The Bramley Cafe, Bramley, Surrey


The Bramley Cafe

Originally uploaded by paulfarrow

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.

Our Time On BPOSS With BP Has Finally Come To A Close.

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

  • Tim Bridges – Project Manager
  • John Sparke – Lead Business Analyst
  • John Derbyshire – Technical Analyst
  • Andy Russell – Testing Manager
  • Scott Waye – Technical Lead
  • Simon Hewitt – Developer
  • and of course me – TEA BOY extraordinaire

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.

Barclays Stockbrokers Have An Invalid Security Certificate

if you go to the barclaysstockbrokers.com url and try to login you get presented with an invalid security certificate error by firefox and ie 8.  The certificate is for www.stockbrokers.barclays.com not www.barclaysstockbrokers.com.

I have rang them and emailed them but no one seems that interested in getting fixed they dont see it as a problem.  Well in these days of phishing and spoofing I would say its a problem.  We will see how long they take to fix it, if at all.

UPDATE: 9 July 2009

Well eventually someone got back to me about it.  Looks like they have a problem with the login on the page as its hardcoded to stockbrokers.barclays.co.uk instead of the using the url that you actually come from.  I have been told by there technical bods that if you use the login at the top of the page it uses the correct url.  And it does work.  Come on Barclays sort it out so that all the logins use the correct URL.  I cant believe it took so long for you to actually come back to me with a sensible answer but to still see the site broken in this way is really unbelievable.  I expect quite a few people are having this problem as your eyes go to the login button within the site not the black bar at the top.

Looking at the stats on my page quite a few people are getting this error as the number of people coming to my site with the search words ‘barclays stockbrokers’ and ‘invalid certificate’ are quite high.

Alex And The Giant Pandas

Thought you would like that title, well my neighbour Alex Pool is off to China to be part of  Panda breeding programme for three weeks.  He is running a blog if you want to keep up with his exploits.

Lets hope he publishes some pictures of them as they are so cute.  Thats if China doesnt censor it all.

Any way I will be following his blog to see what he gets up to.   Link to his blog is in the blogroll section of the links on the right hand side of this blog. Actually any one looking at my blogroll would think I am a nutter (which I am) but what a mixture of titles !!!

Duchy Original Elderflower Refresher Not In Stock

Went to buy some Duchy Elderflower Refresher in my local Waitrose

and couldnt find a drop, now its my favourite summer drink.  Was told by an assistant that Duchy are changing their packaging and until that is finalised Waitrose were temporarily not stocking the product.

Weird, I have emailed HRH Prince Charles personally to find out what is happening !!!  Will keep you updated of any response from him.

Front USB Ports not working on my Shuttle running Vista x64 Ultimate

After taking the Cypress update my front usb ports stopped working.  How did I fix it well if you go to the device manager (right click the computer icon in file explorer, click properties then click device manager [left hand side]) under Universal Serial Bus Controllers (right at the bottom) there is a device shown now called HX2LP kit (3.03.0000.2) I believe this is what causes the problem so I just uninstalled mine and rebooted.

After the reboot I get a generic USB hub appear and the front ports on my shuttle SD37P2 are now working.

Also when I run windows update again I dont see that update any more.

Dollar Accounts and Barclays Bank

Just had a webchat with Barclays Bank, and it must be them embracing different ways to chat to customers that browse their website.  So thought I would ask about dollar accounts and why not after all it popped up and they asked me.

So here goes the conversation

Customer: ok can you give me current exchange rates on dollar accounts that you offer please
Customer: ??
Sarah A: I am sorry, Paul, we don’t have that information.
Customer: what ??? you dont have the information and your the bank !!!! never mind I will look around thanks for your help good afternoon
Sarah A: You’re welcome, Paul. Thank you for using Barclays Webchat Service.

Well again a corker from Barclays Bank – they are the bank and they cant even tell me what dollar rates they have !!!

Reminded me of the time I went into a branch and asked how much it would be to pay off an existing loan with them.  The girl behind the desk said well i’m not really sure its approximately ….  cant write a cheque for approximately …. eventually a supervisor came over and told me the exact amount.

Gosh they do make me laugh.

Got my Suzuki GSXR750 K7

Last weekend took delivery of my Suzuki GSXR750 K7 it is very nice. Bit frightened have to be honest of it at first but after 2 bends I was smiling very big wide smiles its excellent. Unfortunately it broke down 2 days after getting it, the regulator went on it but Portman Motorcycles are fixing it. But until that time I didn’t get above 3rd gear and was doing about just under a ton.

Suzuki GSX-R 750

Suzuki GSX-R 750

Getting Rsyncd, Vista and Backuppc to work

Recently upgraded to vista and for the life of me couldnt get the vista to work with rsyncd running from cygwin.  Would always stop with a code 12 error and not alot else.  I just run rsyncd or rsync with the daemon option as I dont belive the cwrsync works as a service yet on vista. 

Now in the backuppc config options for rsyncd and rsync there is a hard link option I just removed that and it seems to work not sure why vista cant deal with that option but if you remove it, everything works as it did before on windows 2000 / XP.