It is pretty horrific, and yet I can't stop looking at it... It lures me in and disgusts me at the same time.

It looks like it should have come from this site: Top 25 Men who look like Lesbians (btw: The picture of Dana Carvey is truly disturbing, you have been warned)

Talking of Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians, I saw this pic of Yves Saint Laurent in the paper yesterday without knowing who it was.

Tax evasion 'costs 1,000 lives a day'

Not paying your fair share of tax makes you partly responsible for the deaths of 5.6million children.

The message to the world’s super-rich individuals and companies has been issued not by a tax authority, but by Christian Aid, one of Britain’s leading charities.

In a detailed report examining the “true toll of tax dodging,” the charity says the practice is so widespread that it is now “tantamount to a new slavery.”

Explaining its claims, Christian Aid calculated that the world’s poorest nations are missing out on at least $160billion (£82bn) a year in tax revenues.

This sum towers above the $40 to $60bn estimated by the World Bank that is needed to pay for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

Under the MDG, the organisation has committed to an aim of halving poverty by 2015, a move that would save 350,000 children’s lives a year.

“We predict that illegal trade-related tax evasion alone will be responsible for the deaths of 5.6million children under the age of five between 2000 and 2015,” said Christian Aid’s director Dr Daleep Mukarji.

Breaking down the figures, the group’s implication is that super-rich individuals and outfits are killing almost 1,000 children a day by failing to pay their fair share, or any, tax.

Wealthy corporations or individuals who act within the law by using schemes to minimise their tax liabilities – known as tax avoidance – aren’t much better, according to the charity.

The not-for-profit group notes that avoidance is part of a “sliding scale of legitimacy,” in particular tax havens, which, they argue, encourage secrecy and in turn foster criminality.

In its report it cites four reasons, each of which it condemns, for banking in offshore havens: to avoid tax, to evade tax, to operate in secret, or to sidestep financial regulations.

“In each scenario, the pursuit of profit outweighs all other considerations,” states the report, “-including good citizenship and social responsibility.”

Setting up a holding company in a tax haven to reduce tax bills is also denounced by the report, regardless of whether the motive is to hold profits, licences or intellectual property.

The shot across the bows of corporations is meant to hurt giants like BP and Wal-Mart, but the report authors also singled out other key players for criticism.

U2 lead singer Bono, pop start Phil Collins and Formula One racing champion Lewis Hamilton are each frowned upon, despite all acting legally to minimise their tax bills.

The report points to the British government as the key to changing the uneven tax landscape – because so many havens are dependent or linked to the Crown; such as the Isle of Man and Bermuda.

But its authors don’t shy away from an acute irony: the CDC plc, owned by the Department for International Development, uses tax havens to avoid paying tax on its £350m in profits.

The charity’s toughest talk, however, is reserved for the accounting, tax and financial experts who have made tax reduction schemes possible for individuals and corporations alike.

It said the “grey area” of tax avoidance has become “increasingly aggressive”, as more “complex instruments are peddled by the tax industry with the sole purpose of getting around laws and regulations.”

The report’s authors reflected: “Some idea of the size of this activity can be grasped by considering an astonishing fact; a full 50% of world trade is reported to take place through tax havens.”

In terms of tax evasion, the charity estimated that the deaths of around 350,000 children under five are potentially avoidable each year by wiping out abusive transfer pricing and false invoicing; just two of the five main ways tax is avoided.

I have been trying to find the holy grail of cell phones; good call quality, speedy interface, good PDA experience, usable email and rss feeds. To this end I have managed to get through a number of phones over the years.

For a good number of years, my main phone was a 6210. This was a classic smooth, well balanced phone, primarily aimed at business users. It did everything I wanted it to at the time, phone and sms, and that was pretty much it. I did get the car phone cradle for it and I have to admit, that was great.

Fast forward to the present day and I have managed to burn through a huge amount of phones since then. I am still trying to find that one phone that does it all for me.

I have a Nokia N70 which I enjoyed but getting into the SMS application was too slow, and generally it felt quite slow all round. I then moved to a Samsung D900, which is a great phone, that slide action is quite addictive. It is the thinner, more attractive brother of the old Samsung D500 that I also used to have.

The D900 is a fast phone, getting into text was speedy and the various other apps on it, like browsing and some of the games was ok. Nothing too special, I mainly wanted it for voice and SMS. I wish it would handle emails though.

When my contract was coming to an end with T-Mobile, I saw that they were offering the HTC sorry, MDA Touch. This is a phone that along with the HTC Tilt, I had been eyeing up and thought would be quite nice. The Touch is very thin, with a nice slightly rubberised feel to it, so I went for it, it was free on a contract continuation and I thought why the hell not.

