And he shall be my squishy.
8:30am: …why am I awake this early?
9:00am: Yeah, definitely going back to sleep.
10:40am: Feeling much better now! Let’s have some breakfast.
11:00am: Hmm. Looks like my domain name was finally deactivated. Over a year ago, I stopped payments on my domain name because Yahoo was charging upwards of $40/year for it, which is borderline preposterous. However, once the payment was overdue, I discovered I had locked my domain several years prior (and had forgotten about it), but until I payed the overdue amount I couldn’t transfer it to another registrar. So I simply allowed it to lapse. Well, it seems the domain name has transferred to a company called Melbourne IT. I don’t know anything about them, so I’m unsure yet if I should renew with them or wait for it to expire completely and hope I can snap it up with some other registrar. Thoughts are welcome.
11:30am: Bagel Factory bagels, nommmmmm.
12:00pm: Ok, time to get down to work: need to expand upon the default Drupal configuration and get it to what we in our research lab need it to do. Meanwhile, waiting to hear from The Lady if there’s anything going on today.
2:56pm: I’ve made some progress on the site: setting up the content formats. I’m running into problems actually publishing the content that is created by users, since in some cases I don’t want the users to be sharing specific types of content between themselves. Also, got yelled at in an email from a student in my CSM class because he’s frustrated with the homework assignment. Had a response written, but didn’t send it because it was as petty as the original email. Am simply not going to respond for the next 24 hours and let him either figure it out on his own, ask someone else for help and figure it out with them, or drive himself into a mad frenzy. Or, you know, rephrase his original questions with less liberal use of punctuation.
21st century revision of the Golden Rule: don't be a dick.
3:01pm: I’m thinking a quick bike ride may be in order.
4:04pm: Been running some Mahout jobs in the background of my desktop to test out some issues someone has brought to my attention. In doing so, I fired up the 4-machine virtual network I have configured with VirtualBox, and the job is now executing, consuming 16 of my desktop’s 18GB of memory. Pretty sweeeeeeeet. But srsly, going for a quick bike ride now, since I’m stuck with this Drupal thing and the StackExchange website is currently having some issues.
5:11pm: Got back from my bike ride; didn’t go very far. Just picked up some quarters for laundry, and also checked out a new bridge that was built to make getting into a shopping center from my end of town much, much more convenient. Provided a very nice view of the setting sun 🙂 Also posted my question on the Drupal StackExchange, and am about to hop in the shower.
6:44pm: Dishes are done, kitchen is significantly cleaner, and I’ve showered up. I still haven’t heard from The Lady yet, so I’m shifting to reading a research paper that I was charged with presenting on Monday afternoon at group meeting. Oh, and I meant to post this yesterday, but here’s the latest [holiday!] episode of My Drunk Kitchen:
6:47pm: Whoa, and Felicia Day is going to be on a future episode??? That’s awesome!
7:28pm: That’s not good: my desktop just locked up. Maybe I was maxing it out for too long on the Mahout job? Either way, not really any time to figure it out: The Lady just contacted me, time to meet her outside for dinner!
7:58pm: Whoops, need some extra cooking equipment that’s at my apartment. So I swing by my place and make a side stop to get a decent bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
8:45pm: Dinner is served! Quinoa with spinach, and chicken with brie goat cheese and sundried tomato filling. Nommmmmm. Also: sitting and chatting.
10:53pm: Erm, where did the time go? Time for me to go, I’m crashing.
11:15pm: G’night!
Theatre of Consciousness 
We’ll is not common name. In fact Magsol is barely heard of and I don’t think anyone but a Star Wars fan (*cough*) would know about it.
The domain does say ClientTransfer/DeleteProhibited under whois, which is worrying because that means only MelbourneIT affect the domain. They could let the domain lapse, but It’s more cost effective for them to just keep it as a parked domain until someone purchases it.
You get some SERIOUS street cred for knowing the reference. Well done good sir! 😀
If they want to keep it parked after it expires, then I’m just going to purchase the .org version. I’m not terribly attached to the .net version aside from having to change a few settings in some of my web apps. So if they’re going to be little bitches then I’ll just work around it.
Late reply, but you’re absolutely right: 3/10 came and went, and Melbourne IT still hasn’t released the domain. I’m now wondering whether I should adopt a wait-and-see approach or just go with magsolweb.org on DreamHost.
I think I remember a while back you were explaining why you went with .net vs .com or .org and it was to do with appropriateness on what you wanted the site to be. You didn’t really look for a commercial TLD since it started off as a personal space. And it wasn’t a non-profit organization fitting a .org so that left .net.
But over time every site changes priorities.
Is it still personal space, a portfolio, a community/portal/resource site or some combination thereof? If you’re still interested in the .net for the same reasons, wait-and-see makes sense, but think about where you really want the site to go. You may find .com or .us may also fit in the picture in addition to .us.
Meanwhile, if your site content is still active and being hosted, it may not be a bad idea to link it publicly even on a subdomain because it’s good to have at least a small portfolio page up as a separate space from the blogs and Twitter. Could also be useful for storing anything you can’t link here and can’t go on Github.
Oops, I meant .com or .us may fit into the picture in addition to .org.
That’s my cue to go to bed! 😛
Lots of great thoughts. I have a couple DynDNS domains that I can, for the time being, use to access my site until such a time when I can renew the original domain name; I put in an email to the friend of mine who hooked me up with hosting space to see if there’s a static IP I can point one of those domain names to.
I did another whois search on another site and found that the status of the magsolweb.net was “pendingRenew” (if I recall), which means that after 30 days it will be put into “pendingDelete” for another 5 days. At which point, it seems the domain name will be completely released.
Seems analogous to having five separate “are you sure?” dialogs pop up when you’re trying to do something…except these dialogs each take a month to disappear. But oh well. At least that sounds less like Melbourne IT is sitting on my domain name, and more like it’s just an annoying pipeline it has to go through in order to be released back into the wild.
I’d still like to end up with a .net for the same reasons as you stated: the mission hasn’t really changed. It’s still a portfolio/personal type website that links to the more substantial stuff on WordPress/Github/etc.
.com .org .biz .info .us Are available!
You can try again via GoDaddy, they’re generally cheaper than a lot of them out there.
I have philosophical issues with GoDaddy. I just heard about namecheap from a friend of mine and I think I’m going to go with them whenever the domain expires (~3/10 if I recall). All I really need is 1) full DNS control, and 2) private registration. Namecheap gives both and nothing more unless you want it. Match made in heaven!
I looked up NameCheap (must admit, I haven’t heard of them before), but what I saw of their web hosting was really no better than GoDaddy so I don’t know how good the domain services would be.
Then there’s also DreamHost which offers domain registrations. Plus they have a strong anti SOPA/PIPA stance.
RE: Magsol, we’ve been down that road before. 😉 Shows how far back we go.
DreamHost looks good, too. I just can’t figure out what services they offer with their domain name registrations, though; private registration and full DNS control are my two deal requirements, and ideally I’d love it all to be under $10/year. Namecheap makes that explicit. If that’s the case with DreamHost then I don’t really see any difference between them.
And you’re absolutely right, we’ve been trolling each others’ blogs for quite some time now 🙂
Looks like DH has private registration by default. I took a peek at their wiki and they have pretty much the same DNS controls as GoDaddy.
That’s all for $9.95!