Posts by Mark York

BT slammed for 'importing' cheap Indian contractors

£400 a day??? - I wish.

Best rate I ever had as a contractor for desktop support\project rollout was £19ph back in 2001, closely followed by £17.50 - 18.50 around 2004-2006.

One of the lowest rates was working for a local authority that paid £12ph, it was a substantial rate cut I took from the 2006 rate, just to be closer to home for the wife & kids.

The very worst rate of all I took when there was absolutely nothing to be had was £78 a day & I took that because it was based in my city centre about 20 mins walk away from my house.

As others have stated the rate you take is not the rate you pay yourself, its there to pay the tax's & both sets of NIC's, to pay accountants, to pay yourself between contracts\sick pay & holiday (actual family holidays not ones enforced on you by sudden contract terminations). I earned far less overall than the permies taking all that into account with far less job security & I was far happier than most of the permies when I was working & I wouldn't have swapped that experience for the world.

After being shown the door from the local authority along with some others, I managed about 2 weeks backfill work & 3 interviews in four months before I gave up my Ltd co & utilised my (new) residency status to move to Canada.

Coat because you need a good one here.

Irish politicos try to cut off call girls' mobiles

politicians making cheap capital out of it either

"Never used these services, but don't want politicians making cheap capital out of it either,"

I'd not be surprised if politicians have ben found to make a few expenses claims under (or on top of) "entertainment" for those services.

Paris because she probably forgets to charge for her services.

Computacenter: Life's not as bad as we thought

ComputerCenter

I spent four happy years working for CC at GSK as part of their support team, which was a mixture of contractors & permy CC & GSK's own staff. We had little to do with how CC ran things as we followed GSK's SLA.

CC then took over the running of support, some GSK staff took voluntary redundancy or got themselves promoted out of local support rather than fall into CC's grasp.

The good working enviroment disappeared rather rapidly with phonecalls from managment querying why calls were not being assigned within minutes of arriving in our queue & endless e-mails about procedures & SLA.

I voted with my feet first back to home rather than the weekly commute to London, to a local support role elsewhere.

Microsoft cries netbook victory against Linux

AA1 & Linpus - OK With My Kids

"I bought an Acer Aspire One, with Linpus Linux. It was awful. I did not get the administrator password, when I created one (using Terminal) I could not download Firefox 3, searched for hours how I could upgrade to Openoffice 3, and used the Terminal for everything. In the end, I wiped it, put Xubuntu on - still had to change one driver for the wireless - and it worked."

I bought the AA1, followed the tweaks given here last December, referenced sites like Macles to install other apps & left the 4 original windows.

Then bought a second AA1 & cloned it from the above.

Result:

2 AA1's configured for kids both with learning difficulties to use without problems.

No waste of printer paper\toner with them constantly printing every 5 minutes, forced them to e-mail it to me before I would print it.

Able to connect & access schools server for homework.

Skype for their friends.

Media playback.

Minimal requests for tech support from dad (see below) initially - None since January.

No pratting about with updates for AV, M$, firewalls or complaints about speed\lockups.

Administrator password is set up at initial setup & IIRC easily changed with sudo.

I do wonder how many Linux machines were reformatted with ahem illegal copies of XP.