2009 September | The Gremlins Umbrella Authority

The Worlds Biggest Bungee Jump

September 17, 2009 | Written by -GRUMBA- | Topic: Travelling | Comments (0)

You may be wondering as to why I have not posted in a week or so. The reason is, I have been in Switzerland with a good friend, doing the worlds biggest bungee jump.

It may seem in some respects, and to some people, a waste of time, and money to fly to a foreign country for 8 seconds of freefall, however I kid you not, the exhilaration alone is worth every penny.

We flew directly into Geneva, where we spent 2 days. Here we met some interesting people, experienced to swiss bars, and smoked a bit of shisha (as you do). We then proceeded to get on a train to Locarno (Around 5 hours East). The train ticket cost £80GBP (there and back), however doing it this way still worked out significantly cheaper than flying direct to Locarno. We spent a day in Locarno, then did the bungee jump, and then returned to Geneva. It was awesome.

The worlds biggest bungee jump is at the Verzasca Dam, Locarno, Switzerland. It weighs in at a whopping 220m, boasting 8 seconds of freefall. I wanted to do this jump, as after doing the Nevis Bungee in NZ, I developed a bungee addiction.

I created four videos of our trip: one of each of our jumps, one of both our jumps, and one of a random squeeky man.
So you dont have to watch a whole minute of video, I will only embed the ‘both’ one, however the others can be seen at Clowestab on Youtube.

Now watching that video, you may be thinking that you have seen that before. That is because you have ! This is the most famous bungee in the world, after it was featured on 007 Goldeneye back in 1998. That is why it is called the Goldeneye jump. It is not very reassuring to hear before doing the jump, but sadly the stunt man who did the jump for Goldeneye actually died. None the less here is the video for your viewing pleasure.

So.. would you do it?

Is there a stigma associated with adult webmasters?

September 8, 2009 | Written by -GRUMBA- | Topic: My Views | Comments (4)

As a domain name investor, I am more than happy to invest in anything I deem potentially profitable.

It just so happens that a year or two ago I was offered some adult domain names.
Basically, I had previously purchased some names from a seller. A few months after this initial purchase, I was contacted by him. His wife had found out that he owned these domains, and given him a lowdown.. sell them, or… well… who knows.

Now I dont have much interest in the adult industry, or adult domains, however these were some reasonably popular adult keywords in various cctlds. I jumped on the reasonably low prices. In hindsight I am curious as to whether his scenario was a selling ploy, none the less I felt I had gotten a good deal.

I have since attempted to sell these domains numerous times, never with any success. Eventually I gave up, and took a $200 offer I had received on ‘blowjobs.us’. To my dismay the buyer put it straight on SEDO, and fetched over a grand. This increased my motivation for selling the other domains, however even a Rick Latona auction could not get any bids on these domains.

Now I appreciate that cctlds, are less valuable than faeces nowadays: I sold 5 LLL.us I had bought for $70 each 3 years ago for $1 each on ebay recently ! However one of the names in the .com extension sold for mid $xx,xxx. You’d thus think that the .us would be worth $500? Apparently not.

So, essentially I am in a position where I own 5 or so domains I cannot sell, in a questionable niche which I have little interest in. Furthermore I have no idea as to how to develop them. What to do?

I looked into adult content on popular adult forum GFY.com. The cost of content was extortionate ! No wonder porn is such a profitable business. 10 sets of images cost more than the domains themselves cost (OK That is an exaggeration, none the less it IS expensive). The little motivation I had was diminishing.

Fortunately for me, I stumbled upon a seller who was licensing a large volume of content for a pretty cheap price. It now seemed worthwhile to spend a little cash for a potentially good return. 100GB of downloading later (YES, 100GB ! : (very high definition images) ), and I was in a position to begin development.

This whole exercise has been worthwhile in that it lead me to develop a script to automatically resize images. I managed to convert 2.15GB of images down to 85MB with this script. I could easily make my money back selling the script.
Armed with this, I decided on my development ‘plan of attack’, and have since put it into action.

FAST FORWARD

So, now my various adult websites are online. Anyone can access them, yet no-one can definitively say ‘That website is owned by ‘The Gremlins Umbrella Authority”. Why is that the case? Well simply put, as mentioned numerous times, the adult industry is questionable, and somewhat immoral from my perspective, however my websites are not illegal. On that basis, money is money, and I will gladly accept it, yet I dont really want to be actively associated with it.

If you park a domain name on an adult landing page, you would not go onto the streets and tell your mates that you were in the porn industry (or would you?). Likewise I know what I want to be known for.. a network of great, user, and family friendly websites. In simple there is a stigma associated with the adult industry, and I have no interest in associating myself with that stigma.

Would you?

ACS Law: Manipulative Cons.

