The latest organisation to suddenly conclude it has the right to send me such unwanted communications is LOVEFiLM which has recently decided it should send me regular SMS messages full of some banal nonsense.

The first such message I received was two weeks ago, on 18th December 2011, and when I then checked my account settings on LOVEFiLM I was surprised to find that all the various “LOVEFiLM Marketing” preferences where unchecked apart from one labelled “by SMS” which I am quite sure I would never have checked, and certainly not while I was refusing much less annoying things like email marketing.

I immediately unchecked the box and then expressed my annoyance on twitter:

Wondering if “please SMS spam me” box on @LOVEFiLM preferences is new as mine is set and I wouldn’t have done that voluntarily…

— Tom Hughes (@thughes) December 18, 2011

Needless to say my tweet was not one that the @LOVEFiLM account chose to respond to…

I assumed however that, having unchecked the box allowing SMS marketing, that would an end to it. It appears that I couldn’t have been more wrong however as today, two weeks later, another spam SMS was received from them. So twitter has one again been deployed:

So @LOVEFiLM can you explain why you are still sending me SMS spam two weeks after I turned off the SMS marketing flag on my account?

— Tom Hughes (@thughes) January 1, 2012

In addition to which I have contacted them directly via their web site to let them know what I think:

Two weeks ago, on Sunday 18th December, I was somewhat surprised to received a marketing text message from you. I was surprised because I had never knowingly agreed to receive such messages and I would normally refuse any such invitation as a matter of routine.

I was even more surprised when I checked my account details on your website and found that all the marketing permission boxes were unchecked except the SMS one. I don’t believe I would ever have chosen those settings, so I wonder if you added that option and defaulted it to on without requesting my permission?

In any case I unchecked that box on Sunday 18th December.

Perhaps you can therefore explain why, two weeks later, I have just received another unwanted spam SMS from you in defiance of my clearly stated preferences, and hence illegally, being in breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST WITH THIS BEHAVIOUR IMMEDIATELY.

For the avoidance of all doubt please take this message as notice pursuant to regulation 22 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 that you are not to send me unsolicited SMS messages again.

Any repeat will be reported to the Information Commissioner’s office for possible enforcement action with no further notice to yourselves.

Now I will sit back and see if I have managed to get their attention this time and if they are willing to learn that this sort of behaviour is completely unacceptable.

Today I got the final statement which, because of the refund of the fee for the second year, showed a credit balance. Rather than enclosing a cheque for the balance though, or indicating that they had repaid it to the account that I had been using to pay the card bills, the statement had this curious message:

What I want to know is, how many people exactly don’t want a refund, and would instead prefer to hand their credit balance over to American Express?!?

Of course their secure messaging system insists on me selecting a card before I can send a message, and won’t let me select a cancelled card, so sending them a message to ask for my refund turned into a bit of a palaver as well…

Lloyds TSB had some Important Information to share with me...

I wonder how many million of those they’ve just sent out…

String-based interpolation of association conditions is deprecated. Please use a proc instead. So, for example, has_many :older_friends, :conditions => ‘age > #{age}’ should be changed to has_many :older_friends, :conditions => proc { “age > #{age}” }.

Now call me confused if you like, but isn’t the suggested replacement still doing just as much string interpolation as the original?

The issues he highlights can be broadly divided into two categories: problems with our stylesheets and rendering technology; and problems with our data, and in particular with our US data.

The issue which I intend to address here is the one he tackles first – that of label density which is something that stems largely from data quality and, more importantly, consistency issues. Specifically, although the post talks about cities, the real question is about what is tagged as a city and what is tagged as some lesser type of place.

By way of explanation I should probably start by explaining that in OpenStreetMap tagging there are four commonly used used values for the place tag which designate a populated place. In order, from largest to smallest, those are: city, town, village and hamlet. The question which then arises is, how do we decide which of those values to use for a given settlement?

Like so many tags the specific names used come, because of OpenStreetMap’s origins, from typical British usage. It is therefore generally not a good idea to interpret the names too literally in other jurisdictions — indeed some tag values like highway=trunk aren’t even interpreted literally in England!

To the British the question of which places should be cities is fairly clear — there are a few alternative definitions (places with royal charters vs places with cathedrals) but those only relate to a few edge cases and in general there is little debate and only a relatively small number of large and/or important towns will qualify.

At the other end of the spectrum a hamlet would normally only be used for very small places that amount to little more than a handful of houses.

In between lies the distinction between villages and towns which is much less well defined but in my opinion would generally lie around the few thousand mark in population terms — once you reach 2-3 thousand residents you are probably a town rather than a village.

Interestingly the OpenStreetMap wiki disagrees a little here and suggests hamlet for populations up to one thousand and village up to ten thousand. I would argue that both of those values are too high for normal British usage and certainly larger than I would use when tagging places.

