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So whither yer humble host?

Despite the fact that I haven’t been all that talkative online lately, depsite all the stress a week or so back, despite the occasional sleepless night, I’m feeling happier and more satisfied with life than I have in years, thanks.

A lot of very positive things have happened to me in the past thirty months, leaving San Francisco and moving back to North Carolina being at the top of the list. Returning to a part of the country that just works better for me at this stage in my life, moving with Mark into out first house, being in close proximity to so many more road trip opportunities, eating barbecue again, and reconnecting with my family have all been great (although the latter has tried my patience from time to time).

Not everything has been so rosy, though. My job quest, and the subsequent realization that I’m not really qualified to do much that anyone wants to pay me for, have been a bit depressing, and have led to some periods of financial tension and general mental anguish. I’ve had a significant chunk of family health issues to contend with, and I’m nervous about what the future holds. The insurance nightmare from last December and January gave me fits. And then there was that whole cancer thing. That kind of sucked, too.

But I’m feeling pretty damned good about everything right now. I’ve lost all of the excess weight I’d put on since moving back east, and then some. I’m getting some exercise, if maybe not quite enough. I’m earning a reasonable amount of money now, if not as much as I should be. And I’m in school, preparing for a profession that fascinates me, and thinking that I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. That’s pretty exciting, and I sometimes get all tingly just thinking about it.

I have goals and plans for the future. I have items in my calendar, and things I need to do, and research I enjoy, and projects that fascinate me, even if they do cause me short-term stress. In short, I feel like I have a reason to get out of bed every morning. To be honest, that wasn’t always the case a year or so back.

Not everything is perfect, of course. I need to find more robust sources of income now, not two years from now. My parents continue to age, and I continue to worry about how I’ll deal with the inevitable problems that will become more and more a part of our lives because of it. I could still stand to lose a pound or fifty. But my outlook is positive, I’m making progress, and as I said above, I’m generally happier than I’ve been in a long time,a dn plan to stay that way.

At least as long as I never have to face another week where I have to face all of the following at the same time:

• Potential hard drive failure.
• Disappearing domains and unresponsive registars.
• Two big class projects.
• My dad having emergency surgery on his shoulder.
• My mom needing yet another explanation of how to check her email and downolad photos from her camera, while having a simultaneous emotional meltodwn because of my dad’s surgery.
• A big pile of extra, unscheduled work, half involving a new client and the other half involving major changes in a job I’ve only had for four months to begin with.

Actually, I think I’ll be OK even if I do have to face all of those at once. I’d just feel sorry for anyone who had to be round me. And glad that I had a most wonderful and supportive husband.

Speaking of anniversaries, my parents are having their fifty-eighth today. Which is pretty damned amazing. And it got lost in the shuffle, but Mark and I had our sixth a couple of weeks ago as well:

I love that boy. And our anniversary itself didn’t really get lost in the shuffle, only my post about it. And that’s because I haven’t yet had the chance to put up our exciting anniversary road trip pictures yet.

At the rate I’m going, it might not happen before Christmas…

Earlier this month, two of my sites went down due to negligence (and perhaps even fraud) on the part of Dotmaniac.com, a part of the Interlink Network Group.

Despite having taken my money to renew these domains and confirming to me that they had been renewed, Dotmaniac never processed the registrations, and the domains stopped resolving when the old expiration dates hit. Dotmaniac seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth; they no longer answer phone calls or tech support email requests at all. There’s no voice mail or anything; the phone just keeps ringing. Their website, however, lives on, still accepting registrations and renewals, although its security certificate seems to have expired.

The problem with a dead or otherwise unresponsive registration provider, though, is not the money you spent (which should be recoverable through a credit card dispute) but the fact that you’re sort of screwed in general. Moving your domain to another registrar requires cooperation from the one you’re leaving, so what do you do when the old registrar disappears?

Thanks to incompetence, negligence, orjust plain fraud 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 a big screaming ball of stress at a time when I didn’t really need it.

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.

Chronology:

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.

Solutions:

I’m not entirely sure which technique worked, but here’s what I did to get out of this black hole. At some point after doing all three of these things, my sites came back online and I was able to move my domains to a different registrar:

1. I went into the Dotmaniac automated web interface and switched off “Domain Locking”, which is a status designed to keep your domain from being “slammed” by other registrars.
2. I emailed the compliance officer at Tucows/OpenSRS, which is Dotmaniac’s wholesaler. His name is Paul Karkas, he’s based in Toronto, his email address is compliance@opensrs.org, his phone number is 416.538.5458. He never responded, but may have moved the process along. I’ve heard that he’s a good and competent sort, but again, I wouldn’t know because he never responded.
3. I filed a complaint with ICANN, the board which oversees all domain registrars. They do not investigate complaints individually, but they do send a copy of all complaints to the registrar in question, which often acts as a swift kick in the butt to slow-moving registrars.