September 5, 2009 | Written by -GRUMBA- | Topic: Scammers | Comments (2)

There are an abundance of online scams going on, ranging from the tedious ‘Nigerian Lottery’ emails, to the increasingly more common ‘Domain Appraisal Scam’. Given that I do quite a bit online, I have been made aware of these scams. Fortunately for me I tend not to fall for them.

Admittedly there are also a lot of offline scams. I, however, have never experienced one apart from on the box in the form of TV Show ‘Watchdog’ (here in Britain). That was up until, well, about 2 months ago.

My father received a letter from ACS Law. It went along the lines of ‘We want £500 from you because on random date you downloaded a Scooter song from a P2P Network’. The first clarification that needs to be made here is that no-one in my family has ever used a P2P network. The second clarification is that when we do BUY music through Itunes, nowhere in our playlists would you find ‘Scooter’. Do people actually listen to Scooter?!

I took a look on google, and there are a lot of threads at various problem about this ‘offline spam’. I am unsure how names, and addresses have been acquired, but there does seem to be some serious automation going on here such that in our A4 envelope, we actually had the exact same letter with a different name on it!

Unfortunately it seems people are getting scared, and paying these fines. This seemed absolutely preposterous to me.. why pay for something you did not do. None the less, as the claims were false we simply ignored the letter.

Today we got another letter along the lines of ‘We are still pursuing our false claims, and want to damage any reputation we have left’. We were given a lowdown of 7 days to pay or be taken to court.

Father wanted to reply along the lines of ‘Go away, we didn’t do nothin !’. I, being the diplomat, went on google again, and looked up suggested responses. We downloaded a template letter from Being Threatened, and will pop it in the post tomorrow. Then it is a waiting game to see what happens. Kudos to whoever set that site up as it saved me a lot of time, and effort.

The letters they sent out are legally binding, it would have been foolish to ignore it once again. Just imagine if somehow, someone was allowed to spam.. and it was legal.

Media companies, fair play to want to defend your rights, but hiring companies like this with their disgusting scare tactics only does you damage, and destroys your credibility. Who on earth will support an industry that threatens the innocent? No-one.

The Support Game: Moniker

September 2, 2009 | Written by -GRUMBA- | Topic: My Views | Comments (0)

With this round of ‘The Support Game’ I felt somewhat bad. I contacted Moniker, who are by far and away the best domain registrar on the web.
My call was instantly picked up by Don Lyons, who is in fact already my account manager. I apologize for wasting your time as a fake customer, but hopefully what I have to say will get you many a customer in return.

‘Why should I use Moniker over Godaddy for example?’

Dons response involved praise for Godaddy for what they do. He stated that they are the worlds biggest registrar, and thus they must be doing something right. He pointed out that Godaddy are a webhost also whereas Moniker simply focus on domain name management. He stated that Godaddy caters to small businesses, and college students whereas moniker is a ’boutique registrar’.

Now I don’t know about you, but a company that can sell itself praising competitors must know what they are doing.

Don then went on to a 5 minute or so explanation of exactly what Moniker offered. Such was the response that after hearing it, I could not think of any hard questions to ask. I felt like saying.. Wow you are awesome, and hanging up… but.. well.. I couldn’t do that.

Paraphrased, Moniker is slightly more expensive, but has never lost a domain name. Their portfolio manager can handle upwards of 5,000 domains on a single page, and dns changes etc can be registered in bulk in a matter of seconds. Furthermore they are owned by Oversee.net, and thus support, and service is streamlined for Snapnames, Domain Sponsor, and Moniker.

I questioned Dons statement with regards to ‘never losing a domain name’, referencing this post, and was informed that Oversee resolved this by paying out of their own pocket to buy the domain back, and returned it to the owner. This has not been verified, but if so is seriously impressive.

Regarding support, I was curious as to whether Godaddys statements about support were correct. Don was completely honest stating that ‘Moniker is not a hospital’, whereas, as a host Godaddy needs 24/7 support, Moniker does not. None-the-less he stated he is almost always reachable by phone, and has a blackberry for when he is on the move. He also praised the Moniker web based support, and the staff.

My only disagreement is that the web based support is slow, and uninformative at best. Phone, and you’ll always get the answer you want.

Without even asking Don also offered me free 0% interest financing to move my domains to Moniker. I queried how they could provide this, and received ‘$150,000,000 in the bank tends to help’. One thing is for sure Moniker aint going anywhere any time soon. Fill in a simple credit finance form, and you can move all your domains such that you don’t need to prolong the process.

What I loved about Moniker was the honesty. Whereas Godaddy sounded desperate for your business, Moniker were happy to accept your business if you both suited one another. Don would not for example offer free financing if my domains were crap. Why? Because Moniker only wants good domains, such that they can look after all their names and customers, rather than be flooded with spammers and scammers.

Interesting fact of the day: Moniker has over 3,000,000 domain names under its belt, putting it up there as one of the top 10 domain name registrars.

Moniker is by far and away the BEST domain name registrar. Don’t delay, and join at Moniker.com