wisdom is measurably smaller.
China is the top priority of my work right now. I am accumulating good contacts, both in China and in the UK. I don't do nearly enough to maintain communication with them. The good news is that I have now got a real office and a real assistant in China to work for me. I'm hoping that this will free me up to do more truly constructive things. Let's see!
It is four weeks since I posted an entry. It is now nearly two weeks since I returned from China.
I have had a lot to do since getting back. We are still operating without Lua, which means that we are that much more stretched. The UK property rental market continues to be slow, but tenants give notice, new tenants have to be found, students come to the end of their academic year, washing machines fail, and so do shower pumps. The odd tenant needs to be evicted.
My visit to China, which seems a long time ago, was educational. My thinking on the place changed in a number of ways. First, I became less convinced about the high-end market. It is true that very rich Chinese, Taiwanese, Macanese and Hong Kongers are buying to Zhuhai, and to some extent moving there. It is true that in common with very many societies, China is becoming more unequal, which, in a time of rapidly increasing GDP per capita, means that many very rich consumers are being created, especially in the Pearl River Delta area. However, there is a large supply of property coming onto the market, and a large proportion of apartments of this type, in builds as old as five years, have never been occupied. This feels very bubble-like. I remain sanguine about the more mainstream apartments that ordinary local office workers and managers can realistically aspire to rent and buy.
I became even more bullish about Hong Kong. The recent price performance and severe constraints on supply, together with the low funding costs courtesy of Ben Bernanke outweigh, in my opinion, the 'everybody is moving to China' argument. Location is critical in Hong Kong, because transport in the very centre is poor and, currently, all the big international employers are based there. There are big cultural problems about relocating big banks to cheaper locations, and I am confident that the Central area of Hong Kong, especially 'mid levels near the escalator' and 'west Soho' will be expensive for a very long time to come.
I am working with some guys at China Direct Partners with a view to working with large UK and European developers to source materials and supplies direct from a network of factories in China. China Direct Partners are in the business of Direct Global Procurement: i.e. they work with companies to extend their supply chain beyond the traditional national boundaries and bypassing distributors. Although the product are tiles and curtain walls, the tools are a sophisticated computer system all accessible to clients, factories and freight forwarders through a web interface. I am very excited by this new development.
I have acquired a cheap second hand Blackberry. These strange devices are no longer a mystery to me. It has required some dedicated problem solving on my part to get the set of google mobile tools working on a blackberry - including google sync, google mail and google maps, but I have managed it. I am on a very good data bundle deal with Yes Telecomm, which I recommend.
My good friend, James Ferguson is attempting to restore the natural habitat to some of the Forestry Commission sites in Scotland. As his site states:
We now propose A programme to restore natural habitat, to Cardross and Rednock Forests to recreate a mosaic of mixed native woodland, and reintroduce where appropriate the areas of wetland bog encroached upon , conserve biological diversity and its associated values, water resources, soils, and unique and fragile ecosystem and, by so doing, encourage and maintain the ecological functions and the integrity of the forests. The work we propose to carry out is part of a wider Movement to restore natural habitats across the whole of Scotland, this site is of importance given its location and relationship with Flanders Moss a designated World Heritage site.
This area is of great value. I would encourage you to contact James via his website for more information.
For more information visit this page from Orion Sky.
Sorry for the lack of entries. Occasionally I hear from a close relative (thanks, Mam) that they have come across this blog.
I'm selling a property.
I'm working hard to get some clients for China Direct Partners. If you know anything about the construction industry in the UK and are prepared to talk about it to me in exchange for beer give me a ring.
I'm continuing to work on finding enough serious investors to put together a syndicate to buy China property. See mingwei.co.uk for some background.
I am having a more active social life than I've had for years. Thanks guys.
I am getting up early to talk to Tony Palanca of CDP in Sydney. It sure makes me feel tired in the evening, so if you are one of the people I socialise with, please excuse my habit of falling asleep after the pudding.
My children continue to make me feel that I was a total slacker when I was in full-time education.
Willem Buiter is a wonderful blogger. I cannot recall seeing his entries printed in the paper. He produced a wonderful post recently about how the Treasury conducts itself. I don't suppose he is always right. Someone with such a breadth of coverage surely could not be. He has had Martin Wolf write articles explaining why he disagrees with him, which at the very least shows that he if he is wrong he is interestingly wrong.
This post is notable if only because of its (surely unique in the FT.com) use of the verb to asperge (click on the link to find out what it means) and in having a title which is in latin. The freedom of the blogger definitely results in a more interesting copy.
