Ruler of Planet Houston

She looks like the girl from Risky Business in the middle one.

I went to luxor and going outside of the hotel was a major pain in the arse. You get hounded like mad from taxi horse blokes and shop owners. The horse bloke followed us for over a mile constantly badgering us for a ride and we told him we might look him up when we need to go back. 4 hours later after our meal and drinks we walked outside and he was there waiting for us shouting abuse cos we wanted to walk. That said, in the hotel and hotel garden we were treated like royalty and it was worth it just for the hotel lark. Went over to the other side of the river where it's like going back in time - kids with no shoes pulling apple carts and a baby donkey lugging other fruit and veg along side them, houses with no roofs or electricity etc.. They gave us no bother at all and it was all very eye-opening. Wish I had a decent camera back then! Doh! I wouldn't go back cos they catch Brits and sell them over the border to Iraqis for beheading/hostage stuff. If anyone does go, it's well worth making up your own foreign language - they don't bother you when you can't understand them. Don't try a real language cos they seem to speak them all!

Aye... that misty one is top class!

That's sort of what I meant which is why an accountant would be worth the money. For example, if you spend £2000 and only made a taxable profit of £1000 over your allowance, an accountant would deduct the £1000 to give you a tax bill of £0 and carry the other £1000 over for future years. But next year you would only be able to claim 20% of that £1000 as an offset against your profit and it would take 5 years to totally use up that outgoing. That's just where it starts getting complicated and where you might think £150 ( it might be less than that even) is too much to spend on an accountant, you may very well lose more than that by doing a bad job of your accounts yourself. A typical mistake would have been to have declared the full £2000 outgoing and still got a bill of £0, but couldn't use that extra £1000 for following years. As I said, if I did my own accounts for the last 13 years I would have probably lost tens of £thousands by doing it wrong.

I think that you can write off 100% if you need to but if you carry any cost over to the next year you can only deduct 20% per year every year until it's all gone.

Yes. Anything you spend on your business such as cameras, batteries, lenses etc... will be deducted from your profit and you are only taxed on the remainder. However, there are loads of other deductions that can (and should) be made such as use of home as office, phone, internet, mileage allowance etc.. You'd be best off getting an accountant to sort it out for you as they know all sorts of ways to get the best out of your situation each year - something on the side like that shouldn't really cost you more than £150 from a decent accountant I would think. When I was employed and earning on the side at the same time, I always ended up with a rebate which was a nice surprise. If I had did my own accounts I would have probably paid tax instead.

Hardware background? I've never worked for a motherboard manufacturer or anything if that's what you mean. Just the same as most people really...built my own computers (and others!) since the pentium 100 days, did little repair jobs, data recovery etc... lived as a geek, read a lot, experiment and all that balls. Nowt credible. And like most people that run web design companies I have all aspects of digital design experience too. Dabbled with programmingsince I was a nipper with a spectrum and eventually realised if I put the graphics and programming together, I could get paid for it. 3D design went out the window when I realised I couldn't afford the hardware to keep up with the pros (I think shrek or monsters inc release made me realise my pc just wasn't up to the job) Really fancy doing standalone desktop programs which is why I was thinking about C# and the fact it is almost identical to php (looking at it) but I am open to suggestions for owt better. Whatever is best for writing business applications I suppose. I assumed you were web since you mentioned the aa/aaa compliance but then why would you be working in c#? Unless you work for google or something.

