I’m a big fan of Pauly Shore. From the era of MTV to Encino Man, Son in Law, In the Army Now to Jury Duty and the mega-flop Bio-Dome, Pauly Shore often appeared next to other up and coming Hollywood comedians. The 40-something comedian’s career abruptly stalled in the mid 90’s. The...

I’ve been writing essays and stories since I was five or six years old. During the past 35 years, I’ve used my ability to form words into intelligent passages for a number of purposes: winning contests, writing books, engaging in journalism in both English and my native language of Greek...

In my very early days as a domainer, not having much feedback or guidance from experienced professionals, I thought it was cool that I had registered the .com of an existing company that for some odd reason chose to use the .net So nonchalantly, I did the obvious: contacted them and offered it for s...

Unless your trip to TRAFFIC Las Vegas or to DomainFest in California was paid for by your employer, it’s time to take a good look into your credit card and even your bank account, for any unauthorized charges. The days in TRAFFIC Las Vegas were packed with events – and of course after ho...

As I’m battling a rather nasty case of flu, I can’t but think of the great time I had at TRAFFIC Las Vegas. The change of guard, from Rick Schwartz to Rick Latona, came with several challenges that in my opinion were handled efficiently and with utmost class. For starters, Rick Latona...

The devastation from the earthquake that hit Haiti cannot yet be assessed; some fear that 50,000 people might be dead and thousands more injured. In today’s interconnected world, with each natural or man-made catastrophe the descriptive terms are the first ones to be searched on the Internet; ...

Yesterday I went to Raglan Road, a posh Irish pub in the Downtown Disney area. The temperature outside hovered just above the freezing point; it was the first time ever that I didn’t feel out of place wearing a hat and gloves in Florida. Inside the restaurant, the beautiful dancer occupied mos...

In the past, I’ve been critical to the point of harshness with Sedo. The multi-national corporation that monetizes and auctions domains is definitely a major player in the domain industry; an industry still in early infancy. With that in mind, when things go wrong I often go off on a “ra...

As I traveled by airplane during the change of the year, I could not but notice how the rules of the traveling game have become stricter. After the incident with the Nigerian terrorist who attempted to blow up a Delta Airlines plane bound for Detroit, there is no more room for mistakes. TSA’s ...

On this fabulous post-Christmas day, I’m pondering why I’ve been using Firefox for the past few years. When I changed over from Internet Explorer to using Firefox, it was due to the world wide web peer pressure – hordes of tech geeks crying out how “evil” IE has been an...

Today, Verisign announced the increase of their fees for registering/renewing .com/.net domains. Per contract, they are allowed to increase the fees up to 7% annually. No such increase occured in 2009. My response: big whoopie. To those domainers among us with no long term memory; there was a time ...

The current argument over the Snapnames rebate seems to be that there is more than meets the eye in the recent Nelson “Halvarez” Brady scandal. Both victims and non-victims of the “Hank Alvarez” scam, which materialized while he was a VP of Engineering at Snapnames, seem to w...

Now that the Snapnames auction history data is available as far back as 2004, the next question is: Did Nelson “halvarez” Brady act alone, both in the bidding alias sense and in the real wold sense? In other words, was “halvarez” the only Snapnames account used to jack up pri...

Acting under pressure from domain blogs, posts in forums and angry emails and phonecalls to support, Snapnames has re-instated access to the full domain auction history per account – going all the way back to 2004. So it’s time to compare notes. After analyzing the data, Nelson “ha...

We all know the “lousy t-shirt” motto; it applies to almost anything that fails to deliver. In the case of the on-going “halvarez” scandal, it’s a bittersweet reference to an overall failure to proactively identify the fraudulent activity of a former VP of Snapnames. Ye...

While everyone is awaiting the next wave of the Nelson “Halvarez” Brady tsunami to hit the domain shores, the lingering question is obvious: will there be more transparency in the future? Oversee is currently rushing to wrap up the Snapnames shill bidding scandal in a manner that does no...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? When a vice president of a corporation who is supposed to be in charge of security processes violates the trust of clients, who is watching upon him? Nelson “Halvarez” Brady is not necessarily a bad person. In fact, most people who...

Half-measures require full responses. When Oversee announced today that a former employee of Snapnames was defrauding thousands of customers via means of shill bidding at domain auctions, they promised that the ongoing investigation would end with issuing refunds plus interest. There is no doubt th...

There’s a reason why the US Navy recruiting office’s motto is “Let the journey begin”. The seemingly vague and non-restrictive phrase was meant to match that of the US Army’s apparently restrictive line – “Be all you can be“. But was “Be all you ...

Can you feel the electricity in the air? There’s a revolution brewing. It’s the lingering smell of ozone, right before a powerful storm erupts. It’s about time to bring the end-users to the domain conferences. It’s about time to change the rules of the game by altering the l...

It’s really a shame seeing AEIOU.com pull out of the minisite business, simply because it appeared that the company – led by Rick Latona – had a streamlined process in place and many satisfied customers. The truth is, Rick’s statement that “there is no money in web desi...

There’s a new gaming application for the iPhone called Canabalt. The great news is, that you can download it from the Apple store for just $2.99 – or play the online version for free on the web at Canabalt.com The game features multi-level parallax scrolling action, miniature but detaile...

The image was too hard to comprehend; there was a dead man in my pool and he was floating, half-naked, face down, along with thousands of dollar bills scattered in the water. So I stood half-frozen in the middle of a warm, yet indifferent Florida night that felt confusingly surreal; the domain confe...

Let’s face it: our day is long, tiring and full of unpleasant things. We need some good, wholesome fun to take away the daily stress. To get away from the daily monotony we need some parody, some mindless reading, some quirky info about nothing in particular. Domainers are in a serious business â€...

Watching District 9 is like witnessing the first atomic bomb explode over Hiroshima and living through the nuclear onslaught to talk about it. The movie is one gigantic message about humanity’s past, present and uncertain future. It’s delivered through a science-fiction wrapper that slow...