I have downloaded standard mandarin. This comes with the Lua Meng seal of approval, and seems pretty good, but to be honest I haven't really spent a lot of time using it. It is hard to get back in to the habit of study at my age. I am, as you will have guessed, having a go at learning Mandarin. At my current rate of progress I should be ready to take 'O' level by the time I am 100 years of age.
I have called a huge number of construction companies with remarkable lack of enthusiasm for an industry that is close to meltdown. My key problem is understanding who does what. It seems that there are really very few integrated builder developers out there: the industry is very vertically segregated. I was warned a month ago by John Myers that a lot of main contractors were 'management only'. I suppose I'll discover more, but it is proving to be an expensive process.
You can view my complete blogroll here:
"Y Mochyn Du (the Black Pig) is a very Welsh pub/restaurant, located a stone's throw from the Sophia Gardens Sports Centre. It has great character, with wood panelling on stone walls and little alcoves.
The restaurant serves a good range of food, with specials and Sunday roasts.
It attracts a real mix of characters, from rugby and football players to BBC and S4C workers. They sponsor Robert Croft, captain of Glamorgan Cricket Team.
Live entertainment includes Welsh folk music, Welsh quizzes, and even opera. They support 3 Welsh choirs."
This is from Cardiff Pubs. I am from Cardiff, but have never been to this pub, even though it is (just) within walking distance of my family home there. It featured in the Independent's 25 Best Pubs list, chosen by Roger Protz. Oddly enough he also chose The Lower Red Lion in the 25. This is within striking distance of me, although not on foot.
I will try to make a note here after I've visited them, which I plan to do soon!
I saw a quote recently about liquidity. An old hand was saying that it was a slippery (!) concept that even smart new traders didn't readily grasp until they didn't have any and then it became frighteningly clear.
I think the same realisation is dawning on me and a lot of other 'sophisticated' investors concerning equities. There is a widely held view that equities are solid, 'real' assets. I even heard a guy who worked for the equities division at UBS once make the comment that he worked for the bit that traded solid shares in blue-chip companies, not flakey bonds and risky fixed-interest products. The essence of equities is that they are a residual claim on the cash flows of a company after all the other claims have been met in full. They are, thus, more junior than the most junior subordinated deferrable preference shares, and certainly more junior than the most unsecured debt.
I think that part of the problem of understanding the nature of equity comes from the idea that the shareholders 'own' the company, as evidenced by the fact that they alone have a say in who the directors are, whether a takeover offer should be accepted, and whether they wish to be first in the queue to provide more capital through a rights issue. The success of the company is evidenced principally by the share price going up, without much attention being paid to the other creditors.
The alternative view, as discussed in books like Brearley and Myers, is that, in fact, the equity holders have a call option on the assets of the company, and that the strike price of this option is the value of all the other more senior obligations of the enterprise. This is clearly the case: if bonds issued by a company cannot be redeemed, then the bondholders are given all the assets of the company instead. Of course creditors form a queue and it may be that other creditor rank ahead of the bond holders, but clearly the people at the very backmost position in the queue are the shareholders.
This explains why shares are not always a good investment in times of high inflation. The idea that shares represent 'real assets' suggests that a good purging dose of inflation, as we are probably facing right now, should be good for shares. For a company with real assets - say a large manufacturer with extensive factories it owns itself - this is probably true. The problem is that other forms of credit tend to get expensive and risky in times of high inflation, so that the head of the queue are taking more of the gross cashflow. Certainly once inflation gets a hold, creditors need to be protected against the macroeconomic uncertainty of real returns and will, overall, make their credit more expensive.
In a rising market in an environment of rapid economic growth, gearing, both financial and operational, have been sought after. The amplification of profits 'attributable to shareholders' have been welcomed by boards and investors. The fact that the variance of returns, i.e. the risk of the investment, has been amplified too has been brushed aside as an of purely academic interest. The fact that Modigliani and Miller pointed out that risk-adjusted returns to equity holders were not enhanced by gearing is never mentioned by corporate financiers or boards of directors. This is no trivial observation - the pair were given a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1985 for discovering it.
Now of course we all see how clear sighted these gentlemen were. We understand that capital adequacy ratios for banks are not there just to give structured finance experts an incentive for devising more and more Byzantine off-balance-sheet ways of holding assets. We are beginning to understand why Mssrs Glass and Steagall were not simply spoilsports. We understand that it is not an unalloyed Good Thing for companies to use all of their net cashflow in buying back shares rather than paying dividends no matter how tax-efficient and EPS flattering it might be.