That's just it. It isn't the same spec as yours. Also, you can buy good and bad hardware with the same 'numbers'. At the time I got it (2 years ago) you would have been lucky to get 16gb ram for under £1500 (unless you buy the shittest of ram you can possibly find - like the "I can match your spec cheaper" bunch). I bought it with a lot of extras totalling over £7000 but for the tower I would say it was around £3500, 2x top spec graphics cards, extended support, some chosen software preinstalled 2x2tb drives, ram in 4 sticks to allow me to expand to 32gb later, magic mouse which was extra at the time etc... but as I said, all top spec hardware...Of course you probably could match the price buying the hardware...but it would be shitty hardware with a shit OS. Haven't fully decided on c# yet. It just looks easy but I need to wait until work slows up a bit before I go at it. you can't test mac stuff on a pc since you can't install os x on one (well you can if you build a hackintosh but that is the biggest fuck on imaginable) and you can test aa/aaa on anything anyway. I test in around 20-30 different browsers including all iphones and ipads using the sdk which isn't available for pc and never will be. After working on pc for years then switching to mac, my productivity increased by about 40%. Coda is definitely the best IDE ever made and is a pleasure to use and speeds up productivity. That along with the lack of crashes (never once has it even froze for 2 seconds since I got it and I am on it 12-14 hours per day every day) or "Windows is installing updates 2% done...please wait half an hour before you can crack on with your job which you will have to start again as windows is going to reboot and delete files and fuck up your email clients and all sorts" bollocks! But for games....Straight over to Windows (on my mac hardware of course ) But this is starting to sound too much like a mac vs pc debate which I want nowt more to do with. I have lived with both (pc for 20 years and mac for 2) and still use both working on 3-4 machines all at once and still feel like all the pc's are a crock every day of my life! <endRant />

??? I installed windows in the time it took to press the power button and wait for windows to install. If I was to do it as a bootcamp partition, it would just take an extra couple of minutes for bootcamp to create the named partition. Again...there are a lot of complete numpties around that might be on for weeks trying to do this sort of stuff on all operating systems, but most people just do it...which is why you never hear about them cos they don't have to post all over tinterwebs asking for help. I do PHP, MySQL, Jquery etc... Moving to C# and Cocao - web based stuff is much better on a mac since you can fully test in mac browsers AND pc ones on the same machine. Also, you need a mac to develop apple apps and use their sdk (or at least you did when I last checked around a year ago). I use an 8-core mac pro, 16gb ram (ram isn't as expensive if you buy it from crucial instead of with the mac). I also do design so the ram and processor power comes in rather handy

Ok. I'm a programmer for a living - I'm not the type that just fucks things up by messing with things I shouldn't and I still stand by what I said. Windows pc's just fuck up on their own. There are a lot of ill informed people that believe they can match a mac for a fraction of the price by sourcing parts of the same spec but they completely miss the point i.e. the 100% compatibility of all of the parts that go together coupled with an OS that is built on those parts which avoids sooooo many problems with pc's and they always forget the fact that they have to put the pc together themselves and usually the parts are the same spec on paper but not in reality - you can get cheap versions of all sorts but you pay the price with the performance. Basically, most of the arguments are purely fanboy based as if admitting there is a better machine in the shops than the one you own is something to be ashamed of! I've been on both ends of the mac vs pc debates (finally holding up my hands and realising I was wrong to support the pc) and they bore me to death - especially when 99% of the pipe-uppers have only ever tried one or the other long enough to make an informed decision. Hopefully there ain't gonna be another one ruining this forum. That said...I run windaz on my mac on another drive and as a VM and it runs better than it ever did on any pc I had or have. Still crashes for no reason though.

Aye..I'd never go back to a pc. I have to work with both but the less time I spend on the pc the better! Before I started on macs I was very anti-mac like most pc users...but it's just ignorance and assumptions that cause that attitude. After using both there really is no comparison. Still have to revert to PC for games but only cos there are hardly any available on mac.

I must admit I tried the roll-back once and it came out at a 90 degree angle to what I expected with extreme force! Never again! And to avoid watering can moments you just have to give it a quick stretch like you would a balloon before attempting to blow it up. And sitting down for a piss?!? howay man!!!

Aye. It's the hair! If he just had a proper old man whispy grey hairdo he would look like a normal skinny old git.

Turnips and begging here too. Then when I was a bit too big for begging, I resorted to listening to Alan 'the walnut' Robson and his halloween capers

Too big?

What's it for?

They know exactly what they are doing!

I was working full-time as a guitarist. A bit of teaching on the side. Single and slightly desperate.

There are other important factors to be thrown into this debate, such as whether or not the under-scrotal plebs are kept trim. If they are 4 inches long, it doesn't matter how you wipe...you'll still have shitty plebs.

Or this for the standers:

I did notice that a cheap plastic toilet seat can de-hinge with the shift in weight if one of the rubber feet is missing. Just get a good solid seat from ikea for £15

So as you stand up, a trickle of liquidated shit dribbles down your scrote and tails off on the shaft unnoticed?