Yesterday I got invited around a very good friend of mines – Rick Marden. It was excellent we had fajitas and they were good. Also had to have a photo with the hat !!.
It was such a great send off for my emigration to the USA. It ended up with him giving me a bottle of Pol Roger which was Winston Churchill’s favourite champagne and a special edition scalextric mini cooper from the Italian Job. So kind, thank you.
It was just great and I will miss him and his wife Judy a lot.
ok I updated my wordpress blog to use a plugin from watchcount.com, so that I can list my ebay items on my blog. I will be selling a lot of stuff soon due to my impending emigration to the USA yahooooooo !!!!
There was a small FEATURE in the plugin that didnt allow it to work when php is hosted on IIS but have worked with the author and have now solved that which is great. Actually great support from them and it works a treat.
So I now have ebay items on the sidebar and you can post directly into the text like this… Check out the tattoo flash from my impending brother in law !!! yahoooo. OK OK I am getting a bit wild for a Monday morning I know any way check this out.
[EBAY 110487838245]
Not sure on the ebay header bit but I guess thats ebay doing that so probably nothing we can do about it.
As I have some time on my hands these days I finally decided to open a Twitter account. Some of my friends do it although not a lot as most of their activity seems to be on Facebook.
Opening the account was fairly easy. And twitter is self explanatory really. I guess the real reason for getting on Twitter is another way of publishing my useless information that I release from time to time via my WordPress blog. So I downloaded the plugin twittertools and set up the Twitter login details which worked a treat – when I now published a post on my blog it pushed it to my Twitter account paulfarr0w. The problem was that it had the big long url in it so hunted about and realised that actually within twittertools it had 3 other plugins, one being the interface to bit.ly which gives you tiny url’s.
Signed up for an account with bit.ly and posted again and bobs your uncle now I have posts going through twitter as well all from one source my blog.
Oh one last thing the hash’s in the titles tell Twitter to group the posts by those keywords which is pretty nifty.
Well first blog of the new year and its snowing once again.
My road outside the window has been white for nearly the whole time over Christmas. It just hadn’t cleared. This morning I woke up to find heaps and heaps of snow. The news is saying its the longest cold spell for 30 years. One thing is the UK grounds to a halt when its snowing.
Looks rather beautiful though – don’t you think?
First snow of the Winter hits us here in Guildford, Surrey. Its not as bad as last year but looks like a substantial amount of snow none the less.
Well things finally came to an end for myself on the BPOSS (BP Open Shipping System) team. So the team decided that we would combine the Christmas team lunch with my leaving dooooo.
John Sparke thought we should go to a Spanish restaurant that he knew…
El Faro
3 Turberry Quay
Pepper Street
London E14 9RD
It is right next to Crossharbour station on the Isle of Dogs.
The staff were welcoming and Spanish which is great as most of the waiting staff these days in Spanish restaurants are english.
I would say the menu was small but precise with some really good stuff on it.
I had the Spanish omelette to start with, followed by a perfectly cooked blue rump steak. The wine menu was excellent and I and a colleague had a red rioja which was just fantastic.
For dessert I had the caramelized bananas served with Madagascar vanilla ice cream.
My colleagues meals were also excellent.
The bill was 433 pounds which worked out at 86 pounds a head so it wasn’t the cheapest lunch although I think the three bottles of champagne and the brandy’s after the meal somewhat pushed the price up.
Would I go back – YES I would.
Well the final finance payment date was rapidly coming up on my white Mini Cooper S and needed to decide what I was going to do.
Didnt really want to refinance the car as there are a few things going on in my life right now which dictates that I dont want to take on any more debt.
Selling the car privately is a hassle and always will be.
So the only option was to hand it back to BMW, was going to do that when a friend of mine recommended Stoughton Car Sales in Guildford and Godalming.
Rang them and talked to a chap called Paul, he was immediately interested and in the end reached a price that was good for the both of us and did the deed.
So its finally gone and I am now car less. Its back to two wheels for me for the moment. For the details of Stoughton Car Sales (Surrey) please click the image below….
Well saw that the cafe in Bramley had re-opened after the last owners had left, so thought being a lover of cafe’s I would go and try it today.
It is situated on the high street in Bramley. Initial impressions: lovely smell of hot food and it was busy. I opted for the Bramley special which was a sausage, 2 pieces of bacon, fried egg, fried slice, 2 pieces of black pudding, baked beans, hash brown, bread and butter. I also ordered a mug of hot tea and the whole lot came to £6.20.
The delivery of the food and drink was a little different to most other cafe’s I have been in around this area because the others tend to give you your drinks as you pay. Here you pay, sit down and the tea is brought out to you. I guess this approach is a little posher but personally I like to get my drink there and then as you can drink and read your paper if you have one. It took a little while for the tea to arrive but was quickly followed by my food.
Initial reaction – it looked good, food was hot and fresh.
You can always tell something about a cafe by the type of sausage they have on offer and this sausage was a very meaty one, it was delicious. Minor detail here but could have done with a bit more bread and it would have been nice if it was on a plate because there was just too much stuff for the size of the plates they were offering.
Value for money – I would say it was a little more expensive than I am used to but it was nice to go to a cafe out in the sticks. It was nice so I am happy to pay a little extra.
Would I go back – Yes I would go back, probably not as often as my favourite cafe in Leatherhead but I would go back.
Since upgrading to firefox 3.5, I couldnt login any more to my wordpress (currently 2.7) blog. It was wierd as I couldnt login using firefox 3.5 on my apple running OS-X 10.5 and I couldnt login using firefox 3.5 on Vista. But I could login on my clients machine running firefox 3.5 on Windows XP.
What seemed to be the problem was that in my userid / password cache I had two id’s for the site one with a capatalised first letter and one all lowercase, ie. Admin and admin.
Now prior to firefox 3.5 this wasn’t a problem as it picked the correctly saved one. Now since firefox 3.5 it looks like it always wants to pick the capitalised one and there seems to be no way to pick the non capitalised id’s however much you try to get it to do it.
Well all I needed to do was remove the duplicate unused id’s and it then worked. You can do this from preferences -> security -> stored passwords, look for the ids you want to remove, highlight them and hit remove.
Once the duplicate id’s were tidied I could now login using firefox 3.5. Guess this is a feature of firefox 3.5.
Well recently we were told that our team BPOSS is being outsourced to India. Its been a long journey with some of our team working on BPOSS for 6 years or more. Myself personally I have worked on the team at Sunbury for 4 years now.
Its sad because its our system, we have put in a lot of blood and sweat to get it to where it is now. What is strange is that BP just seem to be biting the bullet and outsourcing everything and everyone. All our knowledge of the shipping system is just about to walk out the door.
The current team
So come the end of September there will be a ready made team available if any one has anything for us to do !!!! Its a superb team, having worked together for half a decade, we gel really well. Not to mention the wealth of shipping knowledge between us.
Our skills are Shipping, Oil, .NET, C#, LLBLGen & SQL Server.
Any way better shut up and get the teas in.