We have enjoyed the party while it lasted. The hangover is going to be a severe one.
I bank with many banks. Some are tolerable. Some are appalling. HBOS definitely comes into the latter category. My personal mortgage is with them, and I have a Repo Rate Tracker, which is a very good way of getting house finance at the moment, so can't afford to go somewhere else.
They have the world's worst banking website (although I admit that there is a lot of competition: Lloyds TSB's and Abbey's both come to mind). The CHAPS and BACS options randomly work and are (experiment reveals) according to such factor as how much you are trying to transfer.
I had a slightly unusual requirement, which was to transfer same-day funds to a UK correspondent bank of Citigroup in the USA with some routing instructions attached. This is impossible through the website, perhaps not surprisingly, but, I was surprised to hear, impossible through the call centre too.
My fallback was to transfer the funds by CHAPS to Cater Allen and then use them to do the next leg of the transfer, thereby doubling the fees I incur for doing the transfer, and doubling the time taken. At least the operative at Cater Allen could understand my request, and confirmed that it was completely possible (and in particular understood that a SWIFT transfer to a UK bank goes through the UK domestic payments system and therefore the latter was bound to be capable of transmitting routing instructions together with the actual funds. HBOS seems to specially recruit operatives to have a spectacular lack of understanding of anything to do with international payments and, generally, to do with basic finance principle.
I have banked with Intelligent Finance for more than ten years. I was drawn to them because they offered an offset mortgage which for me was by far the best way of financing my house purchase. Virgin, who pioneered the concept, predictably ruined it by offering an uncompetitive borrowing rate.
The payments mechanics all seem to work, the website is usually up, and the interest rate is very competitive. That's where the good stuff stops. The worst thing for me is a complete inability to process CHAPS, BACS and SWIFT transfers efficiently. The website is practically useless for the first two of these. There is no pretence of offering SWIFT transfers from the website. The website seems designed to lead you up a garden path, refuse your instructions, so that you are forced to go back to square one and try to get through to the call centre.
Calling the website is like banging your head against a particularly hard and knobbly flint wall. It is absolute agony. Scottish staff with thick accents invariably fail to have a clue and are fantastically unhelpful, seemingly delighting in the fact that their bank offers so few services.
My advice would be to get an IF offset mortgage, linked to the BoE repo rate, stuff you liquid savings into an offset current account and keep all proper banking transactions well away from IF. Personally I use Cater Allen, but I would guess that any branchless bank would be far better than IF. For SWIFT transfers, one of the many Forex transfer specialists are likely to be far more efficient and will certainly give a much better spot rate than IF or any of the high-street banks.
Having got that off my chest, I'm off back to work. Sometimes getting into a grumpy rage can be quite cathartic.
I've gone from MT 3.35 to MT 4.2. It is a dramatic improvement. Pair handled the upgrade expertly. Once again I am forced to acknowledge their professionalism.
Quick update on what I've been doing recently:
The markets continue to tank, and it looks more and more certain that we're falling into a deep recession. This is very worrying.
This blog gives an update to the e-gold saga.
I have been a member of e-gold for a long time, but I haven't used it for anything serious, mainly because of a lack of counterparties. I was reminded of it when I listened to Russ Roberts latest podcast. It seems very odd to me that national central banks remain a nationalised monopoly provider of money. It seems obvious that there are plenty of candidates for money, and that the 'modern' reserve banking, with arcane rules for money creation all centrally controlled by a central banker, or cartel of them, can't be the right way to ensure good banking. The latest crisis certainly strengthens this conviction.
Anyway, I would recommend listening to Russell interviewing George Selgin about free banking (i.e. unregulated banking, not the absence of explicit charges for running current accounts). It's fairly clear that Russ doesn't 100% understand what George is talking about, which is what I think makes the Econtalk podcast so good. I should probably listen a second time, because I certainly got lost at various points. My previous experience of doing this, with other podcasts, though is that I am bored for most of the time and fail to understand exactly those points I mis-understood the first time through. Maybe I should get the book.
Traditional banking is occupying my hours a lot a the moment, certainly too many for me to spend long writing this. So I'll have to stop.
I have used Flickr for a long time. I usually upload my shots there. You can see them here.
I have also used Picasa for a long time. I am not capable of using proper photo processing software, although now there are some amazing pieces of software around, including Portrait Professional, that even I can use to make ugly people like you look like models.
The problem with Flickr is that there is no integration with Picasa. Whereas there is a button in Picasa to upload to Picasa Web Albums. And Picasa Web Albums is integrated with Google Maps, so I can easily tag my photos with locations.
