Passives / Transliteration

[ulvesang.livejournal.com]

1) I'm obviously quite familiar with the "active" passive in Russian, as in: "Улицу разрушили", or even: "Меня зовут ____", but in class we have now just touched upon some sort of periphrastic passive using быть as an auxilliary verb, or something like that if I'm not certain. Of course, we won't learn about this phenomenon until much later...

So, just so that I can understand it if I come across it, how does this work? Are there any semantic differences between the two forms?

2) In trying to transcribe the [h] sound into Cyrillic, is there any rhyme or reason between using г (Гамлет, гуманитарный) or х (хай-тек, Джамес Херриот [I think])?

Спасибо