Blue Chi’s

Sugababes are probably the best British musical talent, I can’t praise them enough. Their new album is extremely well produced, I quote the label describtion, “with some of the best producers and writers in the business; Dallas Austin (TLC, Madonna, Pink), Guy Sigsworth (Madonna, Britney Spears), and Cathy Dennis (Kylie). Mutya, Keisha and Heidi have also continued their long-standing working relationship with Brian Higgins, Cameron McVeigh (All Saints) and Johnny Rockstar (Robbie Williams)”. I am not going to take about the tracks that I like, because almost the whole thing does, the only two tracks that I still can’t really feel are “Red Dress” and “Obsession”. Well, maybe I should disclose my favourite tracks anyway, they are “Bruised“, “Joy Division“, and “Gotta Be You“. I have to complain about the song the “Spiral” that leaked so long ago, I can’t believe they did not include that song, I never got sick of it. The Babes are already doing well with this album and their first single “Push The Button” for both of these have debuted at number 1 at a number of charts.

1. Push The Button
2. Gotta Be You
3. Follow Me Home
4. Joy Division
5. Red Dress
6. Ugly
7. It Ain’t Easy
8. Bruised
9. Obsession
10. Ace Reject
11. Better
12. 2 Hearts

I had to force myself to blog this, Ramadhan is really messing up my schedule, only week it left, I will survive.

My Company Law tutorial group is really cool, it is very international, there are two British girls, one Indian Malaysian guy, one Chinese Malaysian girl, one Polish guy, one French guy, an Indian girl, and me!

The first tutorial was generally about the difference between incorporation and other forms of carrying business.

1. Sole Trader: This is the default status of an individual carrying on a business. The advantages of this form of trading are that there are no formalities to establish the business and that there is no disclosure required. On the other hand, there is no legal separate personality and there is no limited liability.. Obviously.
2. Partnership: There are a couple of other forms of partnerships, however, the regular partnership requires no formalities, it is much more flexible that incorporation as you can contractually do it in any way you wish, there is no disclosure and no regulation, it has tax advantages over incorporation, and because each partner is equally liable this presumes that it should make them work more efficiently. On the other hand, there is no limited liability, no separate legal personality, it is unstable by default as its existence depends on the existence of each of the members (but that however could be overcome contractually), every member acts as an agent for all the other partners, and is hard to gain money from outside as each contributor would usually become a partner.
3. Limited Partnership: This form of partnership features ‘sleeping’ partners that have limited liability for the price that they are not involved with the management, those are called “Sleeping Partner”, yet still, all other partners will have unlimited liability. Everything else is identical to normal partnership.
4. Limited Liability Partnership: This is a new invention in the UK, it features limited liability and is not regulated as strictly as incorporations. The advantages of LLPs is that they are taxed as partnerships and not companies, on the other hand it requires some effort to create in comparison to normal partnerships and there distinction between members and directors does not exist by default.
5. Incorporation: Incorporation grants a separate legal personality to the business. Optionally the company could take Limited liability, either by shares or guarantee, if limited by shares, contributing members would only be liable to the nominal price of their shares, which they usually pay upfront, companies limited by guarantee decide upon an amount to be paid in case the company went into liquidation. Limiting liability by guarantee is usually used for charities and not commercial organisations, however, it is possible to have a company unlimited. In addition to this a company could be public or private, a public company is one that offers her shares for sale and exchange in a public share exchange market, it is regulated more strictly than private companies, a company that does not have its shares listed in a public market. The cons of choosing to run a business as a company is that you have to disclose details of your address, name, etc, and that it requires certain formalities to be carried out, like drafting a constitution, etc. In reality, the UK has some of the easiest and cheapest procedures in the world to create a company, there is no requirement for a minimum amount of capital to start a private limited company, and the fees to start a company could be as low as £15 when you do it online, which is the procedure that takes the longest for establishing a company, this period is… 5 days. You can make a company in the UK in one day only, but you’ll have to pay £30 and will have to go to the Company House.

*This was a messy entry, I might rewrite it later, but I just wanted to have something online.

Seven things I plan to do:
1- Visit Japan, don’t know when, don’t know how, but I’ll have to do it once in my life.
2- Colour my hair blue before I finish my degree. (I HAVE TO)
3- Hmmm… maybe start going to the gym for the first time in my life, all the guys over here plan to go, so I might just go as well.
4- Finish some PS2 games that I started.
5- Refurbish my flash website?
6- Do something good for the National Day Celebration in Cardiff this year.
7- and finish reading the Quran before the end of the month.

Seven things that I can do:
1- Switch my Arabic accent like that.
2- I can cook makboos.
3- I can spend 5 hours daily playing videogames if I wished it.
4- I think that I can sing, but I’ve never done it in public.
5- I can eat like crazy without gaining weight.
6- I can be so friendly and so unsocial at the same time.
7- I can do math and I can program as well.

