If you mistype Ebay on your way to check out some auctions for gobots or whatever you are into, you may come across www.evay.com. What Evay.com is doing is owning a domain name that is close in spelling to Ebay.com in the hopes that enough people will mispell the name and come to there site. They hope to then make some money off the Ad revenues and click throughs that they can get from their partners. You will notice that their top search links are all Ebay.com related. While this practice is morally questionable and on par with tricking motorist into getting off the highway on the wrong exit with misleading signs and then trying to sell them overpriced goods and services, it is not illegal. After all they paid for the domain name and the hosting and built the site and after all you got lost in the first place.

Now lets just take a look what Verisign has done with their recently squashed “Sitefinder” service.

If you type in www.ebmbay.com you would come up with an error that tells you that their is no domain with that name and you should try something else. When “Sitefinder” was implemented what you would have seen is a page not unlike that of www.evay.com. You would have seen a page with advertisements and click through links and a sentence telling you that the domain that you wanted does not exist. Along with this sentence would be a couple of actual sites that would be close in spelling to what you typed.

The reason that most tech geeks, software organization as well as ICANN, (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) were taken aback and appalled at this “service” is that they were in affect squatting on every internet name not registered for their own gain. (Ad revenue, click through, inflated page stats)

While Verisign would like to say that this is some sort of Innovation on their part. That if they are not free to innovate (Sad copy of lame Microsoft excuse for monopolistic practices) that the internet will eventually die out from lack of investment. The rest of the community I think sees this sad attempt at a business strategie as exactly what it is. A fumbled power grab by a company that cannot compete in it’s core business.

Mark McLaughlin at Verisign would like to say is that “It’s tantamount to saying that the Internet world is flat and therefore there is no need for further exploration.” What I would say to him is that, we know that the Internet world is round and we think that squatting on all the internet names and hijacking peoples experience for your own gain is neither exploration nor innovation.

Go set your internet speed trap somewhere else.

I have been absent from my blog for a little while because of to much other stuff to do.

So now I’m back, (from outer space) since my last entry I have been out to see and buy paintings from open studio people, I’ve been selling more stuff on ebay, installing Emagic Logic 6 on my MAC, and still trying to donate my car to a worthy cause.

Alanna is in full painting mode now. She is trying to finish lots of paintings while she has less than 2 weeks before her open studio. My job is to help out but mostly to just get out of the way.

Some other funny things have been happening around here like our governor being recalled because he actually has experience (read: he is one of them, politicians) does not grope women, and does not make movie reference one liners in regards to billion dollar gubenatorial choices.

My big “Ah ha” moment today was learning about ID’s in CSS.

Best game ever

I posted my first items to sell on Ebay last night and I have to say I’m a little disappointed. I have been buying things off Ebay for a while now but I never sold a product and now I know why people bitch so much about them.

The buying process on Ebay seems really easy so I thought that the selling process would be just easy. Not so. Once of the first things that you have to navigate through is the category listings which are an infinite and gargantuan cluster fuck. Who ever dreamed that you can list a simple alarm clock under so many different categories. You would think it would be a heads up to Ebay that their process was a little screwed up when other software firms make a living from making a software product to make selling things on Ebay easier……

I’m always a great proponent of Ebay from the standpoint of the amount of auctions that they deal with and the size of their community but I think they are lacking in the user interface category and I can see why people turn to other ways to sell stuff when they come across the process that Ebay has in place.

We did some fun flea market shoppin this weekend. Now I just have to try and get rid of some other stuff that we don’t need. (Ebay here I come) I think when you have a small apartment you should get rid of something for every new thing that you buy.

I try to not buy stuff for the sake of having more stuff, so I think my plan will make it easier to keep the place managable.

Yankee dollar talk
To the dictators of the world
In fact it’s giving orders
An’ they can’t afford to miss a word

I’m so bored with the U…S…A…
But what can I do?

The Clash

A very nice weekend secluded at Torodel rancharia. Alanna was a little sick but we still had a great time just hangnin by the pool, reading, swimming, watchin movies, cookin and doin plain old stuff.

Alanna had some problems with her scooter on the way down so we had to make sure that we would be able to get back to the city with it. It all turned out OK though. Great ride both ways, a little hot though.

I got stung by a yellow jacket on sunday so now my finger is all swollen.

(Let me ask you something, was you ever stung by a dead bee?)

You could spend up to five years in prison, pay a $250,000 fine and lose your right to vote for trading a *single* copyrighted song if the Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act (ACCOPS, HR 2752) is passed by Congress. This is a profoundly wrong-headed approach to file-sharing and it’s up to you to stop it. Write your Congressperson today and urge them to stop this unbelievable attack on the American public.

Do something about it.
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Sruprsied the hlel out of me!

Check this out….

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t
mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny
iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can
sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn
mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as
a wlohe.

Fcuknig amzanig huh?

It’s Alanna’s birthday today. We are going out to a nice dinner and then I think we will go on a crime spree around town. Since we spent out birthday money on a nice weekend in Vegas Alanna gets my undivided attention for here birthday. (Well maybe she gets something else).

I signed up for that Friendster thing today. I don’t really understand why…. I guess I am giving in to pressure to have one more online account that I will ignore and forget the password to.

Sometimes real life is a whole lot funnier than people give it credit for.

I think everybody should get one patent. Based on how easy it is to get a patent for something these days I think they should just get rid of the whole process and just give everybody a patent # when they are born.

Here are a couple of examples on how easy it is to get a patent that is neither new nor novel nor interesting in any way.

Method for swinging on a swing
Method for making a sandwich

Microsoft recently lost a court case against a person who with a patent with the following description:

“(d)istributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document.”

What this means, for everybody is that this person who never wrote a single line of code got a patent for the idea of a browser plugin and if Microsoft cannot persuade a judge to reverse this, all browsers sold or distributed will have to remove or change the entire method for plugins. This effects every piece of Flash, embedded video, and PDF on the web.