Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Remember the good old dial-up days?

The truth is, I’ve been using one form or another of cable Internet access since 1999 and never looked back.

Back then it was Media One, a Jacksonville, FL cable and Internet access provider that offered 1 Mbps Internet access. My employer of that time, an Internet service provider of the mom-and-pop era offered both dial-up and ADSL.

Even then, it was not a secret that fiber as an Internet access medium would eventually beat the living daylights out of both the dial-up and ADSL copper cables.

Twelve years later, my Internet access is Roadrunner at 40 Mbps. There are even faster home-office providers and nobody in their right mind would even consider dial-up as a back up method to access the Internet, in the days of wireless and cellular networks.

Today, while doing some belated spring cleaning, I tossed out the humble phone jack cables used by dial-up modems, but I kept my first dial-up modem as a relic of an era which, for better or worse, does not exist anymore.

Pardon the Sunday rant but the truth is, I was just about to change my default browser to Opera.

Miraculously, Firefox – the browser of choice for millions – fixed a series of underlying glitches with its latest 5.0 release.

The “feature” that drove me nuts interacted with Gmail and other web sites and since the release of Firefox 4.5 there was a delay of several seconds until those web sites were fully active and functional in the browser.

Firefox 5.0 resolves those issues without much of an explanation, but who cares. All I want is a browser that works!

It’s good to hear when people become successful overnight; that’s the type of satisfaction that can be shared.

Financial success through domaining is yet another way to display one’s entrepreneurial achievements and the recent sale of Social.com for $2.6 million is one such case.

Five years ago, Social.com was stolen from its owner and was offered for sale on Sedo. As I’ve done on numerous other occasions, the notification of its legitimate owner and of the selling platforms were both shared on DNForum.com

Although the original thread is gone, you can read some interesting reactions or lack thereof about my report of the domain’s listing at Sedo, back then.

While things have changed a lot in how Sedo communicates nowadays, it’s an interesting window into the past.

Congratulations to the seller of Social.com and I’m glad they weren’t tricked out of their property back in 2006. It’s important to note how much DNForum has contributed to preserving the state of alert over stolen domains as well.

While working on completing my 2nd mid-$x,xxx sale of last week, I encountered a problem that I hadn’t experienced before.

In the past, I’ve used many 2nd tier domain registrars and some might be quirky; others outright useless, particularly if they’re based in countries where English is a secondary language.

The transfer of the sold domain away from Fabulous.com – my favorite domain registrar – was to a Tucows reseller, FatCow, which is based in Canada.

When the new owner of the domain initiated a domain transfer to FatCow, Fabulous never received a transfer request and neither did I.

Two days later, with the agreement still pending, I contacted FatCow and I was told that there was no Technical Contact for the domain.

Of course, that was not the case; all of my domains have all contacts (Registrant, Administrative, Technical and Billing) and since they all match, Fabulous groups them together at the WHOIS.

Apparently, the API of FatCow parsing the WHOIS information failed to see that and recorded the Technical Contact as “blank”.

I had to get on the phone for 30 minutes with the FatCow tech support and explain that they should be using DomainTools to verify that the WHOIS data is as expected.

Instead, I had to inform the buyer that they had to open a ticket and provide my domain’s Technical Contact email and FatCow would escalate it to their domain department in order to send out a manual request.

Finally, when that happened we had wasted three days; while payment was safely at my bank account, the new owner was definitely anxious to get hold of their domain as soon as possible.

These programming glitches can cost dearly; the best way to resolve any such anomalies is to get on the phone and insist that the matter is examined while you wait.

The few times that I needed tech support from Fabulous – the popular domain registrar from Down Under – I had no trouble hearing back in a timely fashion.

All this, while due to location Fabulous is 14 hours ahead of the US East Coast, a full 17 hours ahead of California and the West Coast. And miles ahead in customer satisfaction.

As it happened, yesterday was one of those extra rare times that I attempted to reach Fabulous by phone, and my 3 attempts were unsuccessful, resulting in a dead line every time.

It appears that right on that day, Fabulous is transitioning its phone network and is using an alternate phone number in the interim.

Once the migration is complete, our contact numbers will remain unchanged, however during the transition, if you need to contact us by phone please call: +61 7 3233 6100

Unfortunately the Contact page does not include this new, temporary number which is the reason why I could not get through. Still, my issue was taken care of via email very promptly; I just thought it might be useful to share in case someone is calling the unplugged number.