VinceH

Sky One shows contempt for their viewers. Again.

Nov 072011
Sky One ruins Terra Nova

Back in May I had a little rant about Sky One ruining Stargate Universe with an annoying banner, advertising a bit of celebrity gossip that was anything but important enough to justify what they did. A banner that was irritatingly large and stupidly bright – especially considering it was set against the dark backdrop of the show, making it that much harder to mentally block out. (Not that this means if the banner itself was darker, that would be okay – it wouldn’t: it would be less annoying, but it would definitely still be annoying.)

Well, they’ve successfully done it again.

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When is a spam not a spam? When it's a service update

Aug 312011

That’s the claim of findmypast.co.uk, one of a number of websites designed to help those interested in the subject of genealogy with the task of investigating their family tree. They seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to send out a marketing email – very specifically, advertising new, lower subscription rates – and claim that it isn’t a marketing email, it’s a “service update”, an email that it is necessary to send out to their membership (and from which said members can’t unsubscribe).

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Very: Sitting in the grey area between spam and legitimate email

Jul 252011

Back in January, I wrote about an issue I had with Very, a Shop Direct Ltd trading arm. Specifically, they had started sending me marketing emails to an address I supplied when I made a purchase from LX Direct (which no longer exists, and also belonged to Shop Direct Ltd) – my policy when purchasing online is to use unique addresses (so I can monitor when companies abuse those addresses) and to opt not to receive marketing emails either from the companies concerned or any third parties. That clearly means those emails from Very were indefensible. They were spam – it’s as simple as that.

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Sky One ruins Stargate Universe

May 242011
Sky One ruins Stargate Universe with the non-news about Ryan Giggs

I don’t care much for football – or pretty much any other sport for that matter. I don’t watch it on TV, I don’t follow any particular team, and if you asked me to name a team’s worth of players I’d struggle, though I could probably get there in the end. And that’s just naming a team’s worth of players – enough to make up a team, rather than all the current players in an actual team. Asking me to do the latter would be less successful than holding your arm directly in front of a rattlesnake in a sudden and aggressive way and saying “Please don’t bite.”

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