Oh how I hate the net from time to time. On second thought, that’s not entirely fair. I do though hate some online businesses. I just recently bought a web hosting account to host a few new domains that I had acquired, and with the account there was also a domain name that came with it for a small price, so I thought what the heck. I signed up, and I was now the proud owner of yet another hosting account and a new domain name. All was fine and dandy.

But things were about to change, I found the control features of the hosting provider to be abysmal and horrid to say the least. I was not at all happy, but things were only to become worse. After having tried to getting used to the new account, I decided it wasn’t worth it and came to terms that it was about time to use the 30 day cash refund option. I canceled the account and got my money back. But what about my new domain name that I get with the account, that I paid for? The domain that is registered in my name. Of course I wanted to take this with my and transfer over to my main registrar.

Well, I logged into my account on Dotster to proceed with the transfer. As the owner of the domain, I got a mail asking me to confirm the move. Of course, I agreed and confirmed and just waited for the confirmation mail. Well guess what, the domain had been registered with a registrar-lock, which makes it impossible to transfer a domain even with the consent of the domain owner. This of course pisses me off, so I contact the registrar the domain was registered with and ask them to remove it. They tell me I have to contact the hosting provider to have them make the change. HELLO!? You can’t do changes to your own systems? That’s just great!

Well, I contact my former hosting provider to have them do the work, but guess what!? THEY WON’T, THEY CAN’T, THEY ARE INCOMPETENT! The only thing they can tell me, is that I have to wait until 60 days after the account with them was registered until I can do changes myself. What a load of shite!!! So I’ve now written an e-mail to the registrar they do business with (yet again!), and told them in short plain terms that;

• It is my domain
• I paid for it
• I want full control over it
• Stop tossing me around, I’m no freakin’ ball
• It’s your systems, your databases. Get it done!

If not, I’ll contact my .ro friends and have them hack them from here until oblivion!

Update:
In retrospect, I understand my frustration and aggression. But in this case, there was nothing I could do, nor the hosting company. After a domain has been registered, it can’t be transferred over to a new registrar for a period of 60 days. This is in compliance with the regulations set by ICANN, the governing authority on domain names. But it still pisses me off though! :) It’s still MY domain!

Ah man, last night was wet. Very wet, so wet that the government was close to sending out a flood warning. My cousin came by the bar, it was his first weekend off for quite some time. So after work some of my co-workers joined him for a few beers. Oh how I wish now it was only a few beers, but it wasn’t. It was far too many. And I’ve been suffering all day for it.

I’ve never really been a person that gets hung over, I don’t cease to function like many of my friends do. But today my body has pretty much been like so dead. I’ve never had the flakey nerves, shaky hands and the occasional sweats, but that hasn’t been the case today. By God, today has been hell. If I knew last night that I signed a contract with the devil, I would have ran away from that temptation island faster than lightning itself screaming like a girl calling out for mum.

So with these words I end my day off suffering and pain, heading off to bed hoping that the devil sees mercy on me and lets me start off tomorrow all fresh and fit for fight. Or else I will file for a lawsuit against the devil on the basis that I signed a contract on false grounds, I thought it was all going to be good fun. Hah, I guess he’s sitting in his warm comfortable hole in the ground laughing at me.

Damn bastard!

Ah well, it seems like Pierce Brosnan is stepping down from being James Bond and passing on the torch to someone else to keep James Bond alive. And from rumours on the street, it seems like MGM and UA has settled on who shall carry on the legacy of James Bond. The new James Bond is to be Dougray Scott, known from blockbuster movies such as Ripley’s Game, Mission: Impossible II and Deep Impact.

Other candidates were Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd and Eric Bana. I can’t say that I fully agree with their choice, I would rather have gone for Clive Owen which I think is a great actor. On the internet, he’s become somewhat of an cult figure starring in BMW’s effort into short movies with the series The Hire displaying BMW’s in all their glory. My personal opinion is that he has much more of what is needed to carry the current James Bond figure than any other, seeing as Pierce Brosnan is stepping down. But then again, Dougray Scott has this “evilness” over him that kind of makes you draw parallels to the original James Bond, Sean Connery.

Being the huge James Bond fan I am, I’m will be waiting in great anticipation for Dougray’s first Bond movie. I don’t think I’ll be disappointed, but I would have loved to see Clive in his shoes instead. James Bond will always be James Bond, none of the movies are really great. Don’t get me wrong, the movies are good but they don’t leave your breathless. Being a boy, you’ve always had this urge and dream of being a secret agent, having lots and lots of toys at your disposal and of course riding around in fast cars with a lady in every port. I think this also goes for many females, and this is the illusion that we all live after and make James Bond what is it. A semi believable adventure that we would like to take part in, and thus forget some of the flaws that the James Bond movies have. We still love him, and we keep on coming back. It’s James Bond after all.

