Firstly there was a seemingly throwaway comment that made me smile on What The Papers Say about the fact that Obama lost thousands of his Twitter followers: “Talk about hitting the President where it will hurt him the least”.

It’s one of the 1st times I have heard somebody in the media actually admit that a whole bunch of virtual Twitter followers are utterly meaningless – it’s almost a brave statement from a journalist who relies on people reading his stuff. But does anyone really care about the drivel people post on Twitter? I’ll leave that conclusion to you.

The other thing I noticed today was that Firefox was using nearly 4GB of memory on my Laptop. That is more crap stored in my working memory than we had long term disk space for the entire University of Leeds in the 1980′s – And I don’t think it’s like we really stored much less useful data.

I wonder how much storage space, air-conditioning, manufacturing, working-electricity etc is being used simply to keep the gazillions of gigabytes of disk farms going just so the worthless opinions about Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse of a billion Internet users can be preserved for ever more.

I shall shut up now, and not add any more to it.

So let’s pretend for a moment that Google isn’t a great encompassing blob of an alien life form and it is in fact different organisations some of which I can be nice about and let’s ponder Picasa.

I have been using Picasa from the start – I don’t know why, it’s not very popular to use Picasa, especially for somebody who doesn’t like Google. I should probably be using Flickr or Deviantart like all the cool kids do but I like Picasa desktop and I like the way it talks to Picasa Web Albums and I like the way Picasa Web Albums are nice and easy to use. But there is more.

Firstly, my Picasa crashed a few weeks ago. I was not happy, I use my Picasa a lot on my laptop for trying to keep tabs on what photos I have on here that I haven’t moved to the Desktop and the huge photo archive I have. Every time I loaded it, it crashed and told me to send a crash report – As long as I didn’t hit “OK” it would carry on working so that was good but I submitted a crash report anyway.  I wasn’t expecting anything, I submit Microsoft crash reports on a weekly basis and have never had any feedback at all but apparently the Picasa team actually read theirs. and a nice chap called Fernando Corrado asked me to test a new version which promptly crashed too. Eventually after 2 days of trying new versions and tweaking things the Picasa people discovered I had a screwed up installation of Quicktime that was causing some previews to die and created a fix. My Picasa now works properly again and it is nice to see such a quick response for what is really, free software.

Anyway, armed with a working Picasa and being generally impressed so far with the new face recognition, I decided to let Picasa run riot over my desktop.  I started it about 48 hours ago now and it claims to be 14% of the way through recognising faces (which is odd because 4 hours ago I restarted it and it claimed to be 21% of the way through).

It is sloooowly indexing 3 terabytes of disk on a 3.5ghz Pentium and has found just under 5,100 folders full of photos. It has found over 1,500 photos of me now ranging over 25 years, some of which have me wearing glasses, funny hats and in one, a Pippi Longstocking wig and a diamond fairy tiara (Hey I get bored in Wal*Mart sometimes). Every time I look at it, it has dug up more and more obscure photos of people with terrifying accuracy and it is still going strong. It also seems quite good at sharing the facial information (via my Gmail account I assume) between my laptop and the Desktop. I am deliberately avoiding asking what Google will do with the huge amount of data I am giving it but I am pretty sure now Google could track me pretty well with its hidden spy cameras since it even recognised me in my tinfoil helmet. Damn.

(Why wouldn’t Picasa let me link that from my Picasa album? Weird)

I can’t find much wrong with it – There are some pretty useless filters in it (why would I want to find all purple photos, or all orange photos?) and some seemingly useful filters missing. One really useful thing would be for it to be able to detect naked photos  (ok, let’s call it a porn filter). There are very few good tools for detecting porn by flesh percentage and *ah hem* “body features” on Windows – Hyperdyne’s Snitch and Media Detective are the only two I can think of and they cost more than I paid for my copy of Vista. It is a feature many people need and want so go on Google, add it please?I suspect all the tools are in there, although please… It will freak me out if you start being able to identify people without faces, that is going a little too far ok?

