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I’ve been using GoDaddy for years. When I started using them many moons ago, they offered cheap hosting and domain registrations in what was a generally expensive market. I purchased my first .COM and .NET domain for ~$3.95 each. Years later, all GoDaddy hosts is advertisements for their useless or misleading products.

All I want is three things:

• Domain registration for cheap
• Privacy or proxy domain registration
• Variable DNS

Seems simple, right? GoDaddy offers all three things I mention above, but the domain registration cost has been rising recently and the Domains By Proxy service they own is expensive and buried in controversy. At least their DNS works as expected.

When it became time to renew one of my domains, I decided it was time to give GoDaddy the boot.

I did all the things expected of one when one wants to find a new registrar. I scoured the web for forum posts, blog entries, and reviews of registrars. After many hours of searching, I narrowed my search down to two companies: Name.com and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Ultimately, after reviewing both services further, I went with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN).

I like simple. NFSN is has a painfully simple dashboard, free account creation, and very easy pricing. They work slightly different than most hosting companies (for a lot of reasons). Yes, they are a hosting company, but that doesn’t mean I have to pay to have them host anything at all. Domain registrations are about average in terms of cost ($8.59 as of this writing), but I love their policy statement. Their private domain registration service proudly announces that it privatizes domains! Though this may seem a given, DomainsByProxy fails at what it is suppose to do for $19.95 a year! For only $0.01 a day, they provide a mailing address, email, fax, and mail inbox for my domain. They assert that, short of a court order, my identity will not be revealed. In short, they say they do their job. A quick Google search shows no complains.

Ideally, I wanted free private registration, but $0.01 * 365 = $3.65. Add that to the cost of the domain, and I’m only paying $12.24 a year for domain registration and domain privacy. That’s about $15 less than GoDaddy for the same services! Darn GoDaddy and their useless upsells.

I’m now one day in to my service (it took about 2 hours for the full transfer to complete–I have another tirade about that), but it’s doing what I expect!

I had such a hard time finding this song that I thought I’d provide a download for the masses here. Hopefully it doesn’t stir up any issues; it’s a great song.

[ Josh Gabriel presents Winter Kills - Deep Down ]

They say, they say
We should have known better than to
fall so deep down, deep down
into this rabbit hole we found

and i was thinking
on the long way down here
no life, no light, no sight. no sound down here
hold my hand now
eyes closed don’t stop down deep
into this pool of regrettable situations
pitch black
think back to the last time
that we were happy

losing my senses
lost in my head
i am nothing, and no one
and nowhere at all
i am thoughtless and i fought this on my own

this is the wrong way
this is the long way down
this is the wrong way
this is the long way down
this is the wrong way
this is the long way down
this is the wrong way
this is the long way down

from these midnight walls
sinister faces rest a gaze on me
and in this darkness
foolishly i run
this is the wrong way
losing my senses
lost in my head
i am nothing, and no one
and nowhere at all
i am thoughtless and i’ve fought this on my own (and i’m sinking….)
on the long way down here
no life, no light, no sound, no sight down here
hold my hand now
eyes closed don’t stop, down deep
into this pool of regrettable situations
pitch black
think back to the last time
that we were happy

from these midnight walls
sinister faces rest a gaze on me
and in this darkness
foolishly i run
this is the wrong way
losing my senses
lost in my head

In other news today, Michael Jackson is reported as dying at age 50. It’s very sad, but neither his death nor his ownership of the Beatles’ music is the topic of this post (although hopefully with his death, the latter will be transferred to somebody who plays well with Apple, Inc.).

Michael Jackson: Trending

After TMZ reported his death, Twitter immediately became abuzz. I (of course) tweeted after becoming aware. Apparently millions of others did too as his name (and the Micheal spelling as well) appeared on Trending Topics. I clicked on his name and five seconds later there were 8000+ tweets waiting for me to read.

Soon after Twitter complete failed. See my post Twitter Stumbles for more thoughts on the happy Twitter whale.

It’s a sign of our time that when celebrity news happens, Twitter fails. When major earthquakes or political elections occur, Twitter can handle the load just fine. Go figure.

Either that means we (as a society) need to worry less about celebrity gossip and more about politics, or Twitter needs to update their systems to handle celebrity gossip.

Of course the irony of both a celebrity and Twitter dying (even if one only for a few moments) at the same time does not escape me. Farrah Fawcett also died today. It’s a bad day to be a celebrity–or Twitter. Does the parallel mean Twitter, too, is destined to die the death of a celebrity? It has its ups and downs, is constantly in the public eye, and in major need of some good PR.

Ah parallels. Fun for all, indeed.

I’m starting to use Visual Studio after years of disuse. It’s amazing to see all the improvements that have gone into Visual Studio since version 5! As a programmer who prefers working in a terminal window (I like the dark colors), being impressed by a GUI is something significant–especially since I’ve gotten used to using Emacs!

Yes, it’s true. I am a die-hard emacs fan. When an editor does not have emacs emulation (or faulty emulation like Komodo), I’ll do what I can to return to my great love: the terminal.

After installing Visual Studio 2008, I was pleasantly surprised. There is an Emacs emulation mode in Visual Studio 2008!

Tools > Options… > Environment > Keyboard

Under “Apply the following additional keyboard mapping scheme,” select “Emacs.” Hit OK and done!

I tried the kill ring (C-k and C-y), and it worked as I would expect in Emacs. Very cool. They were pretty ingenious with the mark region too (C-<space>). It begins highlighting of text in the editor.

Almost immediately, though, I found a problem. The tab key no longer works on new lines. The proper functionality would be new lines indenting to the appropriate place based on previous context. But no, it only works on lines with current text. Pressing <return> does not indent automatically! What were they thinking?

Deal breaker for me.

I’m very happy to announce I’ll be starting a new job this Monday, June 8th, 2009! For my own job security, I’m not going to mention which company. I will say that it’s one of the largest manufacturers of computer hardware components in the world!
I’m very excited! I’ll even get business cards!

I was reading a blog the other day, minding my own business, when I came across this question in the comments section:
What about the green argument? Holding information in RAM requires power to keep it there, or else the computer forgets it. RAM that has nothing in it has no power cost to the system, [...]

I’m an AT&T wireless customer. After heart-ache after heart-ache, I’m still a PacBell Pacbell Wireless Cingular AT&T wireless customer. Not only am I an AT&T customer, but all of my family is too. Conveniently enough, we have a FamilyTalk plan. It works, I suppose. Why is it that multi-billion dollar communication companies don’t care about [...]

I fished this out of an old blog of mine. It still generates hits (believe it or not) after it’s original posting on September 10, 2006. I lost the images associated with the post, but was able to recover the body.
Last night I noticed that my C: drive (Windows 2000) was getting a little cluttered. [...]

I have a Debian server sitting in my garage, and I just updated my wireless router. Once upon a time I used WEP for all my wireless security needs. Yes, it was rather simple of me, but it did its job. At the time I had FiOS and felt worldly enough to share to those [...]

I moved over the weekend. Moving is a lot of work! I’ll get back to posting soon. In the mean time, wish me luck.