Junk mail is a huge business. Every year, millions upon millions of items of unaddressed mail is stuffed through the letterboxes of the UK’s 28 million addresses, wasting valuable resources and generally causing bad vibes up and down the country. This junk mail is not sent through the postal system in the traditional sense, but included when the postie drops your mail through the letterbox. The postie himself gets 1.67p per item for each piece of real-life Spam delivered, causing blood pressures to rise wherever he goes.
You can, however, opt-out of the scheme. It won’t stop mail sent to The Occupier, but it should stop all mail that doesn’t haven’t have an address on it – the blight that is UnAddressed Mail. All you need do is email optout@royalmail.com and include something like the following:
Subject: Door to door Opt-Out request.
Dear Sirs,
Kindly register my address to opt out of receiving unaddressed postal mail.
<your full address here>
Regards,
<your name here>
Send the email, and eventually you’ll receive a PDF version of the form back. Print the form, fill it in (It only requires your name, address and signature) and post it to:
Freepost RRBT-ZBXB-TTTS
Royal Mail Door to Door Opt Outs
Kingsmead House
Oxpens Road
OXFORD
OX1 1RX
You don’t even need a stamp!
Potential for Mischief?
In theory, you are supposed to write to the above address and ask for the forms, which they will then send to your address – the idea being to prevent Joe Bloggs from applying for the Opt-Out on behalf of his entire street. Emailing, however, simply returns the form back to the sender’s email address, which could be absolutely anybody.
With this in mind, it would theoretically be possible to generate a list of all UK postal addresses (The Royal Mail will sell you it for £405+vat) and print out the same PDF (it has no unique identifying markings) for every one of them, then use a Letter Folding and Inserting Machine to stuff the envelopes printed with the Freepost address. Done one town at a time, it would eventually opt the entire UK out of receiving unaddressed postal mail.
At least until Royal Mail put a stop to it.
Updated 10th March:
The BBC is reporting that the current limit of three items of Unaddressed Mail per week is to be scrapped to allow much more junk mail to be delivered:
On Monday Royal Mail and the postal union declared peace in a long-running dispute over pay and modernisation that had sparked a series of strikes.
But buried in the 79-page agreement – which still has to be voted on by its members – is a pledge from both sides to lift restrictions on deliveries of what the Royal Mail calls “unaddressed mail”.
Read the full article here, and don’t forget to leave a comment if you’ve opted out.
I’m sure you’ve all seen it, that annoying, unskippable advertisement from whichever anti-piracy outfit is infecting your particular country. It focusses on a teen girl in a bedroom downloading something or other from a site titled “Feature Films”. The dodgy, shakey-cam style titles read:
You wouldn’t steal a car.
You wouldn’t steal a handbag.
You wouldn’t steal a television.
You wouldn’t steal a movie.
Downloading pirated films is stealing.
Stealing is against the law.
Piracy. It’s a crime.
All well and good, except that downloading pirated films is not stealing, it’s Copyright Infringement. Piracy is where you board a ship out at sea and make off with it. Rum may be involved, and also planks.
But the best bit, the kicker, is that these ridiculous ads only appear on the legitimate, paid-for version of these films because pirates strip them out. Not only that, they serve to remind the buyer that they could have downloaded the film instead of paying for it, and without the annoying Anti-Copyright-Infringement ad on the front.
And yes, if I could download a car that had all the crap stripped out, but which was otherwise identical to the original, then I bloody would “steal” one.
After watching The Gadget Show a while ago I got the hankering for a pair of Salomon Cosmic 4D GTX Boots which the show had for £130.
But where are they?
The closest are on this Salomon Boots website but these are the Ladies version – certainly not the funky red ones that Brian Blessed was stomping around in.
One thing that always annoyed with the Gadget Show’s website was that you couldn’t just click to jump to someone selling the products they had on the show, and the Salomon Boots segment was no different – where are the boots? Where do I buy the boots? Where are these boots avalaible for this magical, mysterious price of £130?
Gadget Show, you are missing an opportunity to make more cash here. Be told.
Edit:
Just my luck, it appears the Men’s Cosmic 4D GTX is available from Salomon Boots after all.
September 9th, 2009, 09:09am was the exact moment that the stars aligned and everything came up nines. Of course, it was bound to happen eventually. Even Twitter got in on the act by, uh, falling over and becoming unavailable for.. nine minutes.
