almostwitty

So, the time has come to try and hire a posh suit. I can’t be the only male who has to hire a posh suit and yet hates the entire experience of shopping for clothes – so you’d have thought the male tailors would have tried to make it as easy as possible. But oh no.

Thus to Suits You Westfield. Which is a total nightmare of a shop.

• The first time I popped in, the sales guy kept trying to get me to hire a package for the exorbitant cost of £100. And then when I refused to do so, he put the order on hold so that I could “think about it and come back tomorrow”. He said he wouldn’t be there but he assured me that someone else would be.
• I popped in the next day. A very disgruntled and pissed-off salesperson eventually deigned to try and recreate my order, but gave up with their insanely slow systems after 20 minutes, and asked me to “come back tomorrow”.
• The next day, neither of the salespeople I had dealt with were there, and instead there was one guy there – a right geezer of a salesman – who literally said “We can’t help you”. I asked why, and he said the store was closing down in two weeks. Strange I don’t see any sign of a Closing Down sale…

Thus, I went into another department store – and they had the opposite problem in being understaffed – thus, every time I try to pop in, the staff are rushed off their feet dealing with other customers. I’ve tried to pop in at three lunchtimes and not had much success – the one time I actually did manage to get measured, I had to wear something that was 4 sizes too small – just to see how it would look – and then realised they didn’t have the lilac waistcoat I wanted.

Online was no help – despite the smartgrooms.co.uk website claiming they could supply a suit by the desired date, when I called them it turned out they couldn’t. And I’m still waiting to hear from another website.

That’s not even getting into the outrageous cost of hiring a suit – and everyone seems to charge the same prices. If that isn’t something that deserves a complaint to the Monopoly Commission, I don’t know what does.

Mirrored from almost witty.

After carefully examining what I could of the HTML code in my Wordpress installation, I concluded that the best way to get rid of the reported injected spam links was to “nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” - in other words, back up the blog database, delete all Wordpress files, re-install Wordpress and then import the backed-up database. I had contemplated moving my blog over to somewhere else, like LiveJournal or wordpress.com but I thought I’d give Dreamhost one more chance.

Of course, I’m going to take some better precautions, as recommended by some friends. These include:

• Not installing random themes and plug-ins for the sheer hell of it. If I don’t like it, delete it.
• There are some handy plug-ins that claim to provide better security, to whit:
• Bad Behaviour
• WP Security Scan
• Theme Authenticity Checker

Originally published at almost witty. You can comment here or there.

As I speak, there is the glorious sound of a gospel choir working their way through a bunch of classic hymns and not-so-classic modern pop tunes.

This would be great, if it was not Friday at 4pm, they were on the ground floor of the building I work in and only the bottom two floors (those belonging to BBC Worldwide) are enjoying the party, complete with mince pies, wine, DJ and glitterball. In the meantime, the wage slaves up above have to - in theory - keep working.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t arrived back at the BBC just when the Christmas party limit was slashed, so my “departmental” Christmas party last week was at a bar, and consisted of some free drink - and far too late - some very unChristmassy canapes. Although I’m lucky I got to go to one at all, I suppose…

Then again, my first BBC Worldwide Christmas party was quite an eye-opener. I’d only been working for a week, and got shepherded to the party at Heaven, which included girls dancing in cages, and ice sculptures where you could drink vodka from an ice woman’s breast. This was 1997, mind you…

Originally published at almost witty. You can comment here or there.