To be honest, this was a mistake, the Windows Mobile 6.0 operating system that runs on it just sucks. Seriously, I don't know what I was thinking there, I can't believe how much of a misstep that OS is. Clunky, slow, you need to use a stylus to type a god damned text unless you manage to find a good installable keyboard. If you are using this, the HTC PhonePad is good and offers T9. Don't use anything else.

Oh and one morning the bloody thing decided to delete all my contacts rendering the thing useless. Nice one, so that was quickly abandoned.

So I have temporarily gone back to the D900, but I await the delivery of a new Palm Centro, this one seems to have everything I want. Small, compact, fast ( Palm PDA's have always been fast ), it does email, everyone likes the SMS software it has and it has a keyboard. Hopefully my quest for a good phone with email has finally found a result.

I started freelance contracting in March. My boss at the job I was in previously took me aside one day and told me that there were going to be big changes. That the consultants had all moved onto contracts and pretty much explained to me that if I still wanted to earn a wage, I had to become a contractor.

It is a tidy way of moving everyone of the payroll, no more PAYE hassles, leave that to the guys to handle themselves.

I knew this was coming and had been looking into contracting for a while. The only problem I had a 4 week notice period and all the roles I was being offered were to start next week, start Monday etc. etc.. You get the picture.

I had been in for an interview with the NHS the week before and apparently they liked me and wanted me to start the following Monday.

Unfortunately I knocked that one back because of a misplaced sense of loyalty I guess. It was too soon, I think. I was very torn about it and was angry with myself for the rest of the week because I just didn't have the balls to say "I quit".

Then I had that meeting with my boss, I don't think he believed me when I told him I had been offered that job. I think he finally believed me when I quit two days later.

I get the strong feeling that he was under the assumption that I wouldn't be able to find anything else so quickly, ah well.

One thing I have to note is how silly the english commentator sounds talking about such things like "first down and ten" .

I can understand the Superbowl is popular in America, I wonder just how popular it is here.

I'm sitting here this morning with Cozmo G. Spacely, Uncle Weed, down front is Kris Krug and camera.

Lots of other people around too, too many to mention.

It isn't down to the hardware, as good as it is, I think it is the most solid laptop I have ever used, the trackpoint is a joy to use compared to trackpads and the Thinklight is a novelty that I am sure will come in useful sometime. The hardware even has some problems? Want to upgrade the memory, then you pretty much have to take the machine to bits, and the built in speaker is very very quiet at full volume.

No, the thing that makes it such an enjoyable experience for myself is the Thinkvantage software, or more to the point "System Update". That is to be honest, worth it for that alone.

Let me compare two rebuilds I performed recently, one on my R60e and one on a Dell Inspirion 1501.

The install task was to install Vista Business on both machines, 32-bit on the Thinkpad , the x64 version on the AMD based Dell.

The install started well on the Thinkpad until it got to the disk management portion, I had turned on the sATA drive and it couldn't see the disk, so I downloaded the Intel Matrix Driver from Lenovo , unpacked it to a memory stick and stuck it in. The Vista installer is nice this way, instead of requiring you to have floppies to install drivers you can now use USB sticks. Great!

Vista found the driver and the install was painless from this point on.

Installing it on the Dell seemed quite painless until the first reboot, when Vista started to finish the install, there was an error telling me the install had failed. A couple of reboots later, and it had still failed. So I tried installing again, and then again, then once more until it worked correctly.

Vista x64 finally installed onto the Dell on the fourth attempt.

At this point both machines are sitting ready to go without any machine specific drivers, so I started the long and arduous task of installing them on the Thinkpad. Well, you would think that it would be long and arduous. With this machine, all I had to do was plug it into a wired network, visit the Lenovo site, then download "System Update".

This bit of software is fantastic, doing nothing more than downloading and installing all the drivers required for that machine on that OS. It recognises what model it is running on, then hunts everything down. It took about an hour to download everything required, and maybe 30 minutes to install after that. I didn't even have to do much, just tell it which bits to install then hit Start. You can sit and let it do it's thing and after it is done have a perfectly working laptop with all the drivers installed.

The Dell on the other hand was slightly different, after getting in to the Drivers section of the Dell website, I had to work out which of the many numbers on the underside of the machine was the Service Tag. Once that was discovered I was presented with a huge list of drivers, but apparently these are only specific to certain releases of the hardware marked A01, A02, A03 etc. In the end it took me about 20 minutes to find the two drivers that were applicable to this machine.

In the end I have to say the software that Lenovo supplies for keeping a machine up to date is superb, I would urge other computer manufacturers to take look at this and implement something just as easy to use, instead of installing all the crapware that comes on a modern machine these days. You don't want to get me started on the topic of clearing a Dell out. Painful.

Newish servers, lots more space and bandwidth. Yippie. Lets me work on something that I have sitting there in the pipeline.

The archived podcasts are missing just now, they are about a gig so I will re-upload them when I get home.

It's good to be back.

The Vader Sessions

Silent Star Wars