The result is the following:
 |
| From Long Walk |
Black humour from Scott Adams.
Sadly, I don't suppose now that I'll ever achieve what he did. It is a pity that the British are so ignorant about this towering figure. I am slowly plodding through War and Peace, but that doesn't really give a proper idea of who the man was. French children spend a long time studying his story. I am not sure what they learn from this, but I have a sneaky suspicion that it engenders an enthusiasm for meritocracy of a sort that we are deeply suspicious of.
Amazingly, Stuart Hall of 'Jeux Sans Frontiers' is a great Napoleon expert. He has a large collection of Napoleon memorabilia, including a hundred clocks from the period. He has had Boney as a hero since his school days, which suggests a breadth of interests wider than someone who has only seen him comment on silly games and football.
In an episode of Great Lives on R4 recently, Stuart told Matthew Parris how this physically small man, who wasn't even French, rose from nowhere to be a dominating force in Europe, a veritable proto-Jacque Delors, in fact. It is funny how the British defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the Napoleonic idea of a united Europe now seems to be unstoppable no matter how much the British establishment opposes it.
It seems that Napoleon's key contribution was to get control of a revolution that was spinning out of control. He was Stalin to Robespierre's Lenin, except that he left the French a somewhat less corrupt and broken society. Even so, I, like most Brits, firmly believe that the Code Napoleonique condemns continental Europe to perpetual economic underperformance.
Although we all assume that Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, according to Stuart Hall it was in fact Blucher's actions which were decisive at the battle. Well, it always was the winners who re-write history. We also think of Napoleon as physically small, whereas he was in fact of average height. He had the usual number of fingers on both hands.
"Meritocracy" is a word that is younger than I am, and, interestingly, was intended to be pejorative. It was coined by Michael Young, father of the ubiquitous, but arguably less talented, Toby Young.
I always enjoy listening to, and reading Matthew Parris. He is a mild mannered man who can be devastating in his judgement on others. I very much enjoyed his latest piece in the Spectator where he describes how he, as a fifty-nine year old man risked being arrested in Monument underground station for running the wrong way down the up escalator when the worse for drink.
Slightly amazingly, 10 Downing St. decided to approve my proposed petition: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Allow comments to be made on all YouTube videos uploaded by 10 Downing Street.". You can see it on the Downing St. website.
Basically I decided to see what all the fuss was about when Gordon put his famous Youtube video up explaining what he was going to do about expenses. It's actually quite hard to find this video because it has such a low Page Rank compared to the countless video clips edited from this and other GB clips to mock him.
I'm sure if Gordon hadn't suffered a terminal shrivelling of his power the slaves in the back rooms of No. 10 would never have dared to allow my proposal to go through. They probably thought that the PM had more important things on his mind.
I genuinely think that allowing comments on YouTube is a good way of opening up a dialog, and allowing the Common Man to speak unto power. The rhetoric of politicians endlessly talks about the need to do this, but the actions show that they rarely care what ordinary voters think, especially young ones who are very unlikely to vote.
I'm sorry, I can rarely build up enough enthusiasm to write more than 140 chars in a post these days.
Every year or so the Knebworth Parish Council organises a public meeting to discuss the one political issue that local people are prepared to give up an evening to discuss: development on the Green Belt surrounding the village.
I am of a generation that has largely missed out on any participation in a public political process. Poltics, which is, at its heart, about how groups make decisions, now proceeds without those groups ever assembling. A top-down process involving spin doctors, focus groups and lobbying by well-funded special interest groups seems to have taken its place. This is a sad loss.
The meeting yesterday was officially to discuss which of the seven sites around Knebworth that had been identified were most suitable. A proposal to build a secondary school to the south of the village was presented by Mrs Pomerance, the leader of the We Need a School campaign. This site is not one of those identified for development around Knebworth, but seemed to have strong support from Henry Lytton-Cobbold (Lord Lytton) on whose land it would be built.
The debate was lively and informed. Many ordinary individuals spoke passionately from the floor. Sadly few of the elected officials seemed prepared to take a strong lead, although District Councillor Thomas Brindley, from Codicote, did make some spirited interventions from the floor.
According to John Bantick, leader of the Parish Council, representations to them cannot be forwarded to NHDC. The recommended way of responding to the proposals is via
the NHDC website (click through the link marked 'Online Consultation Software'. This is a fairly clunky process and requires one to register with the NHDC website, although it is possible to send an email to ldfconsultations@north-herts.gov.uk or even write a letter to:
LDF Team
North Hertfordshire District Council
Gernon Road
Letchworth Garden City
Hertfordshire
SG6 3JF
I imagine that you've arrived here by searching for Freshfield Analysis. This is a company of which I am a director. It is registered in England and Wales, number 1972407. Its registered office is Caxton Villa, Park Lane, Knebworth, Herts, SG3 6PF.
