Steve Hemingway

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:

1. Do choose your tour company carefully and make sure they have professional guides who speak your language,
2. do make sure the hotel, if it is part of the package a good one. Ours was pretty dreadful and we tried to move, but everywhere was fully booked. The one we would have liked to go to was the Silberstein
3. try to avoid getting full board. The hotel food might be the best on the island, but then again it might not.
4. get someone to tell you *exactly* what the trip will involve, what equipment is required, whether you should hire snorkels, wetsuit etc. etc. before going, whether there will be facilities to get changed into a swimsuit at the destination, whether food will be provided, what it is going to be, what size the boat will be, will you be able to shelter from the sun on the journey etc. etc.
5. make sure you take proper equipment. The Galapagos islands in August are bloody cold for somewhere on the equator and at sea level.
6. probably bring your own wet suit and snorkel if you plan to swim much
7. do not sign up to one of the six-hours-of-internet-use-for-a-suspiciously-cheap-price internet cafes that seem to be everywhere. You will find that using up your minutes will be as much fun as watching a prickly pear cactus grow. I bought a half an hour in one but it really made dial-up seem fast: I think the internet is via satellite or GPRS. It is certainly not 3G, WiMax, Wifi mesh, ADSL, cable.
8. if you are seriously interested in the flora and fauna, bring a suitably technical book with you. The guides we had, apart from speaking almost no English, did not give the impression that they had studied natural history to any very advanced level.
9. if you can, avoid going as part of a package. All the expeditions are provided by local boat operators, and are available to be booked by the public, probably at less cost than you pay through a tour (generally very expensive),

10. Take the reviews of the Royal Palm hotel with a pinch of salt, except perhaps the one posted on 09/26/05.
    

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!

my Amazon shop

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!

I have so much to say, but so little time to say it. Also, I am aware, I have failed to get back to some of you that I was planning to meet.

I don't think I'll get anything useful done now before I return from China, on the 19th Jan. If you are interested in buying some property, or possibly getting involved in importing some electronics from China, then just give me a call on 07712 176618. I am going to visit some suppliers, hopefully.

If you know anything about finance of property, especially in China, then please contact me.

I will continue to have access to email in China - steve.hemingway@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

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.

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:

• I've changed around the routers in my house and generally spent ages tracking down bad network behaviour. I think the root of the problem is setting up a phone as a DMZ. I really don't know the exact cause of the problem, but it seems to be solved now.
• I have had my mother to stay. She was very ill in the first half of the year and is still very frail, but much better now. She is very lucky to be alive.
• it's half term, and Tom and Alice are here. Both are getting on with their work rather better than I am getting on with mine.
• I saw my brother and Neil Moffatt in Cardiff over the weekend. I have just read Neil's short story 'Balancing Acts'. Maybe it's just because I feel an empathy with the author, but I found the work really quite good.

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 Advert is on the Cardiff Craigslist. Something similar is on the Cardiff Gumtree (I don't know whether it is just me, but I get the impression that Gumtree is pulling ahead of Craig's List, even though I much prefer the design of the latter.

Anyway, if you follow the link you will get the idea of what is required. If you personally know me you will realise that I will be very fair with anyone who is taken on.

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.