And now for the downside. Don’t worry Picasa, this isn’t about you, I have nothing but praise for you today and this weblog entry would have stopped here if I hadn’t needed to register a Gizmo5 account for Jess today.

I merrily browsed to http://gizmo5.com only to be redirected to http://www.google.com/gizmo5/ and told:

Gizmo5 Has Been Acquired by Google
New user signup has been suspended and will return when we re-launch.
To receive information about the re-launch please enter your email address.

This is not useful… I needed a Gizmo5 account today and now Google own it I assume that the useful “Forward to Skype” feature will end up broken since Skype are in the business of selling Skypein numbers and won’t want Google Voice numbers supplying this for free. I assume it will also create a mess because Google Voice is only available in the US and Gizmo was available everywhere. Plus of course, it’s a pain since I wanted an account today dammit! Grrrrr.

On the plus side, this means I didn’t have to write a Weblog entry that was full of praise for The Evil Empire.  Got to take some good out of everything I guess.

(I also wonder why WordPress wouldn’t allow me to have that last line in a paragraph by itself… This thing has a mind of its own I swear)

For those of you who haven’t experienced Twitter I ask you to stop reading now. I offer no definitions, no useful information and no links. You don’t need to read this posting, get on with your life and ignore it. A life without Twitter is a richer life indeed.

A few days ago, Leigh explained Twitter to me and made it all a little more clear to me. Some of what she said made sense, I could see some small merit in micro-blogging and as a 55-word story writer, I obviously have a sense that small can often be a lot more beautiful. I don’t object to the concept of Twitter per-se, I object to how people seem to use it. Twitter originally came into my field of annoyance because of its interface to Facebook; now unfortunately it seems to be infecting everything. Twitter updates the Facebook statuses of people so I would get a feed somewhat like this.

• “Pillock is waiting for a train.”

• “Pillock has been waiting for 5 minutes, the train is now late.”

• “Pillock wonders where the train is, and goes to get coffee.”

• “Pillock thinks the coffee is horrible but at least the train is coming soon.”

• “Pillock finally sees the train.”

• “Pillock is getting on the train now.”

• “Pillock doesn’t seem to be able to get a seat, damn train company.”

I will stop now… Unfortunately, this endless microglimpse into somebody’s tedious existence won’t. So why do people do it? I could probably come up with all sorts of theories; some of which would be pretty sound but ultimately it all boils down to the fact they do it because they are obviously quite deranged. Is anybody interested in this? Isn’t there enough quality literature in the world for people to read without them sitting there all day reading this constant stream of dirge? Apparently you can get people’s Twitter feeds sent to your mobile phone – What the fuck? WHY?

Maybe part of the problem is that it seems to be acceptable in the modern work place to be connected to garbage like this. When I was at BT, it used to be a particular bugbear of one of our security people that if people got into work and sat down and read the newspaper for the first 4 hours, they’d probably be sacked but that people seemed to think it was quite acceptable to sit reading random stuff on the Interwebs all day, playing on Facebook and the like. Is it a way that office people can escape work that is more acceptable than sitting in the garden reading Treasure Island? I pity what society will become if it is. On that matter, I find it somewhat ironic that I used to effectively twitter for a living. People used to have to pay $3.00 for each of my 140 word messages but then they were sad wankers, with no other friends than the imaginary people at the other end of their phone. Oh… Wait a minute… Ummm.

Maybe it is part of the new instant news society. As news consumers we seem to expect second by second updates but they aren’t useful, they aren’t healthy and they often do nothing more than confuse the whole situation. The average person isn’t trained as an intelligence analyst and the average person’s mind isn’t quite that fucked up enough to want to be. Nicholas Taleb writes quite well on the subject of the psychological effect of constant streams of updated information in his book “Fooled by randomness” – If you can ever drag yourself away from reading inane twitter messages, weblog postings and RSS feeds full of online comics; I suggest you give it a read.