The company does not have a website, nor own any domain names, because it is not selling anything. It is an operating company, leasing UK real estate, but is not seeking investors or customers. Properties that it has for rent are usually advertised on RightMove.co.uk when they become available.
Financial information about the company is available on the Companies House website in the normal way. If I have applied to you for credit presumably you have already had an opportunity to ask for any financial information that you consider relevant.
My contact details are on this site somewhere.
I used to own a company called Herts Lettings Ltd, which was a letting agency, based in 13 Station Road, Knebworth, SG3 6AP. This was a limited company, registered in England and Wales, number 4314391, incorporated Nov. 2001. This company is still trading, although its name was changed on 22 July 2008 to Ming Wei Ltd. Membership, and directors, of this company have not changed since incorporation.
Around 24 June 2008, a separate company, registered in England and Wales, number 6627978, was incorporated, and shortly after changed its name to Herts Lettings Ltd., the same name as the former name of my company. I have nothing to do with company number 6627978, except in that I agreed to the directors of this company taking over the clients of my letting agency.
I am still receiving mail addressed to me at Herts Lettings Ltd, 13 Station Road. This mail should be sent my postal mailing address, which is available on this blog somewhere.
I have received an invite to Google Wave. I don't know much about this except that it is some kind of real-time collaboration tool. I accepted the invitation and now can provide another seven of you with an invite in turn (You get eight, a lot less than the hundred you used to get with gmail. I have offered one to my son, but he seems less than enthusiastic so I may get it back).
The selling point of Wave is that it is real time, and multi media. Maybe the big downside is that it is real time. Proper work requires undivided concentration. Real time interaction destroys that. Like trying to write a novel while serving at a (possibly not very busy) shop.
I have accounts with ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger (under its many names), Skype, Google Talk, and probably a few instant messaging services I have forgotten about. I use Pidgin messaging under Linux to sign in to many of these services but hardly ever talk to anyone over them. If people want to get hold of me synchronously they telephone me, or even visit me.
I've been reading Hal Varian's book 'Information Rules'. Its discussion network effects is very good. It seems to me that no IM system, including Google Wave, if that is actually what it is, will reach that critical mass that email and the telephone have reached. Varian is a clever guy, and a lot of people have lost a lot of money by betting against Google, but not everything they back turns to gold. Any members of Orkut out reading this?
The problem with Wave is that it requires people to say something. People seem reluctant to do that. I am not sure why not, but I suspect that it's something to do with the experience most people have of education, of failing exams and having all their mistakes counted against them. I guess that this makes them afraid even to write an email. I'm not quite sure how this squares with the average comment on a Daily Mail article, but I guess that these are made by the 1%.
I was reading that now more than 30% of the population of China is now online. Twice that proportion (surely) are online in the UK. But none of them seem to be from my school or university cohort. If you are in your 50's and are reading this, please comment on this entry to confirm that you are both online and able to write a sentence or two.
Here we go again ... It's the time to send cards with pre-printed season's greetings. It practically the only time of year I send personal correspondence by snail mail, and it just happens to coincide with a terrible delivery performance by the Post Office. Not that our local postman does not work extremely hard, and extremely long hours. It seems to me that we do this purely because of a sort of collective reluctance to be the first to send an electronic substitute.
I agonise over what to write in the card. It's hard to be too effusive when writing to someone you last had contact with a year ago, also via this method so singularly lacking in feedback. I usually stick to writing my name and the name of one or more family members at the bottom of the greeting. I don't feel remotely like including a kind of circular letter. These have dwindled in popularity over the years for fairly obvious reasons. Although we hardly ever send one (we did send one upon returning from spending a number of years working abroad, more than ten years ago), I actually love reading them. The problem is that you can look like a prize prat when your prize-winning son ends up in a Thai jail for drug smuggling.
It's easier to decide who to send cards to. My rule is that I will always send a card to anyone who sends me to, even if I have no idea who they are. If believe yourself to be a counterexample then consider if I might have an out of date address for you, or if, indeed, you have an up-to-date address for me. I know that you might have sent a card or an email around giving your new address, but old addresses have a habit of creeping back into address lists like ground elder, smothering the new ones. I do send to some old friends who I might not receive cards from also.
