Month: June 2007

Paddling against the flow

I did this paddle again. According to Google Maps Pedometer, it’s 4.6 miles. It rained two days ago, so the creek was higher than normal, and it’s flowing very fast. Both up and downstream were harder than normal – the speed differences between the parts of the river can catch the boat and swing it around or push you into one bank or the other. And of course upstream is just harder because you’re paddling against a strong current. But at least I wasn’t grounding out on a shallow stream.
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WTF? Apache crashed.

It appears that my Apache server on my colo box died early this morning at 6:26, which is around log rotate time. The only anomaly in the logs is that it appeared to have problems killing one of the FastCGI processes, sending it SIGTERM twice and then SIGKILL. This has never happened before, and it’s somewhat annoying. Fortunately I was only off the air for two hours or so.

Probably not going to happen

Well, I heard back from the guy who wants to buy this domain. He said he’d meet my price, but wants to spread the payments over 5 or 6 years. Oh oh. A friend pointed out that this could very well mean that they’ll be out of business in 2 years, and I’ll have lost the domain and not gotten the full price for it.

So I’m sending him the following response.

Yeah, you see that to me is a big sticking point. As a former nordic racer, I’m all too aware that good ski shops go out of business at a horrendous rate, and the ones that don’t go out of business barely scrape by. I imagine it’s even worse now when you can order from a bazillion on-line shops instead of having to drive 30 kilometers to the next competitor who isn’t trying to sell you some plastic monstrosities with fish scales on the bottom.

So to me that says that if you don’t do better than your most optimistic predictions, I’ll get one or two years of payments, and then nothing. And that’s not worth it to me.

I’m not in the business of evaluating business plans, and while I know banks are often wrong, they *are* in the business of evaluating business plans, and if you can’t convince one of them that having “xcski.com” as your domain is worth what I’m asking and give you a small business loan on that basis, I’m not going to disagree with them.

I wish your business well, but I’m going to have to say no to giving up xcski.com. Like I said earlier, though, I have the domain xcski.net which I will part with for a much more reasonable price.

Oh well, that share in the Cessna 180 on straight floats was nice to dream about for a few hours.

Is it worth it?

I got into this internet thing early enough that I got myself a damn good domain name. I was the original owner of canoe.com, a name I chose because it represented something I used to love doing. Also, at that time, you had to sort of justify why you needed a domain name, and so my story to Internic was that I was planning to set up a public access network called “Community Access Node Open to Everyone”. (Internic was the one and only domain registrar at the time.) I originally tried to register canoe.net, but it either got lost or rejected, so I tried canoe.com, and it worked.
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