Nothing annoys me more than finding a good domain name that someone has purchased with the intention of either selling it on or doing absolutely nothing with it. Bulk domain name buying has been around since DNS was setup but what really irritates me is that there are millions of domains that sit doing absolutely nothing apart from supplying free adverts for the hosting company. I lost a domain I wasn’t concerned about recently only to see it instantly purchased and yep, a buy this domain page put on it. I have no intention of buying it back but I reckon it was purchased on the basis that I had forgotten to renew it and so the buyer was hoping I would desperately contact them to re-purchase or lease it back. Services such as MetaFusion.com are setup for bulk purchases of domains and users then try and sell or lease them on. A domain is only a small part of a successful online presence and certainly not worth the money some of these free-loaders try and charge.

I’ve seen many companies who have tried to trade domains go out of business pretty quickly as it relies on someone truly, desperately, needing that domain. Of course if you are trademarked you could make a claim for the domain but this is often an expensive and pointless exercise.

I suggest that if a web site does not have content, or its content is not relevant or is purposefully purely a pointless advert page that there should be a process to remove ownership and release the domain for a real use. This would certainly cut down on 90% of ‘Empty Home’ domains.

While tapping my way through the usual interpipe sludge I come accross something fresh.. even if it looks old. Well it is old, but it has some extremely fun suggestions and there were a few things I had never seen before which I could do sitting at my desk such as:

Make ’smoke’ with your mouth
Compress the air in your mouth, then let off the pressure, then let the air out slowly. You’ll see fog!

This works! Apparently the site is about discovering your inner child by doing funny and different things that you often just dont bother with as you cruise through life.

Longer Seeing
Modify your perceptions with physics rather than psychopharmacology: put an infrared filter in some welding goggles, then wear them outdoors on a bright, sunny day. (Choose a filter that is in the near-IR, so a bit of light is visible still. Or try theatrical gels, congo blue combined with primary red, several of each.) The world will become EXTREMELY BIZARRE. Wait a couple of minutes until your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Then the bright pink clouds drift in the dark sky above the frosty white trees. The world is dusk, yet the sun still shines. Car tail-lights blaze brightly. The houses and roads are dark. But the grass! The trees! They are frosty blazing red, like snow which has been sprayed with cherry Kool-aid powder. Everyone’s clothes are altered. Blue-jeans are almost white. Some black clothing turns light grey. The artwork of T-shirts is almost invisible, and everyone’s hair is grey. (New: see the article.)

I’ve heard that some types of clothing are transparent to the infrared, so stagger on down to the beach and verify if this is so. “Mister, why are you wearing those goggles?”

I think this site has some superb ideas and some rather childish ones but then again I suppose thats the point.

http://amasci.com/~billb/cgi-bin/instr/instr.html