Most cards I send are to long-standing family members. I send one card on behalf of my family. I therefore have to decide on whether to name all our family members, name just me and my wife, even, sometimes, to name the pets. Former work colleagues and random friends from school and university are much easier. I just don't send cards to you!
I always send rubbish cards. Well, they are not total rubbish, but they are not great. I bought a few thousand as a job lot from eBay, with a vague plan to retail them, which never materialised. I always find it amazing that people will pay one pound fifty for a card in a newsagent when the same card can be bought from eBay for ten pence, but that's how the wonderful world of commerce behaves, and I'm in no position to change it.
Well, having raised expectations so much, let me anticipate non-delivery and non-sending now, and wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
I spent a lot of my working life as a contract programmer. I was a hired hand brought in to develop specific pieces of code. I was paid a fee agreed at the beginning of the contract. At other times in my career I worked as an employee. One of the biggest disadvantages of being an employee, as far as I was concerned, was having to submit myself to appraisals. It also was fairly galling that my pay could not reflect the shortage of my specific technical skills.
I found the whole appraisal project slightly surreal. I had, essentially, done the same job as a contractor as I was doing as a 'permi' but now some box ticking exercise would, in theory, determine how much I was paid. Even worse, when I briefly became a manager rather than a developer, I had to give appraisals. The whole process seemed as fake to me as a manager as it had seemed to be to be fake as one who was managed.
The good thing about being part of a pay-setting discussion was the final incontrovertible proof that the appraisal numbers played no part in setting pay increases but was, at best, a fig leaf for denying a decent increase to someone who was not highly regarded by me, or more importantly, my own boss.
Well, now I have put all that behind me, and will probably never have to suffer it again. There are some compensations to getting old and past it.
We've been setting up vacation messages on our email servers for a long time. We give some fixed message to our correspondents that we're away and will not be able to respond for a while. Sometimes we will set up some rules, for example that we will send the message only to people who are already in our address book.
This idea could be taken a lot further. I seem to spend more and more time telling people and computers my date of birth, my mother's maiden name, the name of my first pet, my first motor car and a whole raft of other personal identity, allegedly for my own security, but clearly to make it easier for others to pay out if my money is stolen. It would be fairly easy for me to build up a comprehensive (within the universe of questions asked by banks) database of answers which some automated system could reveal to those with suitable credentials.
This kind of thing could be extended further with access control lists for part of the information controlling access from others, maybe family or friends. The great thing about this is that these questions could keep being answered after my death. Perhaps the set of questions and answers could be extended to those related to my wishes for how my funeral should be arranged, who should be invited, and who should not.
It will be quite tedious to write all this information in a rigid format, but a general computer analysis of my writings and statements could be used to infer my answers to all sorts of questions, even to the extent of my voting preferences. A virtual me could be constructed that would be almost as good as the real thing, although this virtual me would not be of much practical help when it comes to DIY or giving lifts. I'm sure the system could be designed to answer questions in my distinctive, if not literary, style of English. I'm not sure how the system would cope when I've expressed diametrically-opposed views in the past. Maybe some kind of time decay could be incorporated, giving more weight to recent assertions. These are mere technical details!
Currently we try to specify rules for financial arrangements after death. We might specify some rules for the management of trusts and bequests. Writing this in paper form will give rise to lots of problems of interpretation. Some format capable of being analysed by machine, like a programming language, would surely be preferable. Perhaps computers will, at last, provide us with life after death, if only in a limited way.
Regular readers will know that an investment property of mine was used for growing cannabis. You can read the post again here. After a week being jerked around by Scottish and Southern (the electricity supplier) who repeatedly told me that 're-energizing' my property was a matter of hours away, I have now been told that, actually, they can't re-connect my property at all, but that I will have to apply for a connection just as if the property was a new build.
The company that is responsible for this is EDF Energy (Eastern). These at least answer the phone promptly, if you want to order a new supply. Unfortunately, they charge an arbitrary and enormous charge for connecting a property to the network. I was quoted 'up to two and a half thousand pounds' for the job. This involves connecting two core cables which are currently separated by about an inch of air. The time it will take to do this is 'up to ten weeks'. I suppose they are very busy, what with all the thousands of new houses going up all around Hertfordshire recently.
Of course they could charge me five thousand pounds, and I'd still pay, because I can't go anywhere else. This shows the power that comes from being a monopoly provider of a good or service. Supposedly regulators and government supervision tempers the tendency of monopolies to abuse their power, but it is an irresistible temptation. I heard the other day that if you want the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to transfer a work permit or other stamp from your old (foreign) passport to your new one, they will charge you five hundred pounds. This clearly bears no relation to the cost of performing the action, but is, presumably, judged to be about as high as they will get away with, just like my re-connection charge.