All of which brings us back to the variations in density in the US map…

The first thing to understand about the US is that most populated places there appear have been initially imported from the USGS GNIS data set. I haven’t found any documentation as to how places were categorised but I suspect it was done based on population and most likely using the values in the OpenStreetMap wiki or something close to them.

Justin’s first example starts with the apparent high density of places in Florida so I took a look at a randomly selected place in his example which appeared to be fairly small — the town(?) of Frostproof. The OpenStreetMap history for Frostproof reveals that it was originally imported from GNIS as a village (probably because of it’s population of 2922) but has recently been retagged as a city.

My suspicion is that this is the result of an overly literal interpretation of the place=city tag – as I understand things many relatively small places in the US officially style themselves as cities — certainly Wikipedia describes Frostproof in this way. Nobody in Britain, or indeed probably in Europe as a whole, would consider somewhere that small to be a city however and tagging it as such certainly goes against normal OpenStreetMap tagging practice.

In most of the rest of the US no such retagging of small towns as cities appears to have taken place, making place names there appear much less dense at low zoom levels. The sort of places which Justin’s article suggests should be appearing in those areas mostly appear to be in the 25-100 thousand population range and hence have been tagged as towns during the GNIS import. The solution here, if more place names are considered cartographically desirable, would either be to adjust the threshold at which places are tagged as cities instead of town, or to alter the stylesheets to render towns at lower zoom levels.

The relatively high density around Los Angeles which the article mentions appears to be the result of a fairly large number of places with populations just over the 100 thousand mark. Despite their large populations, and the fact they are likely independent cities legally, I suspect that many of them would be tagged as suburbs in Britain rather than as cities or towns and hence would be given lower priority when rendering.

The real lesson to be drawn from all this however is that the US OpenStreetMap community probably needs to reach a consensus on how to map populated places to tag values so that a better level of consistency can be achieved with less variation from area to area across the map.

The most significant item in the collection was a personal diary for the year 1897 which carried an inscription on the flyleaf of “John Unwin, Fanny Street, Saltaire”.

In itself the diary is a fascinating piece of social history and that is certainly the main reason for including it in the archive for the benefit of future generations. The diary is of interest to my family for a second reason however, which is the mysterious way in which it came to be in the possession of my grandfather.

The cover of the diary.

The story is that in the 1930s my great-grandfather, David Unwin, was the general foreman on a building site in Cricklewood when one of the workers on the site came to him with the diary and asked, given that as foreman my great-grandfather would simply have been “Mr Unwin” and that the diary belonged to John Unwn, if the diary was his.

Obviously David Unwin knew that the diary was not his, but equally he knew that his father and his older siblings had been born in Shipley and that he had many relatives in the Saltaire area, and he therefore assumed that the diary must belong to a relative of his.

Despite a number of attempts by members of the family over the last eighty years to figure out who John Unwin was and how, or if, he was related to our family no real progress was made until I started on some genealogical investigations a few years ago in an effort to draw up a family tree.

Looking at the tree I had assembled there was one obvious candidate for a John Unwin who would have been a suitable age in 1897 and reading the diary confirmed beyond any doubt that he was in fact the author – among other things the diary records the departure of his brother Robert on his way to a new life in Bridgeport, Connecticut; an event that I had already discovered evidence of during my research.

Diary entry for 1st October recording departure of Robert Unwin (RU) for the USA. Shipping records show that he sailed from Liverpool the next day.

The result of my research was therefore to discover that the author was in fact the first cousin of my great-grandfather, and my first cousin three times removed. Quite how the diary came to travel from Shipley in West Yorkshire to Cricklewood in North London between 1897 and 1930 remains a mystery, especially given the excellent condition in which it survived despite being found on a building site!

The diary is now, as I indicated at the start, in the Saltaire Archive, along with my scans of the diary and my uncle’s transcription, having been handed over to representatives of the Saltaire History Club and members of the Salt family (the great-grandson of Sir Titus Salt, Denys Salt, and his nephew, Jonathan) during this year’s Saltaire Festival.

When I called Orange they, as expected, put me through to retentions who then rather surprised me by saying that there was no problem adding data to my OVP Virgin tariff and that I could have 500Mb for £5 a month. That wasn’t quite as good as the other tariffs I had been looking at — it was the same price but less data — but I decided to give it a go anyway so he added it to my account.

As my understanding (from searching the internet) was that Orange had two separate classes of SIM only one of which allowed 3G data I explicitly asked if I would need a new SIM but the adviser assured that my current SIM would work fine so off I went to try it out.

