startups, technology and fishing

Don’t ever leave a website that starts to get any kind of traffic on the joke that calls itself GoDaddy. As a registrar they’re not bad but their DNS tool is very broken.

I won’t bore you with tales of my screaming match at a manager there at 2am when a simple A record IP address change caused my image server’s address to drop in and out of their DNS at random. Or how the crankier I got the more he called me sir. Or how his colleague explained that if I choose to use their DNS service I need to know intuitively that I can’t make more than one change a day or their zone file gets corrupt - and how it’s standard procedure that you call them to do a “zone file refresh”. Or how he explained that a record I hadn’t changed at all dropped off their servers and the reason was because it’s an “Internet Thing”.

I moved over to dnsmadeeasy.com today and so far they rock. They’re the lowest cost host that offers Anycast on their servers which gives pretty good protection against DDoS attacks - something that took out dnspark a while back when I used to use them.

If you’ve ever visited Nissan.com you’ll know the story of Uzi Nissan being sued by Nissan Motor Corp. Having been sued over trademark infringement before, I know how hard this must have been for Uzi - and how hard the decision to appeal must have been.

Nissan.com is a descriptive name in the case of Uzi Nissan, which means that it’s not a strong trademark (he can’t sue anyone else who is using it descriptively) but he also can’t be sued for using his own name - especially with a history of 20 years of use. Any junior TM attorney will tell you that. And yet Nissan went after him with a vengance, all the way to the supreme court - Nissan Motor Corp’s petition was rejected.

Uzi finally won and kept the name and it must have cost him a small fortune to do so.

Nissan’s behavior makes me ashamed to own a Nissan XTerra and I’ll be considering this when I make my next purchase decision.

I rant, Tony rants, Alan ranted.

With surprisingly similar space-time coordinates.

Our love of Facebook is duly recanted.

We’re no longer Zuckerberg’s subordinates.

I’m not a copyright nazi and I’m all for sharing. But it really pisses me off when I see people plagiarize my blog entries verbatim without even giving a link back to the source and without adding so much as a single sentence of their own content.

Add a couple of sentences of your own and you can call it a mashup or use two sources and you can call it research.

Om Malik also had a run-in with content thieves a while ago.

UPDATE: Seems there was no bad intent on Brad’s part and he sounds like a pretty cool guy actually. Check out this awesome ad video he posted recently titled ‘the wind’.