A few of the armies of the world still employ War Artists; Australia and Britian being two of the key ones. The theory is that a painting can take in all the events of a day, of a battle, of a campaign and merge them all into one single, well thought out visual statement. It can do this far better than a single photograph, a single video clip, a single report. Whilst I don’t argue that very occasionally a potographer or film cameraman does capture an iconic image of war; I do agree with history that the painting does it far better. What’s wrong with people noting their thoughts down in a little notepad, a camera or an electronic organiser and summarising their day later? They could even use Twitter to do it and write something like “Late Trian, Crap Coffee, No Seat – But Long John Silver whisked me away and saved me. Thanks Robert.”

I quite like Giolla’s Livejournal. He occasionally posts a small Haiku that summarises his week which seems like a perfect use for Twitter – Maybe people could learn a lesson from that but they won’t will they. They will continue to think that people are interested in every breath they take. Sting was wrong. We aren’t.

Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

It’s all the fault of the sodding electronic calculator. See back when I was younger than I ever really was, there were slide rules, and a slide rule looked like this:

I appreciate that many people reading this won’t have ever used a slide rule in anger, but the principal behind them is that most of the time, you more or less guess the answer, as opposed to have it displayed to 9 decimal places in monocolour LCD lettering. Look up a little from here… See the third scale down? Just to the right of the 3? There’s Pi marked. It’s marked roughly between 3.1 and 3.2 – It’s about 3.15 in fact. If you want to multiply Pi by 3 you pop the two numbers together on the correct scales and read off about 9.45 on the result scale; if you want to multiply it by 30, you multiply that by 10 in your head… If you want to multiply it by 3 million, you do the same only with more zeroes and your error rate has gone up considerably, but it doesn’t matter much really, does it?

Why is this annoying me? Apart from the fact that I want to shoot people who can quote Pi to more than 6 places? Well it’s the post office, that’s what it is. They have digital scales now, and when the parcel you are posting weighs 501 grammes, they charge you for over 500 grammes. Generally speaking by that point, I just rip a corner off and make them re-weigh it but even so, when did we become so obsessed with this “down the nearest gramme” accuracy? I don’t like it. Make them stop. I am not even going to start ranting about their new letter size measurement devices which very much depend on the operator’s skill at getting parcels through a little plastic measuring slot – Well I am not going to rant YET, at any rate.

I want markets back where they plonked stuff on scales and weighed it in pounds. If it was 4.4 pounds, and cost 30p a pound, they’d charge you about £1. 30 because that was roughly what 4.4 * 30 is (a slide rule would confirm this to you, if you were to ask it, especially a W.H.Smiths one with the little clear slider thing missing like most of them are these days). These days they pop things on digital scales, tell the scales that the things you want cost 78p per 100 grammes, and when it weighs 264.5g it prints a label that says £2.08 (yes, the bastards round it up too).

I blame the Common Market.

Having been raised in this belief, I would consider it sacrilege for somebody to suggest that there may be something better and more practical than the shed. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? Well far be it for me to try and improve on the shed, but I do think I have found a possible contender for the next generation of shed. The Ambulance!

Before you scoff, think about it! It’s a huge shed, with lots of twiddly things in it, loads of cupboards, built in seats, and and and… AN ENGINE AND WHEELS!

You can drive it away and have your shed somewhere else. Think about that! Ok, so now the more naive of you may be asking “Why an Ambulance? Why not just get a camper van?”. Camper vans are gay, that’s why. People who have camper vans are generally utter knobends who should be banned from the road and then shot. Ambulances on the other hand… Well, you can tell people you got it because it’s a big van, whilst secretly dreading the idea of ever actually having to use up all that space in there. When you get really bored, you can hunt for the sirens, and work out how to reconnect the blue lights. You can try and work out what all the data cabling is for, you can even try and work out why the interior lights only work sometimes. AND THERE ARE BUTTONS! LOTS OF BUTTONS!

Trust me on this one any Northern Men out there… Before you go out to the Shed Shop to look for a new hideaway; have a look in Autotrader and see if there are any old ambulances for sale first. You will thank me.