Unfortunately, and as you’ve probably guessed by now, it didn’t actually work — in fact data didn’t work at all! So a few days later I found myself speaking to them again. This time I got a very helpful lady who immediately realised that the previous adviser hadn’t set things up right and she proceeded to send about six SIM updates to my phone and then wait while I rebooted it and confirmed that data now worked although I was only getting GPRS and not 3G data.

Once again I asked whether I needed a new SIM and was assured that I didn’t, and it must just be the coverage where I was that was stopping me getting a 3G signal so off I went again.

Fast forward two weeks and I still haven’t seen a 3G indicator once despite visiting a number of different locations so it is obvious that there is still a problem and I ring them again.

This time I get a slightly less helpful fellow who, after failing to find my phone on their database, says that they “don’t support it” and he can’t really help. When pressed that it’s not really about the phone as I know the 3G in it works fine on other networks and I just need my account enabling for 3G he finally admits that I probably do actually need a new SIM to make it work.

Of course it’s not that simple — they can’t just send me a new SIM unless my current one is broken. Even then they would only send me a 3G one if I had a 3G phone. I do, of course, have a 3G phone but what he really meant was “a 3G phone that you bought from Orange”.

So I went for the nuclear option and informed him that in that case I’d like to close my account and get a PAC to move my number to  a more helpful network. At that point he put me on hold and I started waiting…

Something like seven minutes of hold music later he finally came back — by this time I was sure that he was going to say that actually, after speaking to his colleagues, maybe they could send me a new SIM card. Unfortunately it was not to be and he just put me through to disconnections who, possibly for the first time ever, issued me a PAC without making any attempt at all to persuade me to stay.

So when my PAC arrives in a few days (for some reason they insist on sending it by post) it will be goodbye to Orange and hello to Three.

Somehow I don't think that's what they meant to say...

I wonder how many of those they’ve just sent out…

The OVP Virgin tariff has long since stopped being available to new customers, but existing customers have been allowed to keep it. Equally Virgin themselves have stopped offering the post pay option on their PAYG tariffs, except for users who have a SIM on their original PAYG tariff. As it happens I have one of those as well…

The net effect of this is that my average bill over ten years has been about £1.25 a month which means that even after buying two phones outright during that period I have come out much better than I would have done by being on contract with a subsidised phone.

I have recently upgraded to a 3G phone however, which meant I needed to find a new tariff as Orange apparently refuse to enable 3G data for OVP Virgin customers, presumably because they would quite like to get rid of them.

My original plan was to use my Virgin SIM and switch it to post pay mode to get full roaming. That would also give me data access, either at 30p a day (with a 25Mb fair usage limit) or £5 a month (with a 1Gb fair usage limit) which means that if you use it more than about every other day then you want to be on the monthly option.

This week however I discovered that 3 have introduced a SIM Zero tariff which operates in much the same way as the original Virgin tariff and the OVP Virgin clone of that tariff. It also allows 3G data, either at 30p a Mb (quite expensive!) or at £5 a month for up to 2Gb. The call costs are also in general slightly lower than the original Virgin tariff.

The SIM Zero tariff is fairly well hidden however – you won’t find any mention of it on the main 3 web site for a start. After some googling I eventually found this link to the 3 store:

http://threestore.three.co.uk/sim/?id=1183

Even the front page of the 3 store doesn’t seem to provide any direct route to that page — the best it provides is a link to this page for SIM only deals:

http://threestore.three.co.uk/simonly.aspx

Which doesn’t list SIM Zero, although it does list SIM Only Internet which is effectively SIM Zero with the £5 a month internet add-on.

So yesterday I ordered a SIM Zero, which really did go through the checkout as zero pounds and zero pence, not even any postage. Today it arrived — they even threw in a PAYG SIM as well just in case I wanted one.

Now all I have to do is get Orange Retentions to give me a PAC which could be quite fun…

ITO World have now made use of that data to do a comparison with OpenStreetMap and produce a set of tiles which can be overlaid on OpenStreetMap to highlight roads in OS Locator which do not appear to be in OpenStreetMap — that doesn’t always mean the road is missing, or even missing a name — sometimes it just means we don’t agree on what the name is!

A case in point is a road near me called Oxenden Drive. At least that is what OpenStreetMap thinks it is called — the OS Locator data calls it Oxendon Drive instead as shown in this show of OpenStreetMap with the ITO World overlay:

Oxenden or Oxdendon?

So today I paid a visit to recheck the name on the signs and sure enough, the signs agree with OpenStreetMap and say Oxenden Drive.

The Hertfordshire County Council Gazetteer seems to agree with Ordnance Survey (Oxendon) while Royal Mail’s address database comes down on the side of Oxenden.

At the end of all that I’ve decided to leave it as it is, as Oxenden Drive, but who knows what the real answer is…