Inktrails from Alaska

Web Shark Alert!

Last year I was the Media Director for the Midnight Sun Intertribal Powwow, and this year I'm wearing the same hat with another added: webmaster.

While the old webmaster had dropped out of the group, and no one was maintaining the website, the domain expired. I didn't know it had expired, as I hadn't yet assumed the webmaster responsibilities. I was told it needed to be reregistered, and I agreed to be webmaster. So I blithely went to reregister it, thinking that there was little reason for anyone else in the entire world to have coincidentally chosen our midnightsunpowwow.org name and registered it. I mean, how many Midnight Sun powwows could there be?

The answer is none, but someone had stolen our domain name anyway. When I tried to go to our old website, I didn't get a 404 (page doesn't exist) error. No, it was much worse than that. I got a page exclaiming very loudly that midnightsunpowwow.org was FOR SALE. Buydomains.com had registered the domain apparently the minute it became available. What was the price to get it back? I just sent off for a quote from them as to what they'd sell it for, but at the bottom of the form it states, and you have to click a checkbox or the form won't send, that you "understand that the minimum price for this domain will be $888.00."

Checking availability of domain names and using Whois, I found they'd also registered midnightsunpowwow.com as well.

You can go to your registrar and pay for the registration, but you are only paying for Buydomains.com's registration, it doesn't revert back to you. And it's very easy to do that by mistake. So CHECK who is listed as the owner before you click that payment button! If it isn't YOU, then you aren't paying to get control of your domain, you are just giving money to the folks who stole it!

We had to switch our domain name to a .net version, one of the only ones left that we could use. Now we'll have to change all our materials to reflect that change.

Back at Buydomains.com I decided to see how much I'd have to pay to get the old domain back. You have to click that you agree to the "terms of use" even just to get a quote.

Reading the "terms of use", you find that these folks are deep into spam. This is directly from their terms of use page:

"5. BuyDomains' Intellectual and other Property Rights

You agree that BuyDomains holds all rights, title and interest in and to the name BuyDomains, The Seeq Network, Rare Names, Seeq.com, AboutRetirement.com, AdorableCats.com, Adultfriends.net,Amazingdogs.com, AnimalWorld.com,ApprovedRental.com, AutomotiveCenter.com, BabyFriendly.com, BacktoSchoolShopping.com, BeautyGuide.com, Business1.com, CancerConnection.com, CareerGuide.com, Cash4You.com, ChampionLeague.com, CheeseOnline.com, Christiancircles.com, CreditCardClub.com, DegreeCentral.com, DietersNetwork.com, DiscountMart.com, EducationCentral.com, eSales.com, e-taxes.com, FashionSource.com, FathersDayGift.com, FindCondos.com, FoodPlanet.com, FootballAuthority.com, GamblingNet.com, GamingSource.com, GardenSeeq.com, GayTravelSearch.com, GreatDate.com, HappyMothersDay.com, HomeAnswers.com, iGuide.com, ImportAndExport.com, infoindia.com, InfoPage.com, InHomeTheater.net, InsuranceProviders.com, InvestmentZone.com, KidsGuides.com, LasVegasLife.com, LatinConnections.net, LegalOnline.com, LocalRealEstate.com, LoversLinks.com, MechanicalWorks.com, MedicalSource.com, MilitaryCommand.com, MortgageGroup.com, MovieCity.com, MusicMania.com, OnAir.com, OnlinePolitics.com, Order-Flowers.com, PhotoConnection.com, PhotoConnection.com, PureBusiness.com, RightLoan.com, SearchForGifts.com, ShopAround.com, SoccerWorld.com, SportsUnlimited.com, Stockpoints.com, TechBuyer.com, TechnologySource.com, TechShopping.com, TelecomSource.com, TherapyInformation.com, TheStartupGroup.com, TicketsCentral.com, TobaccoCenter.com, TravelChoices.com, TravelSeeker.com, TVChannel.com, WebsiteSolutions.com, WellnessPrograms.com, WineWorld.com, WonderfulWeddings.com, WorldReligion.org and you acknowledge that no license or right under any copyright, patent, trademark, service mark or other proprietary right or license is granted to You or conferred upon You by this Agreement or otherwise"

"Cheeseonline.com"? Holy Wallace and Gromit!

And even weirder enough, this company is on a page of Grassroots.org, a supposed liberal community-building site. Do these people even know what they are affiliated with? Is grassroots.org a front? This is a nestful of snakes. More than that, it's a veritable city full of snakes.

I can't imagine any 5013c buying back, that is, ransoming a hijacked domain for nearly nine hundred dollars. I would suggest that if you have a site hosted by Buydomains.com to switch host servers immediately to someone with some real business ethics. I wouldn't trust my site to them. And to boycott all the above websites as well. And spread the word. That's one thing the internet is very good for! This domain-snatching may be legal, but it's entirely unethical.

Bottom line: don't let your domain name expire or you'll be next.

