Failure is the Key to Success

Also known as ‘The right and wrong way to deal with an internet order problem’. This also applies equally to telephone and any other form of distance selling. Here is the sad saga of my dealings with Bristol Cameras Ltd. It is preceded by a couple of problems with internet orders that were well managed and resolved.

Before Christmas, I ordered 2 books from the Aikido Journal website, Traditional Aikido Volumes 1 & 2 by Morihiro Saito. These were books that Jo and I used to clarify our techniques many years ago; we never owned them, but were looking after someone’s library for them. The originals were printed in the 1970s and had been out of print for many years. Occasionally, you would see one or more of the 5 volumes on Ebay, but they would go for in excess of £100, usually a lot more. In early November, Aikido Journal announced that Volume 1 was available immediately. This was a brand-new edition done in the exact style and format of the original books by Saito Sensei. These are hardcover volumes made for durability featuring a semi-gloss paper like the originally published volumes. Anyway, back to the problem, after completing the order for volume 1 and confirming my credit card details, instead of a confirmation, I got a series of database errors displayed. I left a message detailing the problem on the contact form and within a few hours I had received an email back from Stanley Pranin, the editor-in-chief of Aikido Journal, confirming that they had received my order and that it should be shipping on the Monday. I had the same problem when pre-ordering volume 2 and had the same swift response and confirmation.
Continue reading » Bristol Cameras took my money

Tags:Adri's Dream,aikido,Aikido Journal,Bristol Cameras,Digital Depot,Elida Trading,manfrotto,mollenhauer,monopod

We went out to the zoo this afternoon, which gave me a chance to try out my ‘bigma’. What, you might ask, is a bigma. Well, it is a camera lens, to be precise, it is the Sigma 50-500mm f4-6.3. I had been considering getting a longer lens later this year for my birthday and had concluded that this was the lens I would get. About 3 weeks ago, while checking a photography forum, I came across a post talking about price rises for Sigma from the 1st February 2009. Because of the changes in the value of the pound and the yen, they are having to increase their prices to reflect the change in exchange rate. This change is in the range of 40% – ouch! The recommended price on the Sigma site was £880 at that time. After a brief discussion with Jo it was agreed that I would buy my birthday/xmas present a few (!) months early. I placed a collect in store order with Jessops in Milton Keynes, who had yet to increase their price and collected it the following day on my way home from work. The current Sigma recommended price is now up to £1350 (53% increase). Jessops have increased their price this weekend, it is now £430 more expensive, I’m glad I got in when I did.

Continue reading » Trying out my ‘Bigma’

Tags:bigma,sigma 50-500,whipsnade zoo

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7.1 on one of my test blogs a few days ago using the new automatic upgrade feature. The upgrade went quickly and smoothly and everything worked afterwards, so that was good.

Tonight, I got round to upgrading my other test blogs and they didn’t go well at all.

Initially on 2 of them I got as far as “Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip” and that was all; it just sat there doing nothing. OK, so I looked on the forums and saw a suggestion that it might be plugin related, so I disabled all the plugins on one of the blogs, this then got to the next stage “Unpacking the core update” and sat there doing nothing. Hmm, this was strange it worked on the first blog. I tried the update on my last test blog and this worked automatically in seconds. The mystery deepens!

Then I had a thought, back in July, when I was working on the problem with Firestats, I found a resolution by adding a line to my .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Continue reading » Upgraded to Wordpress 2.7.1

Tags:.htaccess file,FireStats,PHP 5,upgrading Wordpress,wordpress 2.7.1