text: If you ask us, the best thing about gaming is that there’s just so much of it to be had. In our eyes, you’re just not a proper gamer if you don’t have EVERY SINGLE CONSOLE that is available at any given time. So if you take advantage of today’s top offer, you’ll be making us happy.
  Top gaming retailers Game and Gamestation (the clues are in their names) are having a swanky sale of pre-owned consoles, which started earlier today. You can reel in a Nintendo Wii from £39.99; an Xbox 360 from £69.99; a PS3 from £99.99, and one of those old fashioned Nintendo DS things for only £19.99. Of course it’s all very ‘while stocks last’ and there’ll be the obligatory stranger’s DNA all over them, but it’s the cheapest way you’ll get a full house in ‘console bingo’ as far as we can see.
  For years, we've all been used to inboxes bursting at the seams with promotional email. But increasingly disgruntled recipients are starting to make their voices heard, and as a result online retailers are beginning to cut the amount of junk mail they send.
  A report in the New York Times suggests that the change of heart — which might currently be difficult for consumers to notice — could change our inboxes for good. According to the report, the amount of e-commerce spam sent out by the top 100 online retailers has shot up by 87 per cent since 2007, and some companies now manage to send out over 500 emails a year to each of their customers. But that's changing, reports the New York Times:
  ...there are signs of customer burnout. A study of its retail clients by email marketing firm Harte-Hanks found that since 2007, the rates at which recipients open retail emails and click on links have declined. In the first six months of 2007, consumers opened 19% of the retail emails they received and clicked through to the website 3.9% of the time. By the first half of 2011, those numbers shrank to 12.5% and 2.8%, respectively.
  Some retailers are finding that sending fewer emails can pay off. Since cutting back its volume, Nicole Miller has seen the rate at which customers "unsubscribe"-or request to stop receiving emails-drop, and the percentage of recipients who open the emails has grown from 15% to 40%, according to Andrea Marron, director of digital strategy at the company. Meanwhile, the percentage of online sales that began with an email has grown to 17% from 10%.
  Interestingly, unsubscribe rates have hardly changed since 2007, which means that on some level — even if we bitch and moan about them — we don't seem to mind being flooded with promos enough to actually do anything about them. [New York Times]
  Greg and his team replaced our patio, and completed several other small jobs for us including putting up a garden gate and a rose arch. We were thrilled with the end result; the work was done very professionally and looks lovely.
  I was most impressed with Greg’s attention to detail, and his suggestions for the new patio were spot on. Everything went extremely smoothly, the lads were a pleasure to have around, and we would certainly have them back for other jobs that may be needed, and will recommend to anyone who wants a fantastic job done at a very reasonable price. The lads even kept their good humor when having to work through a whole day of rain in order to complete the job!