Oh yes. Here’s one I made earlier: http://lorry.org/Misc/Ambulance/

When I was younger, I had a near perfect memory. I could remember 62 character random passwords fairly easily, I could remember passwords from years earlier and having a head filled with god knows how many passphrases seemed to be a fairly normal thing. I didn’t forget them, I didn’t need to keep a note of them.

Then I got ancient, and senile.

I found today that I can’t remember passphrases I set 10 years ago even though oddly, I can still remember passwords I had 25 years ago. The problem is that sometimes I need passwords I set 10 years ago. It’s not that I completely forgot them, I remember it is a passphrase about a sheep and a thunderstorm and I remember some of the words, but I can’t remember the capitalisation nor the punctuation, nor even really the word order. It’s useless, I doubt I will ever actually get it. I also have endless boxes of tape archive that when I contemplate it, I know I don’t actually know the passwords to any more (even if I can find the software).

The point is, I never thought I would forget them so I never thought of making a note of them.

So my advice? Despite everything that grown ups will tell you, and despite everything I tend to teach normally, start making a note of your passwords. Keep them in a heavily protected storage device, and use a passphrase that you will certainly remember and use it every few days to make sure you do remember it. Make it a good one, and you’ll be fine.

Whilst you are keeping the passwords, you may as well keep copies of the software that will allow you to use the encrypted thing, the backup program you used, the weird mailer, the weird key storage utility or ssh program. In 20 or 30 years when you want to read your old mail, you may be glad of it.

Pop to http://www.truecrypt.org/ – Install that and make yourself a disk that you can keep all this stuff on, without having to worry about extra security. Hell on an encrypted disk you can even store your passwords in plain text in a text file. Keep a backup copy of that password file on another encrypted disk and tell a close friend the password to it – Don’t give them the disk but ask them to keep the password safe, this’ll cover you in the event of complete senility too as long as you remember how to use a computer. That’s all, nothing complicated, just do it, and you will thank me one day.

Now, with all that said and done – If anyone remembers the sodding password to my PGP keys, and what on earth those sheep were doing in that thunderstorm, can they please tell me? Quickly? Before I go even more mad?

They are not the same colour! They can’t be… They look nothing like one another. I figured it was one of those cons that makes you waste hours checking. Ok, so I admit, I checked and cut the squares out and popped them side by side in Microsoft Digital Image Editor.

It’s not fair! There must be something wrong with my picture editing software – That is the only explanation.

Just to further confuse me, when I tried to convince Giolla that this was just the Internet and Microsoft, trying to mess with my head, he sent me another – In this one, the central cross colours are meant to be identical…

Sure enough, as proof positive that it is my graphics program and not my brain that is fucked, this is what it came out with:

See, don’t trust computers, they are all in collusion and mess with your head and eyes. Well they won’t send ME mad. I am wise to you all, do you hear? DON’T MESS WITH MY BRAIN!

In computing terms, I probably class as somewhat experienced. Back when I used to do computer things, I used to systems manage whole countries and in my time, I have managed networks with hundreds of thousands of machines on them of all different types. I was almost certainly one of the first systems manager in Europe to be perfectly happy managing VMS and Unix Systems on the same network with no preference to which were there – If I wasn’t the first, then I was certainly the only one who would ever admit it and talk about it at the DECUS conferences.

In terms of systems management, PRIMOS was my first, on a 2250 in the early 80′s, and Unix my second, on GEC 63/30′s in the later part of the 80′s. By the early 90′s I had started managing bigger VAXes and in 1992/93, I started doing DECUS presentations on managing VMS and Unix on the same network. After that I had started writing more on managing large networks as it was becoming commonplace for the old single-flavour networks to be picking up VMS, Unix and various PC Network Operating Systems. At British Rail in 1994 I don’t think I could even count the number of systems and lightly connected networks there were all over the country. In the last few years Unix has got a new lease of life with BSD and Linux going open-source, Sun pushing more and more into various places and now even Apple getting in on the bandwagon. I haven’t really kept up but Unix is Unix is Unix.

