I have been using Zerigo’s DNS service on some of my domains for the past 4 days. These are the current statistics regarding number of queries. Obviously icurtis.me is the preferred location of the domains that I have started using here so far. Zerigo keeps track of # of queries because there is a max query quota of 1,000,000 queries per month. Obviously, I’m no where near that for this month yet, and won’t get anywhere close.
For as long as I have had domain names, I have wanted vanity DNS servers, but never had them, never even had a chance for them. Now after beginning a change of DNS providers I have 2 sets of vanity DNS servers. One for totally personal use (A-F.KULARSKI.ORG) and one for all other uses (A-F.NS.PCFIRE.NET). Just one of life’s simple pleasures I suppose 
I have been an active registrant and reseller with eNom since 2000. In that time I have witnessed eNom go from a small company in Seattle to a large firm with multiple divisions as part of Demand Media. I have gone from having a personal e-mail address for high level executives to having to resort to communicating with only a high-volume support system with support agents in countries I probably can’t even pronounce. There has also been a change from me paying about $8 per year for my domains to now being at $10.50 (or $19 for a .me). This is partially due to changes in fees in the ICANN fee structure, but also partially because other resellers have paid their way into higher positions in the hierarchy than me, and them getting my discounts. When I first opened my account, it didn’t matter how many domains you had, just as long as you were willing to keep money in your account to cover their renewals.
I have considered a good number of options for a possible move. The first option was the registrar that I had previously moved away from and developed a hatred for, GoDaddy, or in this case Wild West Domains, their wholesale domain counterpart. This seemed like an OK idea, most of their capabilities matched my needs, pricing is good, but still there was this feeling of sleaze that just goes wherever Bob Parsons has been. I don’t trust smaller registrars without a reseller program because they have variable pricing, and also variable availability. With a budget registrar you never know if your domain is residing with the next RegisterFly. At the moment I am strongly considering OpenSRS. OpenSRS has reasonable prices, and they will declare where every cent is going (they proudly claim that $3 of the fee is their profit). OpenSRS also features a very flexible reseller program that will allow me to control how they interact with my clients, if at all. The forms are also very straight-forward and do not have the marketing pitches that eNom has begun throwing in. There exists a problem though, OpenSRS for all of their features, do not support Dynamic DNS, the ability for computers to update their own IP addresses in the domain records. This is problematic for me because I have so many of them, but I can see the rationale from a security perspective. All it would take it one time of someone sniffing the security token and being able to hijack a host record, but with improved security mechanisms this has become less likely. If I opt to go to OpenSRS I would have to set up an alternate mechanism using their API to manage those host records, and I’m not sure I like moving to that from a trusted method of host management. The other issue I have is a slightly weirder quirk, sub-domain delegation. Also called NS records, a sub-domain delegation allows a managed DNS domain name to have a 3rd (or beyond) level record created and pointed at a different set of name servers, allowing greater administrative flexibility. eNom doesn’t have it, neither does OpenSRS (at the moment, but they hint at it coming, unlike Dynamic DNS which they give a snowcone’s chance in hell). OpenSRS is owned by Tucows, a long-established registrar, but one with a reasonable reputation of integrity and working with customers. Also, if there is something that doesn’t work for me, I know that support is just an email away to help, and during the day, I get a response in less than 2 hours.
GoDaddy’s managed DNS has the option for sub-domain delegation, and in fact I’m using it for cmkularski.net for an external hosting experiment that I am working with. They seem to be one of the few registrars allowing this, although other hosting providers support them fully. The other cool thing about GoDaddy is their capability to allow for uploading of a plain text BIND file, which means the idea of writing a zone file and then publishing it is very easy. There are no annoying fields to fill out, or anything like that, just write the file straight across and drop it into the box. Very simple. GoDaddy is one of the few registrars that seems to be actively updating their DNS control panels to be more robust and more useful. Sadly, GoDaddy themselves is still in a large corporate entity that seems to be doing every aspect of the Internet business including domains.
