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PC's are expensive. They are amazingly powerful and complex pieces of equipment, and they are worth the money, but they do represent the consumption of a lot of resources.

These are the rules I follow when buying a PC. Others may work for you, not least because you may be reluctant about installing a new operating system, upgrading the memory of your laptop, or replacing the hard disk. If you are willing to have a go at doing these things you can save a lot of money:

1. Think about buying a second-hand machine. There are a lot on the market, and some have been well maintained,
2. don't disregard processors made by AMD or designed by ARM,
3. don't be worried if the hard disk has failed - this is usually easy to replace, and quite cheap,
4. don't be worried if the computer has no operating system. If the PC has a COA then you are entitled to install a fresh Microsoft operating system. In any case you can install Fedora or Ubuntu, which will probably serve you just as well,
5. eBay is a great source of ex-lease laptops. Sellers will usually have very high feedback.
   
6. think about buying the sort of boring computer corporations typically lease - i.e. not Alienware or Mac,
   

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7. don't be put off buying from abroad - you can escape the VAT (possibly) and it's easy to get used to a US keyboard (I prefer them) or if you don't like that you can still use a UK-style keyboard, you just have to remember where the £ key is,
8. get as much memory as you can afford. I think that a 4GB PC is just much nicer to use, even if the processor speed is a bit slow. It's fairly cheap to buy extra memory from a specialist supplier like Crucial  but it's probably going to be cheaper to buy the PC with the extra memory already installed,
9. always google for reviews of the particular PC before you bid. Amazon is good, but sometimes ordinary buyers will give a low rating because the item was delivered damaged, or doesn't do something it was never designed to do,
10. think about what you need the PC for. If you are going to connect it to a modern PC or monitor, then an HDMI connector is very important (DVI or display port may be an cheaper alternative if you're prepared to buy a slightly more expensive adaptor cable).

These are my top-ten tips. I am sure there are other things to look out for. Send them to me on Twitter and don't forget to tell me how you get on! My latest purchase was a Dell Latitude E6400 with 4GB RAM which I managed to pick up for under one hundred and sixty pounds from PC Efficient in Shefford (driveable from me, so I save the delivery cost!).

 

I have posted something in TMF (as a reply to swemson's original post).  I have contributed a few posts to the Herts Investment Club . I am about to create a group in Linked In.

I have not yet managed to organise an actual meeting. I do intend to do this, but we're still a bit too spread out. Ideally we'd have North, East, South subdivisions with separate meetings.

My original post doesn't seem to have attracted any comments. I really would like someone to show some interest otherwise I feel as though I'm talking to myself.

I have now created the Linked In page. You can see it here. It is possible that you need to be a member of LinkedIn to see it. Linked In is like Facebook but for boring people.

Well, my blog is back. Actually it took all of 2 minute to recover it. All the entries remained visible, and hence my PR was probably unaffected, since Google doesn't care about formatting anyway.

I haven't been saying anything here. I've been using Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz (which I still rather like) and Joomla recently, plus creating the Knebworth Parish Council Website using Google Sites (aka Jot Spot).

Joomla is very frustrating to use. I'll say which site I've been working on later, maybe, but it's not live yet, and I don't want to encourage anyone to go there until the client has given the 100% OK. It is however pretty powerful and I'm sticking with it. I am using Dreamhost, which is a pretty good hosting company, although I'm sticking with Google for email servers.

I've been looking at EPOS and General Ledger systems. Not very informedly though. If you know anything about these subjects, please give me a ring.

I have had a bit of a play with Amazon's EC2 service. I set myself up a micro instance and found that I had a fully-functioning virtual machine, out there in the cloud, running on Amazon's infrastructure completely free. This is pretty awesome.

If you want more info on any of these techy type things feel free to google for them. Alternatively drop me a line and I'll be happy to bore you about them.

I see that a few of you have managed to leave comments. Thanks for showing that it is possible. A few of you whom I know personally have brought up things I've mentioned in my blog in real life conversations (yes, I do actually get out to the pub from time to time). Why don't you say 'hi' in the box below? You can also do so through FB as I think I've linked this blog to my page via RSS Graffitti, which is a much better app than the default FB notes app. that is supposed to be able to import RSS but has never worked for me.