Seven things that I can’t do:
1- I can’t gain weight.
2- I can’t crack my fingers
3- I can’t live without my phone.
4- I can’t say “No”.
5- I can’t ask for help so easily.
6- I can’t speak Balushi. (Isn’t it supposed to be don’t)
7- I CAN’T MAKE PHONE CALLS BECAUSE OF THE LIMIT THE STUPID VODAFONE PUT ON MY CONTRACT.

Seven things I say most often:
1- Musta7eel / No way
2- Akbar Irony fil’Salfa
3- Elmuhim / Anyway
4- Awain / My ass
5- Cool?
6- Mambo
7- There is no signal in this place! (LOL)

I couldn’t resist it, the extreme me had to surrender to my lust for the sin of sound. It was not Ashlee’s album that did it, but the curiosity to hear it surely contributed greatly to the conclusion.

That aside, Ashlee’s second album was okay, it is probably ‘Nothing New’… but isn’t this exactly what we were looking for? While the general conception may suggest “looking” at it in the context, but the provision of a music album is probably a service that we pay for, why should I bitch about how much of a pathetic person the chef is when his food is irresistible. Ashlee has a great vocal talent and I find her music very listenable. However, it is hard for me not to say that I liked the first album way much more than this one. The track “Boyfriend” didn’t really click the first time I heard it, but it surely did the second time, I can’t get enough of it. “Dancing Alone” is a nice simple love song more on the slow side. “L.O.V.E” is an OK track even though I did find it quite irritating the first time I heard it. “Say Goodbye” is a weird song, it reminds me so badly of “Zelda II” on the NES, that’s probably the synthetic tunes at the start of the track.. it is another OK song. I was really impressed by Boyfriend, I am not going to say that this album sucks, I hope that it grows on me the same way “Autobiography” did. I have not heard the track “Kicking and Screaming”, but I did hear the bonus track from the Japanese release I think, the track is called “Nasty Girls”.

1. Boyfriend
2. In Another Life
3. Beautifully Broken
4. LOVE
5. Coming Back For More
6. Dancing Alone
7. Burning Up
8. Catch Me When I Fall
9. I Am Me
10. Eyes Wide Open
11. Say Goodbye
12. Kicking And Screaming
13. Fall In Love With Me

I can’t believe this, I got my tutorial schedule today, AND IT IS CRAZY. I got all my tutorials on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and for those that have been following my blog, you should know that I only have lectures on these days, this means that for the rest of this whole year, I am going to have Wednesdays and Fridays off! I don’t think that I can ever dream of having a better final year, no final year project, three-day weekend.. actually, I only have three days of school out of the seven days of the week. This is too good to be true… BUT IT IS! LOL

Oh my God, we had our first committee meeting the other day, these guys are really so hardcore, to these people, the whole thing is like a challenge against their ultimate loser enemy who has never done a single right thing ever in Cardiff, i.e. the previous committee, or that’s what they think. They’re giving me so much headache already, I hope that this is just because this is still the start of the term. I had to write the following message to the society members.. Cardiff Omani Society is serious.

Dear Members of the Omani Society,

The executive committee of the society held its first meeting during this week and have decided upon the following:

As done in the previous years, membership fees will be collected from each member of the Omani Society to fund the coming events of the society. The membership fees this year will be £20 paid once to cover all the main events of the society such as the Eid Assembly and the National Day Celebration.

Each member will be required to fill in a record form with details of his name, university, address, mobile number, and email. The £20 fee will be collected from members when they submit their form. The lower part of the form will be kept by the member as a proof of registration to be exchanged later by the Omani Society Membership Card (OSM Card).

Each registered member will later be given a membership card as a proof of registering with the Society, OSM card holders will have privileges over non-OSM card holders during activities that are not covered by the £20 fees such as trips and sports activities that require paying on the spot, such as the Friday football activity.

Members can register starting from today, Friday the 14th of September, you can either download the attached copy of the form and take it to one of the appointed members, or you can fill in a copy of the form during the football activity in Talybont this evening as copies will be available there as well. The application form will only be accepted if you pay your £20 along with it.

The OSM cards will be distributed to the members once the registration process is completed by the majority of the members.

Regards,

The Omani Society

We went for the first Japanese society gathering today, I cannot see that it was the best event that I’ve been to in my life, I’ve never joined such a society where I’m like the ‘wrong’ person in the group. All the Japanese people sat together, and all the White people sat together, it was actually our mistake, I mean, we could’ve just got ourselves in some group and chatted like everyone else, but it was hard, anyway, the president and the secretary finally came over and chatted with us for a while, it was very nice of them, they were British girls that were studying Japanese and French, the funny thing about the Japanese Society is that non-Japanese people run it. There are going to show a movie in a couple of weeks time, I’ll be going for the event for sure, hopefully we’ll be a little bit more social next time!

I just came from my first official Taxation Law lecture, the course will focus mainly on income tax rather than studying a little bit about all the various forms of taxes. The cool thing about this course is that the lecturer gave us some bad ass lecture notes that basically have the whole lecture written down for us, we don’t actually have to go to this lecture because we have all the notes, this sounds very tempting as I have a lecture on Thursday from 5 to 6.