Things have changed a lot since 1999 when I registered my first domain name with Network Solutions, the successor to InterNIC.
Lately I have been spending a lot of time in Microsoft Word 2010 for various tasks that are academic, and I have noticed that the 3 installations of Word I run all seem to start off with great amounts of annoying.
To make Word more usable I have taken the following steps:
Just a few pet-peeves of word processing that I had to address today to make my world more functional.
I have decided that after 4 years of barely using LIVECURT.NET that I am going to decommission it on its anniversary date this year. The domain expires on October 3rd, and I intend to let it drop. I have not really used the domain and it has since been succeeded by other domains that are more relevant. Services on LIVECURT.NET relating to blogs, media and such will be moved to the ICURTIS.ME domain. The auxiliary blogs (such as they are) and other special purposes of LIVECURT.NET, including hopefully a new status board, will be moved to the CMKULARSKI.NET domain.
Over the next few weeks the transition will occur and my content will be moved around.
Since I am an aspiring graduate student, I have decided that I want to write my next Psychology paper using TeX/LaTeX, but so far it is not being as simple to get into as I thought it would be. The syntax is clunky and there aren’t really any WYSIWYG tools to assist in getting started. I am left with the option of working with TeX directly until I get the hang of it, or give up and move on. TeX is not one of the methods commonly used for behavioral sciences, it is more likely to be found in use in a math, physics, chemistry or biology department. I have decided that I want to explore it though, since there are times that I get sick of MS Word and its very much over-bloated interface for such a simple process. That being said, TeX is probably a little too cumbersome for most writing feats. The paper I am writing is not very heavy on numbers and certainly not on equations, but I think that knowing TeX might be helpful in the event that I end up doing research and have to document it in a paper. I am going to give TeX a shot and see if I can learn enough of its syntax to make using it worth ditching Word.
So far I have downloaded 2 distinct TeX tools, LEd (LaTeX Editor), and MiKTeX. I feel like I have no idea what I am doing, but I think I might be able to get into it easy enough to make it worth-while.
For a long time I hated the “buzz” feature of Yahoo Messenger. Judging by the fact that no other major instant messaging client had included the annoying feature I decided it wasn’t worth worrying about. Several years ago as the number of instant messaging clients I had installed grew and I became more bothered by them with each new OS installation (and as a beta tester, there were quite a few), I gradually let “less important” IM clients, such as Yahoo messenger fall away. The “buzz” feature is one of the things that made me declare it less important. I was always annoyed with the jiggling flashing box and made a point of always turning off the sound that the client made.
Now, in my only IM client, Pidgin, I find a button marked “attention” which seems to have roughly the same function. Obviously this only works on Yahoo and XMPP, not on OSCAR or other protocols that never considered such functions, but still, it is very annoying. The button in the client is placed in a spot where it is very possible to accidentally tap it. I have not yet been annoyed by being “attentioned” in Pidgin, but I assume the functionality is there. Why must everyone make technology something annoying?
To My Reader(s):
This blog recently moved to a new platform, WordPress. As a result, commenting is not handled in the same way anymore. You may leave a comment using the text boxes at the bottom of the entry pages. This will get your comment in the system, but will require you to wait until I can manually authorize it before it will be visible. This will also leave your comment open to analysis by the SPAM system.
You may recall from the previous system that you could authenticate with any number of services, OpenID, Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, etc. As of about 5 minutes ago that functionality has been restored, however, because of the modular nature of WordPress that option will NOT appear on the comments section, you must log in to the site first. You may login by clicking on the “Log In” button at the lower left panel of the page. Its a long way down there, but keep scrolling, you will find it. You will click on the icon panel with the service icons, at which point a box will open, you will select your network, and then login with the credentials of that system. Once this is done, your subscriber account will be created on the system and you will be able to comment freely and without censorship. You will at that point comment as normal (you should see your credentialed name and an empty box on each post).
This may all sound complicated, but the hardest part is finding the login button on the bottom of the page. If there is an authentication system somebody wants and it isn’t there, use a standard comment and let me know, I’ll try to get it in the system.