Malcolm Sergeant reputedly stated that he would try anything once with the exceptions of incest and Morris Dancing. I have not personally been tempted by either, but I have just had my first experience of line dancing, or Scottish dancing, or at least something with a distant relationship to dancing at a Burns Night Supper which took place in the last few hours in Knebworth Village Hall.

For practically the whole of my adult life I've been using computers. When I was at school we had a teletype rigged up to an acoustic coupler to the City Hall computer, some kind of ICL machine with a magnificent 128K of core store. Unlike most people of my age, I don't consider them anything more frightening than a TV or radio.

I instinctively value digital information more highly than physical, tangible stuff. When I think of filing something, I think of putting it into a database. Communication is most easily retrieved when it was sent by email. Music is best transferred as an MP3 file. Most institutions, and people, I have concluded, just don't feel like that. They may use an Amazon Kindle, but they much prefer to hold a real physical book, or a paper newspaper or magazine.

People also prefer to interact with people in person. A video link is preferable to a telephone conversation is preferable to an instant message chat is preferable to email. A face-to-face meeting is preferable to them all. We are governed by people coming together in rooms to talk, with paper agenda and minutes as props. Important decisions require physical meeting.

I recently read Tony Blair's autobiography. Famously he had never sent or received an email, at least until he ceased being prime minister. Gordon Brown spent hours every day writing notes by hand, in his execrable and illegible handwriting, rather than using a keyboard.

The other day we held a sort of party. Lots of young people were here. A good number of hand-written thank-you cards and notes were sent. Nobody sent an email expressing the same thanks. Even amongst those who have never known a period before email in the home, it's somehow a cultural given that thanks are expressed by something tangible.

This is all incomprehensible to me. Debates in Parliament could much more efficiently be conducted via Google Wave. MPs could sit at home, or in their offices. Considered, checked and grammatical contributions to the debate could be depended on. Oh, but no, Google has abandoned Wave, because nobody used it, in spite of its manifest potential for saving the planet by rendering travel to meetings obsolete.

The desire to physically touch things, and come together physically remains a mystery to me, but, it seems to me it must be something to do with extra information transmitted above and beyond the factual content of the conversation. The subtle indicators of, well, something beyond me, anyway. This is fine, but it does make me feel excluded. Not only do I not receive this information, but those who do don't seem to be able to communicate to me either its content or its function. All very odd... You can leave comments you know!

View Stuff in Cardiff in a larger map

I'm really not quite sure why this has always seemed to be such a problem. If one goes to 'My Maps' in Google Maps (probably the link is only there if one is logged into Google Services) then one can create a new map, complete with markers and routes, and pick up an iframe link to embed in a blog entry, much as you can see above.

I have been on a few enjoyable walks around Hertfordshire recently, and made a record of them on my new GPS enabled phone. Expect them to appear here fairly soon.

"Attending elite universities is not education--it's access to the peer group. There's a lot of truth to that. The actual education you get is pretty generic. If you were really diligent, you could open books and read it. What you are really selling is access to other students and to colleagues. Gateway to certain things--that's what you charge for, can't charge for knowledge. Does that hearten you? We've found a way? That's the way it is. Would prefer a world where people pay professors giant amounts of money to strew knowledge and enlightenment around to people who need it. But that's not the world we live in, so I make my way as I can. "

From Laughlin on the Future of Coal and Climate.

Education is a funny thing. It is expensive but is consumed by people who have no, or very little money. It is paid for by parents or the state, in loco parentis. The service consumed is never directly experienced by those paying for the service. It's a bit like law or medicine, where the there are very large asymmetries in knowledge between the supplier and the consumer. It's quite the opposite of some entertainment or a piece of cheese.

I remember discussing with some other parents the excellent university education that was on offer in the USA. Immediately they said to me that they would never want their children to go to abroad to study because the main point of the studying in the UK was networking opportunity. Implicitly the assumption was that the place of study would be Oxford or Cambridge.

It seems that there is some evidence for this view. I am pretty sure I've come across studies that suggest that the school you attended has more influence on your future earnings power than the university you went to, and a lot more than the class of your degree.

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.

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").

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 50^th 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.