What angers me about this episode is that it was all so unnecessary. Sure, electricity was being stolen, but digging up the drive and cutting into the underground armoured cable was a totally disproportionate response, which the police and EDF Energy must have know would saddle the owner with huge delays and costs. Moreover, they must have known that the person who would bear the cost would the unwitting, and duped, owner, not the criminal gang that was running the operation.
As you probably will have guessed, this is not covered by my house insurance. I will blog about that another day.
If I am ever asked a question that begins "Are you sure that..." I always want to answer "I'm not even sure of my own name or place of birth, so I'm fairly unsure about the answer to that." The problem is that I take things literally. When I was in Standard 1 (about 8 or 9 years of age) the kids in the class that I was in was told to read a story and re-tell it in their own words. I asked what this term meant, and I was told that I must not use the words that had been used by the original author.
Everyone else (as far as I was aware) found no problem doing this, but I was very distressed. It must have been a fairly strong feeling as I can remember it clearly now, four decades later. The problem I had was that I just just couldn't think how I could find synonyms for the prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, articles and auxiliary verbs that permeate English text.
In this sort of situation, in which I find myself fairly regularly, still, people will just tell me "oh, it doesn't mean avoid the use of literally every word that appears in the original story", as if there is some kind of meta information, available to everyone but me, specifying the set of words that may be re-used while complying with the original instruction. I suppose there is some kind of reasonableness test that is implicitly applied to relax the strict meaning of the original instruction.
Well, by now you are either wholeheartedly sympathising with me because you recognise exactly the problem, or simply cannot understand how there is a problem. I would guess that the latter reaction is going to be somewhat more likely. If you are in this larger group, spare a thought for those of us who find the fuzziness and imprecision of ordinary life distressing and confusing.
Chocolate-coated brazil nuts, mince pies, stollen bread, Christmas pudding, turkey, bread sauce, sage and onion stuffing. Some of the foods that we seem to consume at this time of year only. How much better they taste after a year of abstinence. I am sure that Melvyn Bragg enjoys his wine much more for abstaining for six months of the year. Perhaps we should go back to taking Lent much more seriously.
Even fairly disgusting food (bread sauce is my bete blanc noir) can be enjoyable if it is consumed rarely enough. My preference would be for twice in a lifetime.
There is something about tastes and smells that trigger memories so much more strongly than images or verbal descriptions. It's something to do with the sense of smell being better connected to our primitive lizard brain, I dimly recall. Whatever the biological explanation, it's really not Christmas unless you've had at least a couple of turkey dinners, no matter how dry and awful turkey meat is, objectively speaking.
And the great thing is that, actually, the food and drink I eat now is of very high quality compared to what we had to put up with in the sixties and seventies, my formative years. Cookers are more efficient, their thermostats more accurate, and recipes instantly available for nothing on the internet, but most importantly there is much more competition between distribution channels. We rarely buy our turkeys from butchers now, but deal direct with the farmer, again, mainly, because the Internet makes it easy to reach the public directly.
But the best thing of all about Christmas food is that, because everyone thinks that it should be cooked as well as possible, nobody asks me to cook it, so I am free to relax, write blog entries, and most importantly, eat, drink and be merry!
Happy Christmas Everyone!
We all loved The West Wing. Apart from anything else it was a wonderful change from police procedurals, whodunnits, and the staples of TV drama. The dialogue was fast-paced and funny, and you felt that you got a glimpse of what really went on behind the scenes - the horse-trading and log-rolling and kow-towing to lobbyists.
But as the sainted Juliette points out in this blog entry, the TV series paints a wholly implausible picture of what goes on in the real whitehouse. The character of Josh Bartlett owes more to The Waltons than any real-life president of the modern era.
I suppose that TWW is entertainment, not education, and that on balance it's better to have an idealised image of what happens in the White House than none at all, but I fear that, as always, youngsters who decide to go into politics because they imagine that it's like TWW are destined for a terrible disappointment. I suppose this is a common fate for politicians and explains why they so often turn to drink. At least there are a lot of nice, subsidized bars in the Houses of Parliament.
I love peanuts and peanut products. My mother is the same. When I used to commute into London I would often run down to the station in Knebworth clutching a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Now I like nothing better than to have a nice piece of wholemeal toast spread with a mixture of Vegemite (first) and peanut butter (probably Waitrose own brand, but not essentially). At a pinch I will use Marmite in place of Vegemite, but it's not the same.
