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Category: Life: Contracting

Farnham hotel prices compared

August 5, 2014
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Please bear in mind this post was written for my own research purposes/notes and prices/availability and your needs will differ.

Checked on the 5th of August for a one night stay 12-13th August for a double room for a single guest. Walking distances given from the hotel to GU9 7NJ (Borelli Yard, Farnham) via Google Maps.

  • Mercure Bush Hotel, Farnham – £129 non-refundable. £139 cancellable up to 2pm on arrival day. Board only. Free parking. Free wifi. < 0.1 miles. [I have stayed here, centrally located, quite a bit of free parking available for guests, but can be a bit of a maze]
  • 1 Park Row, Farnham – £88. Free continental breakfast. Unclear cancellation policy. Free wifi. No parking. 0.2 miles. [I have stayed here, it’s a nice little centrally located B&B, but only has 5 rooms and no parking – nearby parking is £10+ per day]
  • Bishops Table, Farnham – £120 cancellable up to 4pm on day before. 2% credit card fee. Board only. Free wifi. 0.2 miles
  • Hotel DeVie – £95. 48 hour cancellation policy. Free snack bar/cereals/toast (possibly free English breakfast: unclear). Free parking. Free wifi. 0.6 miles
  • Princess Royal – £96 non-refundable. £107 cancellable up to day before. Board only. Free wifi. 1.6 miles
  • Farnham House Hotel – £70 cancellable up to 4pm on the day before. Board only. Free wifi. 2.1 miles
  • Premier Inn, Aldershot – £87 pre-pay, £91 cancellable up to 1pm on arrival day. £2 credit card fee. Board only. Wifi: £3 for 24 hours. 3 miles.
  • Hogs Head, Farnham – £69 non-cancellable. £79 cancellable up to 12 noon day before. Free parking. Board only. Free wifi. 2.5% credit card fee. 3.8 miles
  • Holiday Inn, Farnborough – £141 non-refundable, 7 days in advance. £155 cancellable up to 4pm on arrival day. Board only. Wifi £16. 4.9 miles.

Bye Bye Mangahigh – hello Bairwell!

November 28, 2011
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After just over 3 years working at Blue Duck Education Ltd as the Lead Developer/Systems Architect with Toby Rowland and other very talented people (too numerous to name here) building the Mangahigh Maths Games educational resource which we built from a brand new site to being one of the fastest growing educational games sites – I’m now leaving for pastures new.

So where am I going?

Well, my fiancée and I will be starting, on the 3rd of January, a new company called Bairwell Web Development to combine our two talents. Bairwell will be offering WordPress, Perch and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5 : also some Varnish, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Perl and Systems administration) development consultancy services – so if you want a well designed (Katy), scalable and responsive (me) website: then please get in touch with us via our web development site (Katy is still working on it at this time of writing), Twitter or Facebook.

Fingers crossed!

Contracting: Looking for work: Unusual job sources

September 9, 2008
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I’m aware that a number of people reading this blog at the moment are looking for work – well, here’s a few resources you can try that you may not have considered:

(yes, Workcircle should be paying me a small commission if you find a job through their system).

Are there any unusual resources for IT jobs that you know about which you’d like to share?

FreeAgentCentral – Brilliant customer support

September 7, 2008
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In my previous post, I mentioned that I was considering switching to the FreeAgentCentral system to handle invoice creation, book keeping and general “keeping things in one place” sort of stuff – mainly because Free Agent Central offers a much more UK orientated system than FreshBooks.

However, I hit a snag. The agency I’m currently working through )Ashdown Group) requires signed printed timesheets from the client – and I’d like to be able to keep these in the same place as the invoice. Ideally, I’d like to have the scanned in timesheets attached to the invoice when it’s sent out to Ashdown. Freshbooks has a “documents” facility where you can classify files to a client/customer: but you can’t attach them to invoices. Free Agent has the facility to attach files to Expenses: but you can’t upload files for any other purpose.

I therefore asked them via their quite good public help system if they had any plans to implement this sort of facility – and the response I got from them was outstanding – not only did they say it was a good idea, but when they said they couldn’t get it implemented before my free trial ran out they would extend my trial free of charge until it’s implemented!

You can’t say much better than that: quick, accurate and customer orientated support which goes beyond boundaries (ok, Ed, who responded, does appear to be the “main guy” behind FAC so he’s got authority to make changes such as offering people FOC extensions) – and I’ll certainly be switching to Free Agent for my online book keeping and accounting and will be recommending them to my other half for her web design services and a PR company in Leicester who ask for suggestions yesterday.

Thanks again Ed!