I run Windows on all my machines at home. Well that’s not strictly true, I run Ubuntu Linux on my nameserver, but pretty much everything else is on Windows. This seems to shock people and I don’t understand why. Because I have experience with all these other systems there seems to be an assumption that I would run some sort of Unix clone on my PC but I don’t understand why; especially since I learned to hate the thing before most of the people who assume this were born.

So now… For my convenience and so that I don’t have to explain myself once a month, I will write it in here.

Yes. I use Windows (currently XP, I am sure I will go to Vista one day when enough people have told me that it is any good) at home. Yes, I rather like Windows even if I do think the logo has an obvious Swastika in it. On the whole, it does what I want it to do and it does it fairly smoothly and easily. I admit, I have to fiddle. I admit, I swear at it a lot, I admit, I get pissed off with it and blame it all on Bill Gates and yes, sometimes I despise every atom of Windows’ being. It’s not perfect, but for a desktop system it’s the best I have found and for the vast majority of people reading this, I have used a lot more than you to make that comparison. When I want software I can usually find something free that will do what I want; if not I can usually download a trial version that will do it anyway. Stuff I buy in shops (or at carboot sales) usually comes with a Windows Driver on a CD and plug and play no longer seems to be “Plug and Pray” as long as you have decent USB hubs.

I have a whole room full of VAXes, SGI machines, Suns and other odd machines. The operating systems these things run were good for what they did, but I really have no urge to fight with them any more. I am happy to let Windows win. I miss not having a simple command line interface sometimes but then again I have add-ons to Windows that let me do a lot of that now. I have tried to use Apple machines but honestly, I just can’t bring myself to feel “Holier than Thou” enough to be an effective Apple User, my Sanctimony Quotient and available money are too low for me to be an Apple User.

I have tried most of the mainstream BSDs and Linuxes; they annoy me. They are all subtly different and most of them won’t install on most of the (not very complicated) hardware I have. The fact they all seem to want to put the configuration files in different places and in different formats is really irritating. I installed Ubuntu Linux on my nameserver to replace FreeBSD (which as Unixes went, was the most consistent of the new ones) when FreeBSD failed miserably to install on the new machine. Ubuntu worked out of the box and was easy to install and run but I got locked out of the machine for 6 months once because of some ridiculous crapness on its part, and eventually had to reinstall when I needed to upgrade something. It works now, as long as I leave it alone but I really don’t like using it, even with the windows looking user interface it feels like stepping back 10 years.

Just so we are clear here – I am talking about Desktop machines, not servers. Servers I tend to login to once every few months for no more than a few minutes, hopefully. If I can avoid that and have them managed automagically, then even better. I don’t give a toss what operating system a server runs as long as it is the best one for the job and it does it quickly, securely and effectively. I don’t understand why Unix seems to have come out as the modern multi-user server OS. A few years ago, Unix was something that was there to quickly hack something up on, it was quick and dirty but effective. It was a Swiss Army knife as opposed to a Metric only Snap-On Socket Set. For serious stuff, Unix wasn’t much use, everything about it was too general purpose and hacky and all the bigger operating systems had their own specialisms and did their own thing much better. For the last 10 or 15 years a large amount of very clever people have been sucked into trying to make this hacky little operating system something it isn’t; adding more and more functions to the blades on the Swiss Army knife without realising that they are weakening the whole thing beyond belief. They aren’t doing any original research here, I heard them announce clustering a while ago, something which you really can’t beat VMS for. How about virtual machines. IBM anyone? It seems to be that every single little application on a modern Unix webserver needs to have SQL installed but if someone had worked out a decent Record Management System by now, there would be no need for a web counter to suddenly need 2 sources of data management. Don’t get me wrong here, Windows isn’t the thing for this, Windows is a good Desktop System and even though NT was developed from VMS, I have never been at all impressed it as a server. Just think though – If all of these young programmers who have wasted 10 or more years of their lives and seem set to waste another 20 had all collaborated on a project to develop a new operating system where could we be now? The networking, filing system and security of VMS, the virtual machine capabilities of CP, the security models of TOPS and PRIMOS, the Database capabilities of the AS/400 – need I go on? Think of all the things they COULD have done, instead of wasting their time with a pissy little operating system that wasn’t even much good for anything when it came out. Think of it in terms of Microsoft taking DOS, adding a windowing system to make it into Windows 2, adding some networking and multitasking to make it Windows 3.11 and then stopping pretty much there and doing nothing else to it.

