Month: October 2007

Stuff

No more 1997 road trip stuff at the top of the page. I’ll miss that. Maybe on the twentieth anniversary, I’ll actually post some of the video.

Sadly, I don’t really have anything exciting to add in my first new post in two weeks or so. Life has pretty much been about school, work, and more of both for the past few weeks. We did make it to the fair on Wednesday and to the Jewish Festival in Greensboro with my mom on Sunday. And we successfully avoided the North Carolina Identity Politics Gathering, after accidentally wandering a little too close to the South Carolina version in Columbia the week before.

This weekend, though, I have no schoolwork due, three consecutive days off work, and plans to go someplace relatively far away. Therefore, I will not be answeting the phone or checking email after Thursday night, lest these plans somehow be ruined, as so many others have recently. OK, maybe I won’t go that far, but I really do need to get away for a couple of days.

For your perusal: new photos in the Carolinas photo gallery, including shots of Columbia, Durham, Lexington, Burlington, and Kannapolis.

Victim Mentality

Yet another example of the emerging propensity among “conservatives” toward the very same whining oversensitivity they used to deride so instinctively in liberals. Like so many annoying granola leftists, these right wing nimrods seem to be spending way too much time desperately searching for something to be offended by.

Of course, it helps your case if you can portray yourself as the underdog, even when your ideology is pretty much in control of the country at the present time, right? Fundamentalist Christians have been doing it for years. From some of their rhetoric, you’d think Christians were such a persecuted minority that they were in danger of becoming exctinct, when in fact they constitute a vast (and controlling) majority of the American population.

Perpetual Victim Syndrome is problematic enough when it develops in people who have actually faced some adversity. Can we please skip all these tears for the vast “persecuted” conservative majority?

Email

Good news du jour: UNCG is now offering the option of using Gmail for student email accounts rather than the suck-ass, miserable Lotus Notes/Domino web interface that was required upto this point — and that looked and acted like it dated from about 1995, and that didn’t even allow POP access. I can now use Apple Mail for all my incoming mail again, rather than having to access some stupid, cumbersome web-based program for the school-related stuff. I am very much the happy.

Insomnia

It’s 2:30 in the morning. In three hours, I have to get up and go in for what will probably be an eleven-hour day at work. I haven’t been to sleep yet. I’m stuck somewhere between “in a violent rage” and “on the verge of tears”.

Why can’t I sleep? There’s nothing extraordinary on my mind. I wound down before going to bed. I did everything right, and I’m still wide awake, pondering how the only thing that’s going to suck more than tonight for me will be tomorrow morning. Assuming there’s any sleep buffer at all between the two.

I’ve read. I’ve watched TV. I’ve cuddled with Edgar. I’ve counted sheep and tried the couch and the other bed. I’ve also reminded myself how I once swore I’d never have another job where it was all but impossible to call in sick, but that’s another story entirely.

This sucks.

Uptown Boy

How anyone could read this and still think not only that I was employed by Uptown Magazine, but also that I would be in charge of their hiring, is realy beyond me. To coin a phrase: the stupid hurts.

Anyway, after an hour and forty-five minutes of sleep and ten-plus hours of work, I can’t exactly say that I’ve recovered from last night’s insomniac mess, but I’m pretty sure I’ll at least sleep a whole lot better tonight.

Domain Nightmare

Groceteria has been down all day due to an error by my domain registrar. I renewed that domain (and this one) last week. Neither was ever marked as renewed, however, even though my card was charged and I received a confirmation. Thus, Groceteria.com “expired” today and the site has been inaccessible ever since, causing me more anguish than I need right now, not to mention a bit of money too. To make it worse, the aforementioned registrar is apparently opting not to answer any phone calls today.

Consider this a warning, though, that I have a feeling this site may disappear on Monday as well, when its “expiration” hits. If it does, you may rest assured that I’ll be finding a new domain registrar on Tuesday.

Domain Nightmare, Part 2

The sites seem to be back. For now. I’m busily trying to get all my domains moved the bloody hell out of the Tucows/Dotmaniac universe before something else can go wrong.

Here’s a chronology to date:

19 October: I renewed Groceteria.com and Otherstream.com on Dotmaniac’s website.

24 October: Despite being renewed, Groceteria.com “expired”, with its status changed to something called “clientHold”, which — I later found out — means that it has expired and will no longer resolve.

25-26 October: I spent the bigger pasrt of both days trying to contact anyone who could help me. Dotmaniac never answered their phone: no voice mail, no nothing. I also tried contacting Tucows, the back-end registrar (Dotmaniac is a reseller), and got no response from them either. Groceteria had been offline for at least 36 hours when I had to leave town on Thursday, and I was pretty sure Otherstream would be gone by the time I got back on Sunday.

28 October: I was right. By Sunday, there was no Groceteria, no Otherstream, and no email. Needless to say, no one at Tucows or Dotmaniac had gotten back to me either.

29 October: More contact attempts, more frustration. Early this afternoon, a friend of Mark’s suggested a method that might at least get the sites back online, and it seems to have worked. I’m now trying to get all the domains transferred to a different registrar. I also filed a complaints with ICANN, the BBB, and Tucows compliance office.

I really didn’t need this right now. I’m already about as tightly wound as I can stand to be, and with this and other things hanging over me, my very much-needed “stress reducing” weekend road trip didn’t really do the trick either. I’m not a pretty sight today.

Thanks to incompetence (or just plain negligence) on the part of Dotmaniac.com, I’ve wasted countless hours, lost a fair amount of ad revenue (and a good chunk of my hard-won search engine placement), at Groceteria, and become an ever bigger ball of stress than I was a week ago.

I’ve also discovered that you should be realy careful where you register your domains, because there’s almost no oversight over the process, and you could find yourself at the mercy of a shady operator like Dotmaniac.com. These slimy sacks of shit are a part of the Interlink Network Group, located in Vancouver WA. If they ever answered their phones, you could call them up and tell them what you thought of them at 888.888.1051 or 877.744.6638. You could, if so inclined, also send them a fax at 360.571.4538. However, if you actually do business with them, you’re taking a terrible risk.

Update: For more information, see this page I’ve created about my problems with Dotmaniac.com. Feel free to link to it as well.