[Wolves] Re: Wolves Linux Advocacy

[smid]

sparkes wrote:

>On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 15:28, smid wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Sorry for flying off topic from the list. Some might wonder why they 
>>should feel sympathetic towards such high
>>paid contractors. Well, a lot of them are sitting at home unemployed at 
>>the moment, looking to see which open
>>source project raises their interest....
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Don't worry Smid this is more on topic than most of the stuff we
>discuss.
>
>As an unemployed contractor ;-) I'll spill my thoughts on the tax
>situation.  
>
>IR35 takes away the advantage of self employment for contractors but
>doesn't give them the security of employees.  If someones contract means
>they need to pay tax under IR35 rules then they should automatically
>become entitled to more employment benefits.
>
>This is why I don't want to do any contracting this time around and am
>starting up on my own.
>
>  
>
>>    Smid
>>
>>    
>>
>
>sparkes
>
>PS Smid, introduce yourself.  All we know is you are pissed off about
>paying tax ;-)
>

:)

Ok, as is the will with the net, I wont tell you my real name, but you 
probably won't believe its my
real name anyway, so it'll all work out fine.

Comp Sci degree, 1989. Worked down in Reading for ICL on mainframes and 
Cobol till 1991, then
onto Solaris and C++. Solaris and C++ has been my skills since then, 
doing 5 years in Fujitsu in
Birmingham (which is why I have a house in Wolves, hated the look of Cov 
and Brum) in the telecoms
trade. Got a bit more of a world traveller and started contracting at 
this point, went off to work in Antwerp,
Belgium for Alcatel Space for a couple of years, did the GSM/3G for 
Motorola (Cork, Ireland) and Siemens
(Ulm, South Germany) for a year, then back to Alcatel Space in Belgium 
for 2.5 years until I decided the
overseas life was not for me and came back to the uk. All solaris except 
Linux near end.

Had some time off, after 6 months, started looking for work. Still 
haven't found any.

Ironically, since I was working overseas, IR35 didnt affect me. Except 
it did stop me coming back for a while.

Linux experience. I remember my first successful linux install, Redhat 
2, back in about 1996. I failed to get
either Debian or Slackware into any sort of graphical state, but Redhat 
gave me enough of a basic window
manager to run emacs. Always been a fan of the FSF stuff on solaris, 
emacs, perl expert, g++ etc. Got
Mandrake on my main pcs, though considering a couple of extra distros on 
spare disk, freebsd and debian on
the list. Later in last contract, ported a lot of solaris C/C++ onto 
Linux (Suse) and specifically using a realtime
patch to Suse, called RTAI. I think more linux users should have SCSI 
disks, but thats just me :)

I would set up business if I could think of what to do. I would maybe 
start an open source project if I could
think something useful I wanted to make. Currently learning Java, 
T-Sql/Sybase, XML, Linux device drivers
and Kernel, but doubt employers will think thats a skill I know.

The Linux User Group? Well, I know I use linux and develop on it. I'm 
not so sure I want to go the full hog
and develop an open source project, but I'm guessing not many of the LUG 
do too. I guess I'm bored with
sitting at home with no social contact except the missus in the evening 
and the cat which sleeps all day.

    Smid