Yet Another James Green Web Developer, Aquarist

Searching for wedding clothes for hire

I spent the majority of yesterday in Norwich city centre at three appointments looking for outfits to hire for our wedding.

Essentially I need groom (me), best man, my father, father of the bride, and two ushers to be kitted out. Without preconceptions about what I wanted and without my bride to be (deliberate) I was joined by my parents and sister, and her fiancée - who happens to double as my best man.

The three appointments were are John Field Formal Hire, Moss Bros, and Greenwoods.

John Field Formal Hire

We arrived almost thirty minutes early and waited outside as it was clear they were busy attending to another customer. The shop is situated in St. Benedicts which isn't the most pleasant area with a combination of musical shops pawnbrokers dominating the businesses.

Once inside we were met by the only staff member on duty - Mrs Liz Field. She was very friendly and extremely professional, getting to know the family and our circumstances firstly, then suggesting that we start with a basic traditional suit before experimenting.

While not everything was in stock for trying out, the majority of what we were thinking about certainly was and Mrs Field went out of her way to ensure we tried every combination, given that a simple change in tie colour was having such a dramatic effect. She was most accommodating and allowed plenty of pictures to be taken. We ended our visit after roughly one and a half hours time, with a quote of £495 for the six of us (groom goes free).

Moss Bros

There was no appointment necessary here, and upstairs we went to the hire shop where we were met by a courteous gentleman most willing to offer his help. We explained we wanted to try out a traditional suit. Unlike our visit to John Field, I was initially only handed a jacket, then after asking was given a front-only sample waistcoat, then trousers. Finally a tie was supplied.

Moss Bros were unable to supply very much for trying-on on the day itself due to stock constraints. A brochure was given to us to explain some of the different styles and colours although the package costs themselves did not very hugely (at least not on the ones we were interested in). The quote supplied was within a handful of pounds of John Field.

We left within thirty minutes which was reasonable given we knew what we wanted from the assistance received at John Field.

Greenwoods

Opposite the rear entrance of Debenhams sits Greenwoods, and downstairs in the basement rather pushed in is where their suits for hire can be found. The manager presented herself and immediately took a few measurements. Very shortly after we arrived another group turned out and was told that we would be attended to first, and that they should come back in fifteen minutes time.

Once again, I was given trousers, shirt, tie, waistcoat and jacket to try on. More selection to try on here that at Moss Bros although not more than at John Field. Still, the quote given here was considerably cheaper at under £400 with cufflinks supplied free.

Conclusions.

We have some additional questions for John Field that we remembered to ask of Moss Bros and Greenwoods such as insurance, how far in advance we were receive the clothes, procedures should we be unsatisfied and how soon must the garments be returned. However, the professionalism and time received was extremely impressive - John Field is preferred at this stage.

Moss Bros was very quick and almost manufactured by comparison. If Tesco's did formal suits it might look something like this. Don't get me wrong, the sales assistant was extremely helpful and it was clear that he expected nothing to go wrong. It was just a little too production-line like.

Greenwoods - a little on the small side and the quotation just felt too cheap. However, they aren't ruled out yet.

You know the web site broke when…

The pages repeatedly stall while loading, and eventually you're presented with:

error '800706be'/aa/_mem_bin/SetSecurityDataValidation.asp, line 190

Yep, that's The AA's financial services pages for Savings accounts. Good reliable service then.

Barclays Compensation – PPI

Barclays Compensation, originally uploaded by james_mk_green.

It began with a claim in October 2008 using a letter downloaded from Martin Lewis' Moneysavingexpert web site. Two days ago on 24 April 2010 we received the compensation cheque.

This is despite the cheque initially being sent to an old address even though Barclays have been corresponding with us at our current address. Oh, and Barclays at one point denying the account to which we referred actually existing - turns out at some point in the past they changed everyone's account numbers and we were not informed.

Great ormond street irony

Great ormond street irony, originally uploaded by james_mk_green.

Picked these up with our local fish shop (pet store variety - not fish & chips).

Can't say I'm overly impressed with Great Ormond Street Hospital giving warnings about children's teeth rotting while simultaneously selling high sugar sweets.

Hell of a day

It began at 0900 with an urgent request for action one of the company's servers, it finished at 1810 feeling utterly knackered and frustrated.

Luckily, the server bit went easily and was complete at 0915.

At around 1000 we received reports that the Internet was down and that our phone lines had gone the same way.

To cut a long story short, our ADSL connection was hit by a rather large scale BT outage. This triggered a DNS bug in Asterisk that prevented anything speaking SIP from, well, speaking.

We got the phone system back online around 1600 having performed ridiculous amounts of packet sniffing, restarts and configuration tweaks on the phone server. The ADSL was switched to our backup account when news came in that BT may not have lines reconnected until at least 2nd April. That's one big outage.

As of right now we're limited in what we can do - many of our operations are bound to our normal ISP for security reasons and moving everything to our backup connection is not trivial. Still, phones and web are back.

Ancisterus Fry in lucky escape shock

bristlenose-fry-3, originally uploaded by james_mk_green.

I came to perform a water change on my tropical aquarium yesterday evening. Nearly all the ornaments were removed including my adult male ancisterus favourite hideaway - a fake tree root (hollow).

After 2-3 hours of cleaning I put the tree root back and found 7-8 tiny fry left on the towel. On touching them, they were still moving, if rather dry.

They were each coerced from the towel threads where their tails were caught, onto my finger then released.

Their next escape will be from the cichlids and barbs inhabiting my tank...