inter-not happening
my net was down the other day… i had the friendly people at airtel check on it for me.. apparently, i wasn’t following instructions…
and then i had to sign an oath to be good to my comp (i think)…
i’m just ranting. as usual. please to ignore.. this is what comes of 48 hours without sleep following 18 hours of sleep. followed by a heavy dose of engrish.
claim ticket no: 17940128111
a friend of mine was telling me today about how he won a lottery recently… without even buying a ticket. he got a mail some time back informing him he’d won 1 million dollars!!!! and all he had to do was contact the email address given with his personal details, and they’d get back to him. and he did, and so did they, except this time, they needed something more: he has to transfer twenty dollars via his credit card. aaaahhhhh!!!! now they’re talking.
sample (this does not purport to be an actual winning lotto notification)
Dear Lucky Winner,
THE EUROPEAN SOFTWARE MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION PROMOTION PRIZE AWARDS WINNING NOTIFICATION.
….. (rubbish deleted) …..
Congratulations once again.
Yours
Sincerely,
Mr. Joseph Pottenkulam Twins(Lotto Netherlands Coordinator).
NB:CLAIM YOUR PRIZE
THROUGH THIS EMAIL ADDRESSES:
agentyosi2006@netscape.net
fortunately, (or unfortunately, he says) he doesn’t own a credit card. he wouldn’t have minded shelling out even a thousand bucks if he’s going to get a million in return. this guy is educated, an architect, and lives in delhi. and i know a lot more like him, the types who’ll click on the monkey to win a prize, or keep pressing the fart button. and they say india’s ready for the internet era.
we deals in design
here’s a new card i’ve done for plus minus zero.
it’s pretty, eh? you should have seen the look on my client’s face when i gave it to him. he wanted me to make some exhibition panels and stuff for his product, and wanted to know if i did graphics work.
i got the project.
i also have to give him three 199/- airtel recharge cards (0 validity).
domain thing is…
well, now that those rants about my lost domains are done, i’d like to move on to the present. the domains i currently hold. its nothing in the league of this woman, or the bigger players who deal in thousands of names. mine’s just a private collection of names that catch my fancy.
sbcltr.com: reads subculture (slogan: drop your vowels and dot com). i’d started building it, but time and work got the better of that. i had a nice little joomla install on it, with quite a few components and modules in place. it was going to pick up where showcause left off. excluding the debts.
CY13.ORG & CYl3.ORG: it’s a l33t domain hack. reads as cyborg. i know… it’s lame, but i had some credit with my registrar, and .orgs were going dirt cheap. and now that i have this, i’d like to do something with it… any suggestions? let me know.
kvlt: it’s kvlt.info, and i got it free with my hosting reseller package. it’s nice, if you’re into that kind of thing. but still, it’s a .info… and kvlt? read on…
looking back, these names seem pretty crappy. oh well… but before i forget, here’s a domain i’m selling: retail associates. it’s for sale. buy it. it’s better than 123businessindiadirectory.org.
oh yeah, make offers on the others too… or suggestions on what to do with them.
ps: other names i own: sthayi.com (my mom’s boutique), jyrwa.com (my girlfriend), ±0.com & pl.usmin.us/zero… but they’re being used.
pmz-india-online.biz
that domain isn’t anything. not that i know of, or that i’d be remotely associated with.it’s just the type of domain i hate. there’s something in me that makes me vicious towards my clients. i won’t give them something that’s too easy to remember. or to understand. like that one. i do things the tough way…
reshmi and i have an architecture & design firm together, called plus minus zero. and i’ve registered two domain names for it, pl.usmin.us/zero & ±0.com. the first one is what is known as a domain-hack. i registered www.usmin.us, which is pretty useless by itself. except for a united states minister. and then i added a subdomain pl. on one end, and a folder /zero at the other. ta-daa!!! plusminuszero!!!
my plans for the future… a company that undercuts and does work: minus minus. a character for asterix comics: maximus minus. and other degrees of plus minus: one, two three etc. the possibilities are endless.
the other domain i own is a lot cooler. ±0.com. it’s actually that. try it in your browser. click, or copy paste. or the long way about it: [alt+0177] on the numeric keypad, 0, and .com. it’s a relatively new thing called idn, which basically lets you type in all languages, and using those arbit characters and symbols. it’s a thing of the future, but i’m prepared.
but as i was saying, clients don’t always get this sort of thing. i might just end up registering a pmz-india-online-4u.biz to get across to them.
domain thing was…
i’ve been buying (and losing) domain names over the years. often, they’re for short-lived projects that (sometimes) take-off. most of the names just lapse and i don’t bother to renew them. like my phone numbers.
but the first one i ever registered was this one, pottenkulam.com, back in ‘99. got it for free via namezero, in the good old days of the internet boom. two years later, they asked me to pay something like 50$ to keep it, or else it’s theirs forever. so i went back to a plebeian @yahoo.com mail id. zero, my ass. picked it up when it got free again.
then there was arbit.biz, which is still available if anyone really wants to mess around with a .biz 
. this was the pre-showcause version of my band ki land days.
good names i’ve lost include nakshatra.net & thaumatrope.net, both for bands i used to manage. that never really happened. nakshatra (the site) is now one of those ad-farms you find in every second site. at least someone is using thaumatrope.net. the bands, well… one imploded within a few successful months, and the other still lingers on.
another favourite was wedesignedthis.com, which i used for quite a while. it was meant to be kollol and myself. i loved that name. i came up with it because we were designing this event, and we didn’t have a name yet. so i figured we’d use this as a signature on our work, and think of a name later. the latter never happened.
and the only site that was active, was used by other people, and was missed. showcause.net. i lost the domain very stupidly, i admit. i was in cochin at the time, mostly offline, and the showcause email id was mysteriously inaccessible. hmmm… look at what the pricks are selling there now. besides airline tickets and viagra, there are searches for adept media and music news. i wonder where they got that from.
and yet another version.
i used to be big on joomla… somehow, maybe it’s me, i’ve been facing nothing but bad luck with it lately. it ended up using my entire quota, without showing where it was being used. and changing permissions of a whole lot of files and folders.
basically, it wasn’t worth the hassle anymore. i’m trying drupal wordpress now. let’s see how that goes.
i didn’t even bother to back up. and i’m removing all the joomla installs i’ve done so far. except for one. he still hasn’t paid me for it. but i heard that an employee of his made off with several lakhs in cash. ha! you get what you give, manifold.
“vengeance is mine”
- mickey spillane
