Weekends Away!

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Posted on 23rd June 2011 by Tony in Random

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I have always been a bit of a work-a-holic, even though my dad would certainly have protested such an idea … he always thought I like to find the quickest way to get out of my chores. The thing is, I really enjoy what I do, but I generally get stuck behind my desk and completely forget about the world around me. It also means I end up forgetting about taking holidays. The very idea of a holiday really scares me – what if there is a crisis? What if I am needed? As part of trying to live a balanced life I am now making an effort to get away one weekend in a month.

Last weekend I had the most amazing opportunity to chill out at The Winston in Simonstown, by far one of the nicest Bed&Breakfasts I’ve ever visited. Mike, the owner is an incredibly friendly chap and his staff are amazing. Boston, the resident chef prepared me scrumptious breakfasts each morning.

But the best part is the room and the view. Just a stone’s throw from Boulders, I keep expecting penguins to walk past the room, you are that close to the beach. Because the weather was really crummy, I was “forced” to stay in doors for much of the weekend, but I cannot explain how amazing it is to chill out, reading a book and watching the storm brewing over the ocean. Pure Bliss! I finished two books over the weekend.

Also, Simonstown is an absolutely incredible little town with the SA Navy Museum and the Toy Museum right there … of course there’s heaps of curio shops, Antique stores and a few great boutiques – a shoppers paradise. There are also a few great restaurants around … I loved it…Take a look at their website here: www.thewinston.co.za

OK, so the moral of my blogpost … I love the idea of talking a weekend a month off and doing nothing. And this place was perfect – I’ll definitely be going back. Mike says the whales should be around from August so it sounds good to me!

Popularity: 2% [?]


DMA Rules are going to increase SPAM …

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Posted on 20th June 2011 by Tony in Rant

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As a member of the Direct Marketing Association in South Africa (DMA) I take the marketing rules really seriously. I strongly believe that if someone doesn’t want to be contacted, then we should respect that. There’s really no point to annoy people – bad for the company, bad for the brand and bad for business.

Everyone knows that the new Consumer Protection Act comes with a series of onerous responsibilities for business owners, specifically that if someone subscribes to a National Database (DNC LIST) you are not allowed to contact them. I have no idea what the penalties are going to be, but it makes absolute sense to me to do this.

As yet, there is no government controlled DNC LIST which means everyone is still trying to figure things out until something actually happens. In the mean time, the Direct Marketing Association has always had a DNC LIST for it’s members, which was emailed to us once a month. This works perfectly with Industry standards for email programmes – basically you use an “exclude” system, which tells the software:

Send Email to This person, unless they appear on the DNC LIST.

Unfortunately during April/May there was some idiot who decided to distribute the DNC LIST to a whole bunch of spammers … as you can imagine, a big mess, with loads of people who specifically asked not to receive emails, now getting heaps of emails.

The DMA (who are tendering for the government contract to manage the National Registry) have now decided to handle the list-exclude on their server. Basically this means that I have to regularly upload my list to them, they’ll remove the duplicates and then return the list to me. Sounds fair-enough, except the DMA have decided to use ID Numbers as the exclude criteria (instead of email addresses and/or cellphone numbers). I don’t know about you, but when last did anyone ask you for your ID number when signing up to join a newsletter?

I suspect loads of people are now going to get more spam, even after registering with the DMA because the marketing guys don’t know you’ve unsubscribed – even guys like me, who really don’t want to be spamming you.

I have made contact with the folks at the DMA and they have told me that if I have problems with their system, I need to email them a non-disclosure agreement and a copy of my list, they’ll clean it up and email me the clean list. Besides the fact that my list is about 60MB big – how often do they expect to do this?

Currently the DMA only has a few hundred members. What happens if they win the government contract and you have 100 000 companies who need their list cleaned up?

This is an absolute disaster in my personal opinion. I would have left the system as it was and then nailed the idiot who broke the rules really hard.

Why is there always one idiot who decides to spoil it for everyone else?

Popularity: 5% [?]


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