I love salted roasted peanuts, and I will enthusiastically eat any confection involving peanuts and chocolate. MarathonSnickers Bar.... mmmm!
I have, however, never been a convert to peanut brittle. The combination of glassy, filling-destroying hard toffee and peanuts has never much appealed to me. This is until I discovered Gourmet Buttery Peanut Brittle from Virginia Diner, courtesy of my wife's relative, Jim Pullen, resident of Fredericksburg, VA. This is the most delicious peanut butter I have ever tasted. The salty sweetness blends perfectly with the peanuts, which are present in the perfect proportion for satisfying crunchiness.
I am not capable of describing the taste of this stuff in a way that will remotely communicate its deliciousness to you. If you love peanuts you will love this stuff. Please ask to taste some if you drop by, but you'll have to be quick - I have only one pound of it and I do not have the willpower that would allow me to ration its consumption.
I have had the good fortune to be related to some people, particularly Guy Yeomans Hemingway, who produced the Hemingway Family History in the 60's, helped by my dear friend Geoff Dart. This gives an idea of what it is about.
Kathie put some effort in researching our immediate family at St Katharine's House in the 80's, when all the records were still in dusty files. I combined this information in a GEDCOM file, which has gathered its own virtual dust on my hard disk ever since. I posted it to RootsWeb, here.
I am extremely bad and lazy about data. Once I get a piece of code working, I always think that it is simply for users to sort out the data. As far as I was concerned, the best way of doing this was in something like a wiki, where everyone who was remotely interested could create and monitor their own leaf of the tree. I looked around at the options for this and eventually decided that the cheapest option was phpGedView. I was slightly hesitant about getting it installed on my web server as my days as a serious programmer/administrator are well behind me. However I discovered that a combination of beautiful coding on the part of the developers, and excellent web-based administration screens provided by my hosting company, pair.com meant that I could get the interactive Hemingway family tree up and running in an absurdly short time.
Really it's only interesting if (i) you are related to the individuals on it and (ii) created as an individual user by me. I can't do anything about (i) but I can certainly sort out (ii). Just email me at steve.hemingway@gmail.com and I'll set you up. I think that you can just send a message to the administrator via the hosted tree as an alternative to sending me an email, but I can't see why you would want to do that.
While I am writing this I should own up to damaging the tree. I somehow tried to merge in a couple of incompatible trees of the Pullen/Palmer/Verrall/Houde families, which resulted in some awful confusion. Because I am only extremely distantly related to these families I have never bothered to invest the time to sort things out. Please help!
The experience of Sweden with free schools is positive, in spite of attempts by the BBC to claim the opposite.
Stevenage has some rubbishy schools. The New Schools Network is a new charity which is being set up to take advantage of the Gove proposals. Maybe, just maybe, now is the time to establish a decent school for Knebworth kids, other than the appalling proposals put forward by Judith Pomeroy.
This might happen, but clearly there are a lot of vested interests which will be opposed to it.
Mark 18th May in your diaries as George Hamilton IV is performing in Knebworth Village Hall for one night only. He will incorporate songs (his hits and familiar titles) alongside conversation. He is a great historian and will talk about some aspects of Americana.
You can read more about George on his website. Like all the up-and-coming stars he also has a MySpace page.
I will update this page with details of the event when I receive them.
This event is promoted by Tony Byworth of Knebworth.
Google News Archive Search is a truly wonderful thing. I can't quite believe that so much archive newpaper material is available, free of charge, delivered magically to a computer near you.
I did a few searches and came across this article about the origins of Stevenage New Town. I knew that the local lord of the manor, Lord Lytton, was adamantly opposed to the development, because he had a large area of his estate forcibly taken from him by the process euphemistically known as a "compulsory purchase", and more accurately known as theft. It seems that he was not alone.
What I found slightly surprising was that it was necessary to come in a fleet of twenty four official cars. It was even more surprising that Lewis Silkin's car had had the air let out of its tyres to let him know what the ungrateful locals thought of his plans.
I always slightly struggled to understand why the 1945 government was not re-elected. It obviously had a huge support initially, supposedly stood up for the common man against the forces of reaction and was free of corruption and run by one of the outstanding prime ministers of the 20th Century - Clem Attlee. However, its collectivist mania caused at least one industry - sugar - to fight back hard against nationalization (e.g. here) which may have persuaded voters that with another five years of Labour, Britain would end up abolishing private property entirely.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Steve Hemingway in the Personal category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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