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Rhode Island Weather
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| As I was posting this I got another note from Sasha -- she is in the process of moving her journal over to her new domain so be sure to update your bookmarks and visit her new site. I'm sure Travis will get his stuff fairly soon; right now he's probably at work, busy cooking up tasty treats. |
Travis and Sasha (whom I mentioned over the weekend as having ISP problems with their websites) sent a note yesterday to their notify list saying that not only would they soon have their websites back up, they would have their very own domain name [www.travisasha.com] -- how cool is that!
Yeah, I know, a lot of people either have their own domain names or are planning on getting one, either using their name or a nickname or their webpage name.
John Scalzi has www.scalzi.com and Dana has www.bobofett.com and Pamie has www.pamie.com, etc. And now Travis and Sasha will have www.travisasha.com.
Well, I think that the last time I checked, www.jimsjournal.com was available... but I've been thinking about this a bit lately and if I were to get my own domain name I really would like to use my name. *sigh* So, you've probably noticed over the past couple years a number of lawsuits over the practice of domain squatting. People who foresaw the growth of the web for business purposes registered bunches of domain names... Let's say there was a company named Acme Widgets, the world's largest producer of industrial widgets... so somebody registers the domain name www.acmewidgets.com and then when Acme Widgets decides they need a website they discover that the name is already taken... and they end up paying thousands of dollars (and sometimes many tens of thousands of dollars) to buy that name. (Lately, however, decisions have been going against domain squatters, so that Acme Widgets might win if they appealed to the international whatchamacallit group that resolves such disputes if they can show that this involves their trade-marked name that they have been using for years -- on the other hand, I understand that the singer/actor Sting lost his attempt to get control of www.sting.com because the word "sting" was just too generic.)
You can see where this is going, can't you. Yes, www.jimlawrence.com is taken.
I could still have www.jimlawrence.net or www.jimlawrence.org or even www.jimlawrenceonline.com or www.jameslawrence.com -- but www.jimlawrence.com is taken.
But okay, there are a lot of people who share my name... Neither my first name nor my last name is all that unusual, so it's not surprising that there are a lot of people who share that combination with me. In fact, I once did a search on google for my name. This was partly to see if I could find myself... and I did... a couple hundred items down the list I found a note I'd written to Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor which he had posted on his site back in '98. I even bookmarked a bunch of my namesakes. There's a professional hockey player. A television weatherman. A guy who runs the bookstore at Cornell. A bunch of college professors and geologists and businessmen... So, was it one of them? Nope.
It appears that I can buy www.jimlawrence.com for my domain name. It is for sale; the asking price is $695.
Yeah, I think if I ever do decide to get my own domain name I will pick one of the other alternatives...
I've got some vacation days to use up... well, I've got the rest of the year to use them (it's use it or lose it before New Year's Eve)...but what better time to take vacation than during summer... Nancy and I have been talking about taking our bikes over to Block Island on the ferry and spending a day riding around, etc. We've not decided which day -- Wednesday or Thursday -- would have better weather for that, so I've decided to take both days off and we'll just see what the weather (and the weather forecast) is like when we wake up in the morning.
