The 2:30am Christmas Turkey
We put off our holiday dinner shopping until very last minute – as in I was at the grocer buying it christmas eve as the store was closing for the holiday. We wanted chicken but I could not find any chickens, so I got a turkey. When I got home I put it in the fridge so that it would thaw out.
It did not thaw out though, when I woke up the next morning my girlfriend was like “I guess I forgot to tell you to leave it out” and I was like “oops” – Apparently turkeys take two days to thaw out under normal circumstances. It was an all day affair, but I managed to get it thawed out from 10am to 6:30pm floating it in hot water, changing the water every hour.
According to howstuffworks.com, a frozen turkey takes 5 hours to cook at 325F. Assuming that was true, I was expecting this thawed turkey to be ready by 11pm at the latest.
However they were quite wrong. This turkey which was put in the oven at 7:20pm was not ready until 2:30am. But damn was it tastey. We shoved it full with garlic, onion, oranges, and lemon, then cooked potatoes and carrots around it.
Why protecting your brand by buying the matching .xxx domain does not matter.
This post is oriented towards the average business, the average hobbyist, the average Joe. If you are in the domain auction and aftermarket business then all is fair in love in war. But like I said if you are just a normal person, here are some reasons buying the matching .xxx domain for your brand name is dumb.
Before I address the common excuses, let me start by asking you if you have even looked at the .xxx registration process, or followed how it has been working for the past few months. If you have, you should notice that the system was designed to do one thing: generate massive amounts of profit.
When the .xxx registry was first announced I put myself on the reserve list for bob.xxx. To explain it simply, there was 3 different registration periods (so far). First, if you had an adult trademark you could put in a request to buy the domain. If multiple businesses wanted the name the name was auctioned to the highest bidder.
Once everyone with proven trademarks had their shot, then it became a “landrush” where you could put in a request to buy the domain for top dollar, and if multiple people wanted it then again the name was auctioned off to the highest bidder. If nobody wanted the name, then the sponsor registry would email you, like they did me, and offer a chance to buy the domain (bob.xxx) for 700 dollars a year. To put that in perspective, opsat.net costs me 7 dollars a year. Obviously, I did not buy it.
A few weeks later after a quiet period, right before general registration was activated they emailed me again, this time offering me the chance to buy the name for 300 dollars a year. It was at this point I quit watching it.
So if you participated in this sunrise and landrush phases, all you really did was make the sponsor registry a lot of money for a string of text that you probably do not even want, unless you really are making porn. For example, gay.xxx ended up auctioning for 500,000USD.
Excuse #1: I need to buy it before someone else does and uses it for ill.
Why? 90% of us are not making porn. So what if someone buys walmart.xxx and starts making walmart porn. First off, nobody is going to accidentally type .xxx when they mean to type .com. I know the keys are like right next to each other (…) but I promise you this is never going to happen. Someone wanting walmart porn is going to get their walmart porn. Someone wanting to shop at walmart is not going to be like “oh maybe I should check walmart.xxx to see if they have better deals there” – and if they do then they deserve what they find.
Second, if this did happen, I imagine walmart will have a pretty well paying trademark infringement lawsuit to file.
But that could hurt walmart’s reputation!!! OH WAIT NO IT WONT BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T RETARDED KNOW WALMART SELLS GROCERIES AT EXCEPTIONAL PRICES AND DOES NOT MAKE PORN.[1]
Excuse #2: I need to buy it so nobody accidentally types it.
I already told you, nobody is going to accidentally type .xxx when they wanted to type .com, .net, or .org. Look at your keyboard, then go look in the mirror. The only way for it to happen is for one or both of the objects to have looked retarded.
Excuse #3: I need to buy it so nobody accidentally finds it with Google/Bing/Whatever.
First, all the popular search engines today have a featured called SafeSearch, and this feature is enabled by default. The goal of this feature is to prevent offensive material from reaching your search results. This means, which SafeSearch enabled not only will a site with porn on it be ranked very very poorly, but just the fact it is .xxx means the search results can strip it out completely without even checking if it really is porn or not.
Oh but what if they turned SafeSearch off, you ask? Then they WANTED the porn, so sit down and shut up.
Excuse #4: I need to buy it so they cannot squad my search engine rankings.
See excuse #3.
Seriously.
Excuse #5: I am making porn.
Ok, buy it. But you do not even need to use it just make it redirect to your already profitable and indexed .com. If we want some femdom bondage porn, we are probably going to type femdom bondage porn in a search engine with SafeSearch off, not try type random words ending with .xxx and see if we get lucky. This will hold true at least until they amend SOPA (or some other bull) to force all porn to only be on .xxx domains.
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[1] This post was not paid for by walmart. My proof is that 1) I did not properly capitalize and hypenize their trademarked name and 2) I do my best to actually avoid walmart unless I am broke this month.
The Photobucket Saga
Not to long ago Twitter started offering direct image uploads for tweets, and that service is powered by Photobucket. When you visit Photobucket to sign up and connect it to Twitter, it throws an error about an invalid zip code. The thing is there is no visible zip code field in the form. This struck me as being really silly considering I could not sign up on the site powering the site I am trying to use. Having just woke up, and still groggy as the allergy medicines had not kicked in I left a rather humorous and slightly insulting (intentional for the lulz) post on Twitter addressing the problem.
I am used to being ignored or brushed off on Twitter, but then a few hours later I got a reply from their help account:
So I see this, and I am thinking “it is such a simple problem and if you know about it, why do you need another ticket about it?” And I posed this question on IRC, where it was suggested I screw with form with Chrome and send them an invoice for my time. I did manage to get around the problem. Their form has (or maybe by the time you read this, had) a hidden input field named “zip” with a value of “N/A” and their registration app was choking on it. Forcing it visible and then putting in a real zip code allowed registration to pass through correctly.
I posted an updated screenshot, and a link to an invoice for the time spent. I never actually expected to get paid, the invoice was [mostly] a joke. But the problem is simple enough it should not take a think tank to fix, and that was the point. The invoice stated the problem with the hidden field and the simplest solution which was to make the field not hidden so that a user could actually input a zip code.
Shortly after this I received a reply…
When I got that message I laughed, but I was wondering if the time was actually worth it. Would they actually use what I found? Was this a write off message? I know I did not actually fix their product, I merely pinpointed the answer that they suggested was eluding them. About ten minutes after that I received an interesting email which went along with this follow up…
So in the end that is my story of how being a groggy nuisance on Twitter may have gotten things done. I appreciate the gesture Photobucket made by upgrading my account to Pro, but what I appreciate more than that is that they actually followed up and may have appreciated my effort. They could have said they upgraded me for my troubles, not my help. We will see how long it takes them to implement a solution. So now it looks like I will be using Photobucket and seeing how that goes for a while. Cheers and Happy Holidays to the Photobucket people.
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