Rewriting Minix (an old and obsolete small Unix system) was something that everybody who studied Operating System Design did, that’s what it was for. It was lovely as a teaching tool but about as far from rocket science as you can get in computing terms. When a Finnish chap called Linus Torvalds developed and released something called Linux as a result of one of these rewrites it seems that nobody told him he should be locked up in Luddite Prison for crimes against the development of new technologies. Torvalds and his cronies have naively and unwittingly put us back years in terms of development, especially when they all started taking the ever important commercial dollar. It is an easy and cheap path to fame to work on making somebody else’s wheel a little bit better and a little bit more round but never forget, even though it looks somewhat more hexagonal now than the square it once was, it’s the same old wheel. It’s a dangerous game criticising the historical development of Linux; its many rabid fans often make Scientologists look open-minded. As soon as you say something like “What’s the big deal? All he did was to do what everybody else was doing in school at the time.” you are instantly open to responses like “Yea, you are just bitter because you didn’t think of doing it.” – On my part, no, I didn’t think of doing it. I never for a moment believed that in the 21st century, people would still be using Unix and it would still look pretty much the same. There are people today struggling with Unix clones who have no idea of the wonderful things that older operating systems had in them that that have now all but been forgotten. Oh Brave New World which has such obsolete shit stuck in it. All you clever kids, stop tinkering with somebody else’s rusty old steam engines and get out there and build us some fucking space ships!

To close, and at further risk of mixing even more metaphors and upsetting all the loonies, religious zealots and narrow minded know it alls; I am quite happy to be Windows user. No amount of nagging me is going to change my view on this and I can’t foresee anything else coming along that will budge me from this path until attitudes and religious beliefs change. For my usage, it is the currently best desktop operating system there is and until those days come, I am sticking with it, through bad and good.

When I first heard that the British Government were pushing this Chip and Pin idea; I seriously had to check tha it wasn’t April the first. For those people lucky enough not to be in the UK, Chip and Pin is a new way of paying for things with a Credit or Debit Card.

British payment cards have a little chip in them at one side, effectively making them into a smart card. They also have the magnetic and signature strip on the back so that they can be used abroad or used in cash machines without chip readers. When you pay with one of these, you either give it to the person at the till, or pop it into the little card reading machine yourself, wait for it to confirm the amount and then type in your 4 digit PIN to complete the purchase. This should ring some alarm bells already simply on the basis of casual theft. Anyone standing close to you when you are hassled in a shop queue and not being at all careful (as presumably you would be at a cash machine) can see you type your PIN and then thump you a few yards up the street, nick your cards and clean your account out at the closest cash machine.

This is a little dirty for the likes of a weblog like this but it’s not something that should be ignored just for that reason. Saying that this isn’t where the real issue lies. The real issue lies in the fact that the cards still have the magnetic strip and don’t use a different PIN for the smartcard and the strip. Financially, it is not very viable to clone a smartcard at the moment; it’s possible but until it becomes more useful (that would be when identity cards come into force) the risk is still low. On the other hand, it is pathetically easy to copy a magnetic strip. When you give your card to somebody before you type the PIN into a machine, you don’t know what they are doing with it. Have they swiped it and copied the strip? Is the “Chip and Pin” machine recording your number? Is there a camera in the roof monitoring what you type on the keypad? All it takes is one swipe of your magnetic strip by a shop assistant, a waiter, a petrol attendant or a well equipped prostitute and a knowledge of your PIN and your details could be sent to across the world within seconds, your stripe details written to another card and your bank account cleared before you have even left the shop. Personally I find it quite annoying when the country’s biggest supermarket (that’d be Tesco) has their staff take your card off you and swipe it behind the counter rather than let you slide it into the card reader like most other shops do. At least when I physically put the card into the machine myself I know that it can’t be reading the magnetic stripe. Tesco are just asking for staff fraud to happen. In fact, any checkout employees reading this who want to buy a 3 track magnetic card reader/writer, I am doing a good deal on them.

