Watching news

Giving up caring about the US Election.  Being following the US Election, and sadly I stopped caring when Ohio and Taxes voted for Hillary Clinton.  With the democrats continuing their in-fighting while the republicans relied behind one nominee, I just can't see the government switching to the democrats.

Great job, please continue to help the other party by destroying each other's credentials.

Good by fish :-(

I went home last night and Wifey told me we've lost another fish.  This is our second fish that we've lost since we've taken custody of the fish tank of a dear friend.

We never named the fish.  My logic was that if you name the fish you became emotionally attached to him a lot more.  Given that fish have much shorter life-spans than other pets, and are not likely to respond to name commands (unlike say a dog), there was no good reason to name the fish.

Still it was a bit sad to wrap the fish up in a piece of tissue and put him away.  The fish was drying up very quickly once it's out of the water and already I can see decay claiming it.

That was the 2nd of our small fish to go.  Now there's only the larger fish left in the tank.  I'm debating about whether to buy more but currently I'm settling on "no", I think when our friend comes back we'll return this tank, and then go ahead and get ourselves a bigger tank and we'll fill it with more fish.

jliu

Foosball championships

We'll be needing a small web app to track office foosball championships.  Currently it seems Ben and Roman are on the top.

Zhilla is incredibly good too, but she likes to cheat (spin).

My wish for 2008

Is that I'd get a project where I don't need to touch ASP.NET or JavaScript or fiddle (something people use the less polite word f*ck) with AJAX for a whole year!

Of course, one doesn't always get what one wants.

jliu

My register lost johnliu.net domain and didn't even tell me

I don't know if I had blogged this before, anyway, I've owned johnliu.net for a couple of years.  In 2006, It expired into redemption period (because I've changed email and didn't follow my old email address, my bad).  But I was able to save it in time.

In 2007, it again expired, but this time I received no email notification from the domain register.

They were not able to re-secure my domain, so now it's parked by some evil domain squatter.

The register gave me john-liu.net for free.  But it sucks when you can't trust your register to remind you that your domain is expiring.  (The same register seem to send me a lot of spam mail promoting their SEO technology).

I think this year, I'm going to go for an external host and have john-liu.net redirected there.  I'll probably keep using spaces for blogging.

Update on 2009-05-19 13:52 by JohnLiu.NET

Hey didn't you lose your johnliu.net - how did you get it back?

The trick is to not advertise your website.

You see, when I had johnliu.net I tried hosting my own blog, CMS, Wiki...  but the server I used at home was a bit on the crap side and I always suspected that script kiddies are out there hacking my machine at home.

At the end, I just leave that machine off for long stretches of time.  All requests to that server automatically fails.

I still held the domain, but it never lead to anywhere.  
It even fell off google.  (this actually was a bigger lost I feel at the time)

So because no one was really visiting the site, when the squatters got it - they didn't keep it after the intial (I assume 'free' period).  They let it expire, and my register was able to lock it and hold it for me.

In summary, I got lucky.

Now that I'm more serious about the domain again - I better not let it expire like last time.