This lecture was a basic introduction to how income tax started, it was actually during the war against France in 1978 when it was introduced to provide funds for this war. The first major Act was made in 1803 and it is said that this Act is important because it introduced two features of income tax, one of which is still present, and the other was only recently replaced. These two features are (1) that income tax is taken at the source (it says in the notes that the payer of income deducts tax before handing it over to the payee, who is the person liable to the tax… I don’t really get it, but anyway), (2) the use of the schedular system, which categorised income in accordance to type and then imposed different tax rates in accordance to the type of income in question.

The schedular system is said to have been introduced to protect the privacy of the tax payers because each income type is collected by a different official, making not one official able to know the exact total income of a tax payer. However, the schedular system was replaced in the year 1996/97.

The government started from the late 90s a project called the Tax Law Rewrite project, which is supposed to rewrite all the income tax in clearer English. This resulted until now in the production of two new pieces of legislation; the ITEPA 2003 and ITTOIA 2005, the second which abolished the schedular system.

It is worth mentioning that he ITTOIA 2005 only applies to income tax (ie, income tax of the individual trader) and not for corporation tax which still runs under the old ICTA 1988 that has the schedules and cases.

More points:

• Tax law was abolished after the war (1816) and got reintroduced once again in 1842.
• Income tax was a flat rate until 1973, there used to be some additional taxes that depended on the amount of income, later on these merged with income tax. (I think).
• There are also some little stuff about tax on savings income and dividends, but I was too tired to listen by then. I have it in the notes though.

I’m finding it very hard to study while I’m starving… Maybe it’s just the beginning of the month and that I’ll hopefully get used to it later, who knows. I have started my lectures this week and the tutorials should follow next week, I think. I went the library today and yesterday, I thought that I’ll read some Company Law cause it is the one that I like the most, I did manage to read a little bit.

In the very first lecture, the teacher mentioned that the current Company Law legislation in the UK was mainly made to accommodate large public companies that have shares in the stock market and therefore have a clearly distinct executive board that does not necessarily own the company. The reality is that more than 99% of the companies in the UK do not fall under that classic definition of a full fledged incorporation, and that a great number of these corporations are one-man companies who’s owner is the employee of the company, the shareholder of the company, and the executive as well. The legal formality requirements under the Companies Act do not take any notice of the reality of the ultimate majority of companies in this country making it quite cumbersome and pointless for the executive board to, for example, hold the compulsory annual meeting with the shareholders of the company, when he is the only person in both categories, that is not to mention that he is required to mail notifications to himself of these meetings as required by the Act, this is just a single aspect of the act that does not seem to take note of the reality of the majority of companies, there are more.

However, the law might be specified for those large companies that make up less than 1%, but the reality is that the influence of this small percentage of companies on the market and our daily lives is far more dominant than of all other companies. Those large companies, though small in number, do collectively have a larger capital than of those other companies. This generates some sort of conflict in who the law should serve more, the majority of companies that make up 99% of the population of companies in the UK, or the small fraction that have the greatest influence on the market. A suggestion was made in the past in the Parliament that there should a separate law for smaller companies from the other law intended to larger companies, the suggestion didn’t go much further because of a weak excuse saying that having two sets of laws for small and big companies will make small companies hesitate to become big.

It’s funny cause the thing that I wrote above is actually what I heard in class and didn’t write, anyway, the teacher said that taking note of the reality of the companies act and the companies population should make a good point when writing an answer, so there you go, Company Law!

I started classes yesterday, I had a lot to do so I didn’t have time to blog it, but before I start let me first say this, RAMADHAN SUCKS, I started fasting today, it’s 2pm and I’m already starving. This year I’ve been eating on my own a lot, I can do it, but I hate it. I am not looking forward to iftaar, I am not sure of whether I am going to cook something, go eat outside with other people, or go the mosque.

I’m a little bit stressed and uncomfortable currently because I am not sure of how I should organise my daily schedule, I DON’T want to live WITHOUT a routine, it doesn’t seem that I’m having any social problems on the surface, but I’m really not sure of how I should allocate my time around all the different groups of people around me. I think that I would prefer being an anti-social person, but at this moment I’m talking to too many people that I don’t really seem to fully understand.

The silly Omani people did not fast today but I did. I went to the mosque last night, and the people there said that they’re gonna fast, we prayed tarawee7, and now I’m fasting today. The people there were from all the different nations, Khaleeji, Shami, African, White, everyone. I really don’t understand why the Omani people would simply decide to not follow the people of the mosque and decide to have their ‘OWN’ Ramadhan. I am lucky to be quite detached from the Omani society.

I might go buy my something to cook for iftaar, I don’t even have dates.

Anyway, on my way out, I would like to link to the Ramadhan Reading Blog, special thanks to the guys that are running this blog.