Update
As it turns out, the rumours  that  leaked regarding  the new James Bond was, as many rumours tend to be, false. The new James Bond is not Dougray Scott, but Daniel Craig. A name not considered by many, but what I think might be a very interesting choice.

Even though I have quite a decent solution running on my mail server to catch spam, some spam mails still evade my spam filter. Quite often I find the spam mails I get to be quite entertaining, and outright amazing. The stuff you get offered would be a rater long list, but for those of you that don’t get much spam, here are a few of them

• Cheap Viagra
  Keeps you going and going and going. Pretty much like Duracell batteries.
• Penis enlarger/extensions
  Increase your penis to the size of an elephant’s penis.
• Get your hair back pills
  Got a bald spot? Fear not, these pills will get you hair which even the most hardcore black metal artist would envy.
• Refinance your mortgage
  Yeah by doing this you will save thousands of $$$’s, we’ll even throw in a free Ceiko digital sportswatch. (they were out of Seiko)
• Want to lose weight; just click here
  We’ll give you a range of pills which will get you slim in no time, when the package arrives on your doorstep it’s just a text book that tells you to get off your fat arse and get out to enjoy nature.

Wanna help out a poor fella; “man, I just lost all my money” or “I know this guy that lives down in XXXXXX who seriously needs some money” or some other really sad story that urges you to donate as much money as possible to help them out. Yeah right! You’re broke, but you still afford internet access do you? Hah, pull the other one.

But recently spammers have been offering stuff that I never thought possible. Spammers actually spamming trying to sell you anti spam software. Oh my, what nerve! I hope they burn slowly on an open fire when they get in hell for all eternity. Just today I received two of those.

When I thought I had seen it all, I get a mail asking me if I wanted to be a minister. If I enrolled to their engenious program I could become a minister within two weeks, and after passing an online exam I would be able to perform weddings, funerals, baptisms, forgive people their sins and what made me laugh so hard I almost wet my pants; visit correctional facilities. Now, just getting the privilege to visit correctional facilities almost made me get my credit card out and enroll to this great course. Just think of that, skip years and years of theology schooling and be able to skip to the fun part. Oh my, I’m sooo thrilled! Really, I am! NOT!

But here is where it starts to get funny, just the other day I registered a domain name for a friend of mine, as a gift. Just a couple of days after I had registered this domain, I receive a mail from a spammer asking me if I wanted to make money of my newly registered domain. As he so nicely put it; “I noticed through my searches that you had registered the domain ‘pumpingirony.net’ and I was wondering if you wanted to make some money on your domain”. I was going all like “what the fuck!”. Given the number of domains that are registered daily, no person is able to check up which domains were newly registered. So my bet is that the fuckers (read: the registrar) I used to register the domain leaked information to a spammer, which then again contacted me. This pisses me off. Spammers are the scum of the earth. If you are a spammer, and read this post I want you to know this. If I ever get my hands on one of you twats, I’ll cut off your balls and roast them on an open fire. That’s the least I could do.

Has the Mozilla team done it? Have they made a browser that will finally be able to take up the fight with Internet Explorer? In my eyes, they have and with great style. Their new release in the Firefox branch has in many ways swept me off my feet. It’s fast becoming the number one choice for web browsers, and with a good reason. Firefox is nothing short of revolutionary.

Being a blogger and also being a nerd, you tend to be concerned about your pages being compliant to current web standards. Meaning, you want your XHTML, CSS, RSS etc to be correct and compliant so that it displays correctly in most browsers. Not only does Firefox do a great job at being compliant to these standards, but it’s built in support RSS is awesome! Your feeds go into your bookmarks, and whenever you go to a feed in your bookmarks the feed is updated automatically. It’s never been easier to see if a site you’re watching has been updated.

The list of new features in the new Firefox is quite long, but I’ll list a few of them here.

• Live Bookmarks.
  The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds in your bookmarks. When you happen to surf by a site that offers RSS feeds, a icon appears in your statusbar. All you gotta do is click on the icon, and choose whatever feed you want to subscribe to.
• Improved find.
  You now have a find tool bar which appears whenever you conduct a search in the current document. And I gotta say, it’s awesome Never has it been easier to find something, and with its built in automatic highlighting of search matches you spend less time finding what you’re looking for. I love this feature, being a coder/programmer. And of course, the ‘type as you go’ find feature is still there for links.
• Managing Annoyances and Protecting Security.
  Finally the extension system blocks attempts to install extensions from all sites other than update.mozilla.org. If you want to install extensions from a site other than Mozilla’s official site, you need to add the site into a list of approved sites. If a popup is blocked, you now have the ability to open it if it was an “important” popup. God knows why they haven’t had this feature before, but at least it’s there now. Another feature that I love, is that it now changes the colour of the address bar whenever you enter a HTTPS enabled site. As long as you see that the address bar is yellow, you know it’s secure to transfer your personal details and credit card details when doing an online purchase.
• Strong Encryption For Passwords Available.
  Finally Firefox has support for strong encrypted passwords. Consider this situation, you use a computer in a place that more than yourself have access to it and use it on a daily basis. Previously, all the passwords stored by Firefox’s password manager were stored unencrypted meaning that anyone with a bit of computer insight could easily steal your passwords. Well fear no more, now your passwords are stored encrypted and each time you start up Firefox it will ask for a master password that unlocks the usage of password manager. If the wrong password is supplied, password manager just lies dormant doing nothing.

