Dan Rooke’s Blog

I thought it was about time I got round to posting about our visit to the Goldfrapp concert last Sunday evening at the Manchester Apollo, so here goes!

The tickets were a Christmas present from Becca. I’d listened to Goldfrapp’s latest offering of Supernature as well as some tracks from Black Cherry, the second album, and Felt Mountain, the first album, and liked them. I wasn’t too sure how they’d be in concert though as some of the tracks seem a little restrained and I’d read some older concert reviews saying similar.

The gig kicked off with a support band called Hot Chip. Their music was a fusion of synth sounds with electric guitar and some acoustic percussion thrown in for good measure. They started with a very loud and crashy song, not helped by the amazingly loud sound system at the Apollo! After my ears had recovered, they calmed down a little and played some strangely soothing songs. I was impressed! After getting a hold of their album Coming on Strong and listening to it a couple of times, I find it very relaxing and chilling. I’d recommend a listen.

Hot Chip’s set lasted for about an hour, with about an hour’s wait for the main act - it was worth it though! Goldfrapp put on a really good show (read more to see pics) and lsitening to it live really made it come alive. I was introduced to some of the Goldfrapp classics which I hadn’t heard before - Train, Tiptoe, Black Cherry and Utopia as well as Strict Machine which I had heard but hadn’t realised was Goldfrapp. It was great to hear Lovely Head performed, which has been used as the theme for BBC Three’s Monkey Dust series along with other tracks from Felt Mountain. They managed to get through a lot of songs in the hour and a half they were on stage, very impressed by their stamina!

Overall I was very impressed and would recommend both Hot Chip and Goldfrapp to anyone who likes electronic music. An excellent night.

Images from Frankie Buttons - a fellow concert goer.

Just a follow up from my earlier post to say that I have now received my cheque as promised. It appears as though receiving the messages was a legitimate mistake.

Sitting at lunch yesterday, an idea popped into my head which I thought was quite good. Let’s see what you lot think!

The problem
Have you ever known that you’ve been expecting something important through the post but also known that no body will be home to receive said important letter/parcel? Can you not wait another 24 hours to collect the letter/parcel for it to be returned to the main local Post Office? Perhaps you’d prefer to opt to collect it direct from the post office…

The solution
An online service which would allow you to see all the items of post due for delivery to your home with the next round of deliveries. The system will identify items by the sender and state whether it’s a parcel (anything bigger from a Jiffy bag up) or a letter. Users will be able to opt to collect mail from the local main Post Office, either all mail or perhaps just parcels. Therefore users will know what to expect and be able to choose what they want delivered and what they want to collect.

I believe that most of the infrastucture is in place to facilitate the basic system where items to be delivered are listed, perhaps the work to implement the system would focus on the logistics of seperating post for collection. It does have some benefits for the Royal Mail in that it will potentially save posties time (knocking on doors and writing ‘we missed you’ cards) as well as save posties carrying around heavy parcels that cannot be delivered.

A good idea to bring the Royal Mail into the 21st Century? Should I get a patent filed?!

Having received my Orange mobile phone bill this morning, I noticed I had been charged for three ‘multimedia messages’ apparently received on 25th January, costing £3.84. The messages were sent from a short text number, more likely why I was charged rather than them being true multimedia messages. Now, call me tight if you want but I didn’t request these texts and in fact I don’t even remember receiving them!

Anyway, I got on to Orange and basically asked for the texts to be knocked off my bill. They couldn’t do that, the best they could do was to give me the name and number of the company. The text number was 84048 from a company called Transact Chaos Network with a CS number of 0870 4541000.

I was quite wary of the fact that by contacting Transact I may just be confiming my number is active, but I don’t want to be receiving any more of these messages at £1.28 a time! First off I sent a ‘STOP’ message to the number, no doubt costing me again. Secondly, I phoned the CS number. I got straight through to someone, very surprised, who I explained what had happened to. Apparantly they had been sold a database by a WiFi hotspot internet café in London where the data had errors and had been transposed. He sounded genuine, so I went along with it. He offered a refund by cheque and asked for my details. Again alarm bells ringing, I didn’t want to give them any more info about me! I said as much to him and asked if there was any other way to go about it, but of course there isn’t. I decided to go along with it anyway as I wanted refunding - hopefully I made the right decision. We shall see if the cheque arrives next week as promised, and if I get text and mail spammed.

Unlike other unsolicited communication, this has immediate financial implications. This is mainly due to the fact that mobile networks impose a hefty charge on the use of short message numbers, both when sending to and receiving from. The Orange CS representative informed me that there are no procedures in place within the industry to deal with this sort of thing. The idea of spam that costs makes me feel a little uneasy, as I’m sure it does you! Hopefully this will be an isolated incident involving an honest mistake, but what can be done if not?

I have now switched to using Wordpress as opposed to pLog (now Lifetype) to run my blog.

This has resulted in a few changes. First off the gallery has gone. Secondly the theme has changed. Thirdly I have some additional static pages available from the navigation at the top of the page.

The switch involved me writing an importer for Wordpress allowing all content to be transferred from pLog seemlessly. You can find more about that on the software page.

Hopefully this will allow me to produce more interesting content - we shall see!