Final Note:

If you’ve been victimized as well, you have my sympathies. Based on the email I’ve received, I’m not the only one this has happened to. What you see on this page is all the information I have. I can’t give you any more, but feel free to check back for updates. I’m still waiting to see the results of my credit card dispute, and will post them when I have something.

More Domains Associated with Dotmaniac/Interlink Network Group:

• http://phpdomain.net/
• http://hostnetcenter.com/
• http://www.domain-maniac.com/
• http://www.srsengine.com/
• http://www.dmdns.com/
• http://www.domainmonger.com/
• http://www.myhome.net/

The last one’s an ISP in Vancouver WA, apparently. They don’t ever answer their phones either. If I were you, I’d avoid doing business with any of these sites.

Some thoughts after a little road trip surrounded by lots of Christmas music on the radio:

First, I could listed to the hippopotamus song all day long. Really.

Second, if I ever again have to sit through the goddamned song about the kid who wants to buy his dying mama some new shoes “in case she meets Jesus tonight”, OR the monologue where Santa breaks down and cries upon finding himself in some soldier’s depressing, dingy apartment, I will probably end up ripping my ears from my head while simultaneously vomiting all over everything in sight. Which probably won’t be pleasant for me nor for anyone else in the vicinity.

That said, this one’s still the best.

More about the actual road trip soon, but the picture above is where I had dinner Wednesday night. Any guesses where I was?

There’s this crazy lady at work. I’ll call her “Agnes” even though that’s not her real name. Agnes is about sixty years old, and is a recent migrant from upstate New York.

Agnes is all about gloom and doom, and can convince you that the most benign ailment or medication will undoubtedly be fatal. She also has an (ill-informed) opinion on nearly everything, and loves to rant, on subjects ranging from the natural superiority of northerners over southerners to the way that lazy immigrants or assorted minorities all try to get something for nothing. Of course, she uses cloaked terminology to show that she’s no racist. Interestingly, she also never hesitates to pad her own time card when the opportunity arises, but that’s another story, I guess.

Yesterday, Agnes was in a political mood. Somehow, we got on the subject of the national drinking age. Agnes, interestingly enough, believed that 18-year-olds should be allowed to buy alcohol, and I agree. However, Agnes doesn’t think they should be allowed to vote. Her rationale? They haven’t had time to learn how hard their parents had to work to earn money and they “don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground”. They need, she asserts, to experience the “real world”.

No, I didn’t really get the connection, either.

Ignorance is most definitely not limited to the young. And most 18-year-olds spend those essential years between 18 and 20 in college — not exactly the “real world” by Agnes’ standards nor anyone else’s. I’m also unaware of any Constitutional requirement that voters exhibit any particular level of financial maturity. There’s certainly no similar requirement that the candidates exhibit such maturity.

When I pressed, Agnes went into a tirade about all the problems Clinton caused when he “allowed all the 18-year-olds to vote back in the 1990s”. I calmly informed her that (a) an American President does not have the power to “allow” anyone to vote or not vote, (b) that a Constitutional amendment was required to change the voting age, and (c) that this amendment had been passed in 1971, two decades prior to the Clinton administration. Apparently, I knew more about the Constitution at age 18 than she knows at age 60. Sort of throws her argument out the window, doesn’t it?

I mention this not because Agnes is a blowhard and a bit of an idiot, which she is. I mention it because her lack of knowledge about how government works and her complete absence of critical thinking skills are, alas, not particularly uncommon. Like so many people who don’t want to engage in intellectual exercise, she believes what she believes no matter how faulty her premises. Facts are not going to change her mind. Clinton is the antichrist. Immigrants are evil drains on our economy, language, and culture. No one is “allowed” any fundamental liberty she finds distasteful — but no one better deny her right to do anything, since all her personal pursuits are completely pure and moral. Agnes prides herself on being patriotic, but she doesn’t know a damned thing about the Constitution, and probably has never even read it. Flag-waving nationalism and a little bit of dogma with a Bill O’Reilly chaser is apparently enough for her.

Unfortunately, Agnes is America: intellectually lazy, uninformed, and too willing to be told what to think. I don’t say this because her views are “conservative.” There are just as many, if not more, left-leaning lemmings about (witness San Francisco). In fact, I’d argue that a majority of the most vocally opinionated folks in the country have absolutely no intellectual basis for most of their very closely-held opinions. It’s a lot easier, after all, not having to do the work of thinking for yourself, and never stopping to ponder why you believe something.

Most people take the easy way out. Give them an “Obama is a Muslim terrorist” email message, or a “Proctor and Gamble is owned by devil worshippers” form letter and most will either not care or just be too fucking stupid or ignorant to evaluate the source and context. And most politicians are quite aware of this. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?