It seems obvious that for this to be classed as an advance in security is just idiotic but then that is a fundamental of Groupthink. Next time how about just sticking a photograph on the card? it’d be easier and cheaper. TV shows like “The Real Hustle” have been showing you how to rip people off for the last year with this and international gangs (should I be emotive and say GANGS PROBABLY LINKED TO ORGANISED CRIME AND TERRORIST ORGANISATIONS?) have been stealing hundreds of millions using this nice and easy free cash machine for quite a while now. It’s only in the last couple of weeks that it seems to have hit the news.

As far as I can see, the government decided that the country should all have Chip and Pin from February the 14th, 2006. Supposedly it is possible to demand a card that doesn’t have a chip; I will have to remember to do this sometime. It’s be nice to have seen any of their reasonings and to find out who their security consultants were so that we could all stand around and throw peanuts at them. Frankly and speaking from a professional point of view here, they must all either have been fucking morons with no understanding of anything at all or just out of their head on the Crade-A cocaine they’d bought with the money the government threw at them for their advice.

When it comes to it, I didn’t register any of the trademarked domains I had back then to sell them, I registered them so we could pitch sites at the companies involved and when we’d convinced them of the wonders of the Internet, we would already have the sitenames to build the site on. Way back then in the early 90′s all but one company said “We’ll never want to be on the Internet, we have no interest, sorry chaps”. A few years on when people did want to be on the Internet, my company lawyers acted badly in my interest and when they were approached started insisting on money changing hands. We did later make a claim against the lawyers for acting without instruction or something but again that’s all forgotten in the mists of time.

Yesterday I registered an Indian domain for a small project I am starting, and I had to search out a suitable one. I noticed that a hell of a lot of the ones I was interested in had already been registered and parked on Sedo (a site that sells domain names). When I registered the one I wanted finally, I was offered the chance to put the domain up for sale on the very site I had used to register the domain. This struck me as very weird and a very odd way for the industry to have gone after all the shit I got in the early days for doing what I did.

I have only ever sold two domain names. I wonder if that is surprising to most people? I sold one years ago because of the afformentioned lawyers (I think I made about $5,000 from it of which I got about $1000), and I sold the other because somebody offered me a lot of money for a generic domain name. I have had a lot stolen from me – In the old days it was a lot easier to fake transfer requests and a lot of people did. After the transfer was done it was nearly impossible to get them back without years in court and a lot of money. I have had a few stolen “at source” too. One of the largest and oldest registries (no names) had staff who were all too willing to simply steal a domain from the owner, and register it to somebody else for a suitable bribe. There was no paperwork in those days and the electronic trail would of course be deleted. This isn’t imagination, I believe a lot of this sort of thing came out into the open in the sex.com court case.

One of my favourite domain names was richersounds.com – Again we originally registered this because we wanted to pitch a site to Richer Sounds, a rather good audio equipment company in England. A few years on the domain was up for renewal (they were free when I started registering them, amazing hey!) and I noticed richersounds.com was about to expire. I like Richer Sounds – They used to give lollipops away in their stores and once in Leeds when they had run out and I jokingly wrote a letter to Julian Richer (the owner), telling him to send the store more lollipops. A week or so later, Julian sent me a whole box of lollies. You can’t beat service like that. When I noticed richersounds.com expiring, I contacted Julian and arranged the domain transfer and everything at no cost; just so that they wouldn’t lose it. I guess they will take my Superhighwayman Hat off me for things like that, won’t they.

As I seem to say a lot these days, it’s odd how the world is changing but whatever happens, the lawyers will get richer off the back of it all. I wonder… Ummm.

bash$ whois richerlawyers.com

No match for “RICHERLAWYERS.COM”.

There you go somebody, I am sure that will make you a few dollars somewhere.