I’m Back Baby, I’m Back!

I am sure that most people didn’t miss me or even noticed that I was not writing on my blog. I took some time off. Yeah. A lot of time off. Some because I wanted to and some because of family issues.

At first I had a server crash. And it was a disaster. I almost lost everything. Posts, comments etc. Almost… And this was the second time it happened. It turns out that the hard drive that hosted all my websites and all my client’s websites crashed. When I asked my web host about backups they told me that the backup hard drive was empty.
They weren’t taking any backups!!! Luckilly I had most of the files on my office PC and most of the critical databases backed up. I lost a couple of days worth of emails and a lot of my time to restore everything. Everything was working at 95% of what it once was within 24 hours but it took me almost a month to have everything at 100%. (minus the emails…)
My blog needed some google help that cached all my posts since my last backup and I used the wordpress email notifications to recover the latest comments.

I had to ask my web hosting company to activate backup and set it up numerous times before it was fully working. I don’t get this…

Then I went on a one and a half month holiday to a Greek island I go every year and didn’t look back. I needed some time to think things through. I spend most of my time with my 9-month old daughter and my wife and a few friends that visited.

And I tried to do the opposite of what I do all year round. I went to the beach almost every day and swam for about 1 hour every day. I didn’t watch any TV and no movies at all. I only watched some sports like the Tennis US open and the European Backetball championships. I went out drinking cocktails and beer every other day. I read comics instead of books or Wired and Esquire magazines. I started running. You get the point…

I also had some family problems like most families do. Health related problems. Some turned out ok some didn’t. That is life. And life goes on…

I really wanted to go to TRAFFIC this year but some circumstances didn’t let me. At first I said that I will go only if I close a deal that I have been working on for a few months. (still not closed) Then despite the deal had not been completed I decided to go.
But then I hurt my right shoulder at tennis and then while recovering from that I hurt my left hip by overusing it to compensate for the right side that wasn’t doing any lifting. This pain in my hip will not allow me to sit for more than a couple of hours, yet alone about the 15 hours I needed to get to Miami. Lets see if I make it to TRAFFIC next year. Now my wife is on board as well… I guess I will buy the ticket early so I don’t have any excuses.
Now my other shoulder hurts and I am starting to think that my daughter is to blame. 🙂

I have been keeping up with domain news by reading domaining.com and I must say that Michael, Theo, Andrew, Theo again, Ron, DomainSherpa and a few others are doing a pretty good job.

I must say that I have become addicted to Mark’s blog at domainpicks.com. I just love his day to day commentary and I really hate it when he skips a day or seven. 🙂
I don’t even look at his domain list so I am really disappointing when he writes something like: “I have been drinking all day so no comments today.” I wish I was drinking too! He wrote one of the best posts of the past few months here. Check it out.

Other top news of the past few months is Rick’s launch of the HallofShame.com. I have some pretty sweet cases to add to that. More to come…

This year is going pretty good with domain sales with a handful of 5 figure sales and other deals on the way.

So I am back writing and I am mostly here to complain. If you only want to here only praises then this isn’t the place to hang out. No, I will not praise a registrar because domains are renewed after I renew them. No I will not praise a backorder service because they delivered the domain I paid for. But I will complain and that is a promise. I have done a lot of debugging over the past 18 years and I can recognise a problem instantly. If I see a problem or bug I will write about it instantly. And when support takes 1 month to reply then I am going to keep bitching until I get a reply.

I mostly missed talking to other domainers on my blog and replying to comments. That is why I have been writing comments on other blogs all these months.

I hope everybody had a happy thanksgiving holiday in the US and today is Cyber Monday which it will interesting to see how it will turn out in domaining.

While I was never really away from domaining, I am really glad to be back.