Remember, 9-9-9 is just 6-6-6 upside down, which makes the birth of Henry Michael Berendes a little worrying.
Looking around for some prices on sash windows, I’m having a bit of a problem finding something affordable, although the prices of timber sash windows here are more reasonable than most, and they’re local, which is useful. Wooden box sash windows are the only acceptable solution, especially in a conservation area / listed building.
Checking around for something to liven up the plain walls in the office, I kinda like this poster of Jim Morrison over at Music Posters, even if I’m not a raving fan of The Doors. That’s the problem with decorating in a neutral manner… it’s so neutral.
I noticed that the AdSense revenue for the site had fallen off drastically after moving to WordPress, and after consulting the AdSense Heat Map I suspect it’s because the ads are in the worst possible positions in the iNove theme.
I played around in Photoshop for a little while, creating something similar to the existing iNove theme because I liked it, and eventually set about creating the php files. Having absolutely no idea how these things work, I simply butchered the default WordPress theme and changes things until [a] it worked and [b] I was happy with the results. I’m sure Themes in general could be much easier to work with, but what the hey – it wasn’t too bad.
There was some severe tweaking to do in order to have it work correctly and fit on a 1024-wide screen, and eventually reverted to tables just for peace of mind, but I am fairly happy with the results.
With the credit crunch in full swing, it’s only natural that people will look for ways to save money. Right now every little helps, and it was with this thought in mind that I decided to investigate cutting my broadband package to a lower tier.
As it transpires, Virgin Media dropped the basic (4Mb?) package and so I was on the lowest price anyway, but while investigating package options I discovered that the same package was available for new broadband customers – after an introductory discount – for £20 a month.
Whereas I, as a loyal customer of roughly seven years, have the priviledge of paying £25 a month.
I called Virgin and asked about this, and the basic response is that, yes the same package is available cheaper, but because it was £25 when I changed to it (I was on a higher tarrif), that’s what I’m stuck with paying.
Since they won’t drop the price for me, and I can’t simply cancel and rejoin (apparently I have to be a non-customer for 6 months) I’ve decided to cancel the package altogether. My housemate will add broadband to their existing package and I’ll pay the difference, saving me £10 a month – fair recompense for the £5 a month Virgin Media have been overcharging me.
So Virgin are going to lose more money in the long run. They’ve lost me as a customer and income from this household will be £10 a month lower than before while they supply the exact same services.
Check your bills and see what’s available via the Virgin Media website. If you can cancel and re-open using another member of the household, you may be able to save yourself some cash.
Finally, my little corner of North East England has got some serious snow – enough to prompt my boss to call and tell me to work from home tomorrow. I had a feeling it would all melt overnight and leave me crestfallen in the morning, but it’s coming down with no sign of letting up.
I decided to bring the cars in off the road, with M’s going into the garage and mine sitting out of the way on the drive. It didn’t take long to become covered, either.
Dog loves it – he and I had a mad ten minutes in the garden playing fetch with snowballs, with him looking very confused when the seemingly disappeared into the ground.
Eventually we had to go and rescue my brother from the Asda store in town and we took the opportunity to do a bit of shopping as well. By this time the snow was several inches thick and traffic was moving at a crawl. On the way back we helped a woman driving a (front engined, rear wheel drive) sports car who was getting no grip at all on the icy hill. Good deed done, we continued our slippery journey home.
Another brief snowball fight, and we all retired inside with a nice warm drink.
As part of the preparations for our upcoming trip to Tokyo we obviously need some cash, so I’ve been keeping one eye on the value of ¥200,000 – roughly £1,000 – in the run up to departure.
When I initially started watching it was £980 which wasn’t too different from the last time time I went in 2006, but I checked a week ago and was surprised to find it had stealthily climbed to £1,045, prompting me to buy my currency before it got any worse.
Good job I did, too. K bought his a few days later and paid £20 more. I decided to keep one eye on the cost of ¥200,000 via the Post Office’s currency site and this is what happened:
Graph shown a gradual rise in the cost of the Yen
One week later the cost has risen 6%! So what’s causing this? Obviously the Pound is falling in value at the moment due to the Credit Crunch, but there has to be another reason – is the Japanese economy having a boom time at the moment?
I may update the graph at the end of next week if the cost continues to rise. I’m sure it will, but this rate is pretty unsustainable.
Update:
As of Monday, the price has actually come down a little. ¥200,000 now costs £1,076.54.