Celtic Jam in Limbo

Our regular Thursday night jam lost its place to meet a couple of weeks ago. We were meeting at The Pomegranate, and the owner just didn't want to have us there anymore. Not that we did anything wrong, of course! But she has her reasons, one of which is that she works too many long hours, and staying up late was getting to her.

So we need a new place to play. I have a few ideas, but if you have any, feel free to leave a comment or email me. With the holidays in full swing, I'm not inclined to approach anyone, at least not this week. Most people are pretty frazzled, merchants and restaurant owners the most right now. I'll find a place for the jam, but it will be January sometime before we restart.

Season's Greetings

Say it out loud.

Mare

egrets

moose

panda

hippo

gnu

deer!

Comment!

So few people leave comments, and I really wonder why. I like to hear from the folks who are reading this. It crossed my mind that folks don't want to leave their email addresses, that they are afraid of spam bots harvesting them off the site. I do think Typepad has a proof against this, but just to make you all feel better, I removed the requirement that comments must also have an email address attached.

However, as basic operating procedure you really ought to have a yahoo, hotmail or gmail or other account that you give at places on the web where you don't want to leave your main email address. Contests, etc. This way you can find out if you won a contest, because you'll check the webmail, (yahoo, gmail, etc.) and you won't have your main mailbox full of spam.

Regardless, most of these web-based mail services, especially yahoo and gmail, come with excellent spam filters. Things have come a long way in the email world. I have a gmail account and only very rarely get spam. My isp for my pop mail account, my main email, is so excellent that I'm sad I don't get as much funny Engrish as my friends do!

This is all to say, go ahead, leave some comments now! (Ya scaredy cats!)

Funny Engrish World Wide

Well, I should have known that there was a web site for those as twisted as I. Funny Engrish has loads of hysterically funny stuff. You can even buy T-shirts from Japan with entertaining Engrish on them! Oh my, yes, I MUST have one! Someone get me one for Christmas, please! (My address is on my book review site, see sidebar. size large!)

Let me rephrase that: It would be for the excitement human enjoyment putting shirt on!

Daily Life Blip 1: Fox Springs

It's clear, a turquoise and coral sky! Beautiful saffron shadows swoop through the white birches and aspens, and make the snow on the skinny spruces glow. A truly beautiful day, so that I decided to go to the Fox Springs and fill my water bottles. Yes, my house has a well and good water, but it's softened, and plants don't do well with salty water.

Sure, it's -18° F. So that's what you expect up here. I put on my purple ski gloves, two shirts, a sweater and a jacket, winter boots, long underwear and flannel-lined Carhartts, completing my outfit with my "terrorist mask," a balaclava that covers my nose so I can breath freezing air. Ready, Sofie and I went out to the car and drove down the road, past the glowing spruces, to the springs.

On the way we saw a man out on a snow machine with his dog team. A little putter of a snow machine, much like mine. We could just see the ears of the dogs above the snow berm at the edge of the road. Sofia was intrigued.

I was uplifted by the sight of a nearly full moon in an aqua sky just hanging above a snow-dusted, forested hill. The moon was so large, yet so pale, it looked like someone had painted it there.

The Fox springs are by the side of the Elliot Highway just a few miles from my place. It's a public spring that is housed in a small covered platform with two large, chrome buttons one pushes to start the water flow. Interesting ice sculptures have been created by the overflow, one that is at least six feet tall!

This is nothing compared to the ice towers my neighbor is building. He also has a Doppler dome in his yard. He's very typical of your Fairbanks "character." We specialize in characters here. :o) Why do you think I fit in so well, anyway?

It took only ten minutes or so to fill the six gallon bottles I'd brought and put them back in the car. Putting plastic lids on plastic bottles with big, slightly wet ski gloves is an acquired skill.

Water stowed, we head back home. The dog team had moved on, there was nothing but a beautiful snowscape. We just got home. It's about 2:20 and the sun has already gone down.

What I Want for Christmas

You never know if there are angels out there. So I'm going to put my Christmas list up here. Sure, I'm dreamin', but why not?

1. A new recording of Yogi Yorgesson singing "Yingle Bells." I have a very corny sense of humor and this song just cracks me up every time! I've worn out the tape of it some kind person sent to me many years ago, and I want to play it for the kids I teach. The artist is actually Harry Stewart, and you can find his CDs here:Harry Stewart.

2. A new violin bow. I took my bow to be rehaired, and the shop that took it botched the job and the bow broke. (And they won't make good on it, either.) It was my best bow, a French one worth $1700. It's been a terrible loss, resulting in my right hand cramping and being very sore from using a heavy bow, the only usable one I have left. I need a light to medium wooden, probably European bow. I tried the carbon fiber bows but they aren't flexible enough for my hand. I play six to eight hours a day, teach people, peform. If you have an old bow that is light, wood and in good shape, I sure need one (or two!).

3. I really need new flannel-lined Carhartt pants. I only have one pair of these, and one pair quilted. It's a long winter here! I take size 33 x32.