Well, all I have to say to Microsoft is; Fear Firefox. I have recommended Firefox to all of my friends for ages, and I ditched IE ages ago for being bloated and prone with security issues. By this, I’m not saying that Firefox doesn’t have any security issues, any program has security issues. But it’s all about the severeness of them that is important to me. Firefox just keeps on getting better and better, and is for me the only choice. If you haven’t tried it already, I suggest you head over to Firefox’s page right now and download it. You will not regret it.

I’ve embraced Firefox as my new favourite pet. Do yourself a favour, do the same thing.

I’m not Christian, I’m not religious but sometimes I do wonder if there is a puppeteer that sits and controls the fate of my life, because currently my life sucks! This whole year in general has been one big disappointment. And once you think you’ve hit rock bottom, guess what happens then? You get screwed over once again. Ah man, if there’s a God he sure likes to bitch slap me from here until fucking eternity.

My year starts up fairly well, job is moving along nicely and I’m somewhat content. Good friends, good life, good everything. Then I decide it’s time to get back to the IT industry, and work with the field of expertise I have (and my education lies). All good, until the day an acquaintance of mine shows up with a job offering. The job is going down to Mallorca, Spain to work there in a hotel. I’m promised this and that, and go down there with a big smile on my face. Who wouldn’t, knowing that you would be working in the sun for the next seven months? I get down there, nice apartment and lovely scenery. Then the whole thing starts to fall apart, and once the first domino chip falls the rest falls by itself. I spend half my wages getting back and forth to work, I work only nights, just barely get one day off per week, had to bicker and argue with management to get paid and have no social life at all, cause all my flatmate’s works different hours than me. Result, I flee the country and head back home.

I get back home, start working a few shifts at the place I used to work prior to me going to Spain. Life is somewhat good, it’s good being back with your loved ones and with people that care for you. But then what happens? Yeah, my lung collapses and leave me in the hospital for two weeks and handicapped for nearly four weeks. On the positive note, I finally quit smoking after having smoked for the last ten years.

Then after two straight blows in my face, I start to get back to life and start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. A friend of mine asks me nicely if I can pull a shift for her, since she’s busy getting the stuff out of her apartment before she heads off to Dubai to study there for four years. Well, guess what happens then? Well, a man comes in to the bar and asks if my boss is there, and since he’s gone for the day I say no. He then asks if I can call him up, and I say sure. I lift up the receiver, dial the number and give this guy the phone. I stand right next to him, and eaves in on the conversation. He introduces himself as a person from a nightclub right next to our restaurant, and he’s wondering if he can borrow some money cause he’s broken the key to his office safe. From what I can hear of the conversation, they agree that this is ok so I give him the money. This not being the first time a friend of my boss has come to the restaurant for favours, I don’t hesitate at all. Give him the money, and he says he’ll be back within the evening with the money. Well, guess who called me today and said that this guy didn’t show up? My boss, asking me where the money was. As it turns out, this guy just hung up the phone that I dialed and faked the whole conversation. Result, I have to pay back this money as it was my fault and for being an idiot. Fuck, how gullible can one person be? God surely hates me.

Is there any better way of finishing a weekend of partying than going fishing with your best friend? I don’t think so. But what pisses me off, is this; We went fishing at around 8pm, knowing that we would have a rather good chance of getting something. We get to the river, and there’s heap of activity. Myself, I’ve never seen the river sizzle with so much life. During the six hours we were there, we’ve seen at least 40 fish surfacing just to show they were there. But did we get any? No, I’m pretty sure the fish just swam right in front of us, looking at us and making fun of us. Damn bastards! The end result, what might possibly have been the last trip of the year with zero fish caught. Better luck next year is all I can say. Ah well, birthday boy. Time to get some well earned rest. And my thoughts go out to my friend Scott, I hope the hurricane Ivan dies out quickly so that he can get home to his girlfriend and spend some quality time with her. You hear that Ivan, stop being such an arse!

Woohoo!

Site is now live, finally, I’ve been saying for months and months now that I was gonna get this site live, but you all know me. I can at times be extremely lazy. But I thought it was about time, finally got some details with my host sorted out and since it’s my birthday in two days time I kinda consider it to be my own birthday present.