The Mini Cooper S Has Been Sold

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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.

  1. Refinance the balloon payment.
  2. Sell the car.
  3. Hand it back to BMW.

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….

Stoughton Car Sales

The Bramley Cafe, Bramley, Surrey

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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.

Firefox 3.5 and WordPress – Cant Login

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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.

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

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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

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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.

Vista, Windows Media Center, Windows Media Player And Blu-Ray DVD's

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My last upgrade of my media center included a blu-ray media player, it was  a cheap LG player although wasn’t as cheap as they are today.  This was bought a few years back when they first came out but didn’t install it for some time until now.

Well I thought Vista was bound to support blu-ray and didnt think anything of it until I started to buy loads of new dvd’s and found windows media center and windows media player couldnt play them.  So what are the options, well currently they are

  • Cyberlink PowerDVD (current version 9)
  • Roxio CinePlayer DVD Decoder
  • Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre

Well my experience is this, Roxio forget it wouldnt even register properly and looking on the NET couldnt find one person that had installed it successfully on Vista so got a refund straight away.  Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre was the same installed but didnt play at all.  Now the board I have in my media center has the INTEL Graphics G35 chip so could be because of that as its not really that good enough to play Blu-Ray discs.

So I know a lot of people dont like it but the PowerDVD was the only thing that played the blu-ray movies for me on Vista with a motherboard that uses the Intel G35 chip.

And that concludes my findings now to buy a micro ATX motherboard that uses the NVIDIA 9400 chipset.

IPhoto9 – Places Map Not Showing

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All of a sudden the places map isnt showing just a grey screen.  Everything I tried just didnt get it to show any more.  Eventually I found a solution that worked.  I went to preferences -> advanced and set the dont look up places automatically to never.  Quit Iphoto and restarted it.  I then set it back to automatic and the places map shows straight away.  Wierd but it now works.

Nikon D5000 Gets An Outing To Boxhill

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DSC_0035

Originally uploaded by paulfarrow

Well got the GP1 gps unit for the Nikon and decided to take it out to boxhill where all the bikers meet. It was only Saturday so not that many about.

The GP1 unit is good but took a little while to get used to it. I also thought I would try Flickr which this picture has been uploaded from. So photo was taken with the Nikon D5000 and the GP1 unit so it has the geotagging info in it. Then I uploaded to IPhoto9 and then uploaded using that into Flickr. I then composed a blog entry with flickr so will be interesting to see how this comes out here on the blog.

13 Inch MacBook Pro – Time Is Wrong

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Just got the new Macbook Pro and after transferring from my old Macbook it seemed it couldnt actually set the time correctly was always an hour behind.  The problem was actually the timezone as it just said GMT in the closest city.  After a little bit of tickering I realised that that the localtime folder should be a symbolic link to /usr/share/timezone/<timezone> and instead a physical folder had been copied over during the transfer and was sitting in  /etc.

The way to fix this is to open your finder window and click on go->go to folder and type in /etc then then delete the folder.  Then you can set the time zone correctly.

Alex And The Giant Pandas

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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 !!!