4. A plane ticket to Seattle, or to Albuquerque, a train ticket from Seattle to Albuquerque--I want to go visit my son whom I haven't seen in three years. I'd rather fly to Seattle and take the train. I hate airplanes.

5. Enough money to fix the CV joints, get brakes and a new windshield on my car. Or the timing chain fixed on my truck! It's parked all winter so I don't ruin the engine by having the chain break while driving it! Vehicles!! A constant money-drain!

6. A new Mac! My clamshell continues to be funky, the desktop unit doesn't have a RW CD unit, and both have miniscule hard drives (5 & 9 GB, respectively).

7. While I'm dreaming, a house and property that I could buy on a land-sale contract. It would be so nice to have my own place again. It would have to be here, of course.

8. For my son and his girlfriend to come up here and visit.

9. For any of my friends, especially Janis, to come and visit!

10. A bunch of those square, violet-flavored candies that my grandma used to have. C. Howard makes them . Here is a link to a Candy Store.

That's plenty, and mostly impossible, but I thought I might as well put it out there. We are supposed to be "adults" and "not want" anything for Christmas. I think that's baloney. There's a kid inside everyone who wants a present for Christmas!

Monsters in the House?

Sofia seems to think there are monsters at our new place. Periodically she gets very frightened, shaking so much that I finally gave her some valerian to calm her down (it worked and she was better for quite a while after that).

She has become Velcro Dog when inside the house. If I sit on the couch she weasels her way behind my legs so she can sit under my knees. If I go to the bathroom she has to squeeze next to me between the toilet and the wall.

It's true there are lots of weird noises here, water running through the pipes, the furnace and the refrigerator that makes the weirdest array of noises I have ever heard. Not to mention that she can hear what is going on outside (kids yelling, playing in the snow, other dogs running around the neighborhood, trucks, cars, people chopping wood, snow plow going by or plowing our place, etc.) Oh, and there are two cats that can walk right up to our inside door if they want. Plus the noises from my landlord upstairs (he's owned by the cats). Yes, many strange noises, many of which I can hear, but I am sure she hears more than I do.

More walks outside help her quite a bit. I think she is also more freaked out because there isn't one window she can see out of. I'm going to make one of the windows (there's only two, we are in the basement--yes, it's a Bat Cave) accessible to her and see if that helps.

For a while she was denning in the darkest corner of the closet, but has shifted to sleeping right next to the bed. At about six am she jumps up onto the bed and sleeps there until I get up.

The latest silliness on her part is to crawl UNDER the bed. There is maybe a six inch vertical clearance. She really has to squeeze herself under there. I was worried she'd get stuck! She did get stuck under the couch at my old house, so I'm not being worried for nothing here.

After I took these pictures she decided that sleeping under the bed wasn't all the great, anyway, and came out.

Nanowrimo: Made it!

At 11:57 I uploaded my novel to the Nanowrimo site and got my validation as a WINNER! Yippee! The deadline was midnight, I just made it. Now I have a fairly garbled novel that's going to take a while to sort out. I'll keep working on it, and on another one that I actually like a bit better that I started last year but didn't finish. Out of this I hope that we'll continue to meet our fellow Fairbanks Nano-ers and create a nice support/critique/brainstorm group to keep us writing all year. And finally, I hope to publish both novels sometime in the next two years, either on my own or with a publisher. But don't hold your breath, both these babies are going to take some work to get them ready for public consumption.

Who Are You Guys, Anyway?

I have more hits on this blog than ever before, and yet no comments left for almost a month. Who ARE you guys? Say something, will you? I feel like I'm out here typing to a strange Kafka-esque universe. There are signs of people everywhere, but no actual voices...kinda creepy, really.

I do look at the keywords being used to surf here. Strangely enough, or sadly enough, many folks have surfed here by searching for the gary/arnold/brandon spam, which, by the way, continues to fill my mailbox. My friend Janis gets all the good email with the funny engrish in it, while all I get are unfunny one-liners from arnold/gary/brandon asking (ten times a day) if I want cheap or new drugs from various places, some shadier sounding than others. That's what I get for having very good spam filters. I miss the funny stuff.

There are also the people looking for "niche music" which still baffles me. Music is music. It all fills some niche somewhere. This term is meaningless. Then again, most musical categories are nearly meaningless now. Just go to a mall music/CD store and try to find the Rock section. "Oh," the hairless, pierced, dead-white rail-thin teenaged "sales associate" says, "That's all in POPULAR." Please. The Rolling Stones next to Britney Spears? That's just wrong. It's more than wrong. It's scary.

Besides, the Rolling Stones have never sent me email that THEY are N.A.K.E.D. Dear God, I hope they never do, looking at that would certainly make me poke my eyes out.

I digress.

Please, there's a comment option at the end of each post. Hint, hint. And remember, "The face of success is only a press on your mouse away! Can't make any promises about sheer glamor, though.