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Well, Zing is certainly evolving.

About a year ago, there were three of us. Now there are seven, and I’m considering an eighth. We’re about to move into a sweet new office. Our client list continues to grow. Somehow we all continue to be busy.

It’s been an interesting ride over the past year. The dynamics of the team have changed quite a bit, for everything from playing foosball to going out to lunch together. Right now we’re all squeezed into an office that’s comfortable for four but most certainly cramped for seven. I think all of us are excited to get a bigger space where almost all of us (except the New Guys) will have private offices. It’ll be fun to see what happens with that, and how much more changes over the course of the year.

Onward and upward!

As a domain reseller, I often purchase domains on behalf of customers. When the domain is due to expire (typically annually), those customers receive automated email messages warning them of the impending expiration so they have time to contact me and renew the domain. These messages are sent 90 days before expiration, then 60 days, then 30, 15, 5, and 1. In other words, there’s plenty of warning.

One of my customers ignored those warnings for months, and contacted me a few weeks ago wondering why his web site was down. I explained that the domain had expired, I hadn’t renewed it, and now no one on the internet could find him. He decided he wanted to go ahead and renew it, but it had been too long and the domain had entered what’s called the “redemption period”. There are strange rules about expired domains– the general intent is to prevent competitors from seizing a domain that’s accidentally expired and bad-mouthing a company or whatever. Anyway, late in that period (which usually lasts around 45 days) the domain enters a special phase where no one, including the original owner, can purchase it. You simply have to wait until the redemption period ends, and then buy it as if it was new.

Strangely enough, registrars don’t always know exactly when a domain will become available. The global registry, run by ICANN, has internal policies that aren’t very transparent. Long story. Interestingly, this has led to the rise of registrars who offer special services to pounce on a specific domain as soon as it becomes available by essentially requesting to register it every few hours until the magic (and unknown) redemption period ends.

Long story short: some Japanese company did exactly that and purchased the domain that had belonged to my customer. It was legitimate, although sort of confusing since the domain was pretty specific to this customer’s business. In any case, they put up their new web site and the word awesome doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Since I’m not fluent in Japanese, I ran this page through Google Translate and was pleased to discover that the web site is advertising…

wait for it…

an armpit hair removal system. If you wonder why the woman is so shiny and happy, it’s apparently because she has smooth, bare pits. And look at the way the little anime boy just adores his armpit-hair-less girlfriend. Amazing.

Unfortunately for my customer, his only recourse is to approach this company and ask politely if they’d be willing to sell the domain back to him. Good luck with that.

Look out, static rat!

I just sealed the envelopes and dropped them in the mailbox. My tax returns are officially on the way to the Gov.

Every year I just want to scream, Why is our tax code so complicated? I have to spend $50 for software each year because the rules are so complex that I literally need a computer to ask me all of the questions and fill in the numbers. And I have no idea– until I actually finish the paperwork– how much I’m going to owe each year. I read about corporations with tens of billions of dollars in profit each year, who pay no tax whatsoever. It’s so very frustrating.

Give me a flat tax any day, so I know exactly how much I’ll owe no matter how much I make or spend. Or even a straight sales tax, where everything I earn sits quietly in the bank until I actually use it to buy something.

If I was in charge…

SSH is pretty awesome.

I’m working at home today (of course) and I need to test some web pages that will be accessing a remote database server. For security reasons, that remote server only allows access from the office IP address. That means I can’t test any of this from home because the database will refuse my requests.

After a few minutes of thought, I set up an SSH tunnel between my house and the office. Now when I open the web page on my browser here, it’s actually sending the HTTP traffic to the server at the office, which routes it to a second server at the office, which connects to the remote database server to pull the information I need. From where I’m sitting, it’s completely transparent and the browser acts exactly as it would if I was sitting at the office.

Now that’s handy!

Yesterday was our 16th wedding anniversary. Wow. Time sure flies.

To celebrate, we didn’t really do anything. That’s the way we roll. But Kyra and her neighborhood friends Alex, Hannah, and Chaille spent about an hour in the evening chalking our driveway with a huge anniversary announcement (as well as a unicorn, a pig, some bubbles, and other unidentified art). It’s a little hard to read due to the geometry of the driveway, but for what it’s worth:

It was a cool idea and we appreciated it.

More to the point, I appreciate my wonderful wife. She’s the best thing that ever happened to a bum like me, and 16 years is only a good start on a long life together.

Laralee accidentally became a blonde a few days ago.

While visiting her mom and sister Cecilia in Idaho, somehow Cil managed to talk her into getting some highlights in her hair. They bought the goodies and went to work, but from what I understand (I wasn’t there) the result was pretty awful. The highlights were too bright– almost white– and a little too overwhelming. So they bought some more goodies, and undid the highlights by just coloring everything a uniform blond.

It’s been around ten years since she was a blonde, so this is a fun return to those days. In her heart she thinks of herself that way anyway.

Ahh, spring is here and the weather was a gorgeous 65 degrees and sunny. Perfect for a bit of ultimate at lunch. And it was the first day of the year when I could go barefoot again. I miss that in the winter, but the hard cold icy snowy concrete-like ground is pretty rough on bare feet for a few months.

Too bad I’m out of shape. I need to play more so I’m ready for summer league in June!

Last week Sarah came out to Colorado with her husband Grant. They have a timeshare up in Vail so they invited me to come up and join them. Although I couldn’t stay for the week, I managed to get up there on Monday night and spend the day with them skiing at Beaver Creek.

Bonus: Zvonko came out from New York City to visit as well. I haven’t seen him in, like, a decade. And it was pretty much like old times.

(Old times being 1994 or so, back at UMR.)

The weather was sunny and an astounding 50 degrees, making the skiing a little questionable. Okay, it was a lot questionable… the bottom was sort of like gliding through slushy soup. But it was all right, because we had an awesome time together.

To add to my pile of Google schwag, Rick sent me a backpack as thanks for some work I’d done for the company.

This backpack is hands-down the coolest backpack I’ve ever owned.

It’s built really well, including a nice carrying handle on top, sturdy loops for attaching things, straps to cinch different areas and keep them snug, and pockets. Pockets upon pockets! In some cases, the pockets themselves have pockets inside them. Everyone knows a good backpack is measured by the number of pockets it has. Awesome.