Blog

Vanity and Volcanoes

Posted by Gareth Adams on August 16, 2007

I guess every geek goes through a phase of wondering just how geeky they are.

I recently got an email from my new landlord, whose surname is Maltby. They’d cleverly managed to buy ltby.com, which meant their email addresses were all in the form …m@ltby .com

This got me thinking about other kinds of domain hack, and to cut a long story short I now own the rethada.ms domain

It means I now have the very concise email address “g@rethada.ms” and eventually a site at http://ga.rethada.ms

All of this is made possible thanks to the sparsely populated, volcanic-ash-covered Caribbean island Montserrat. Since their population of just over 4000 don’t make use of the territory’s TLD they offer it out to non-residents without restriction, much like other vanity TLDs like .tv (Tuvalu) and .tk (Tokelau)

Needless to say, I’m pretty confident about my geekuality now.

Tags:

5 comments

  1. Paul commented on August 16, 2007 at 08:33 PM

    This is absolute genius! Much respect.

  2. Gav commented on August 17, 2007 at 12:38 PM

    Yes mate. Kind of knocks my gav at gav.gs into a cocked hat!

  3. Piers commented on August 17, 2007 at 01:22 PM

    All rise ‘Geek of the week’

  4. Sean commented on September 19, 2007 at 05:17 PM

    Clever perhaps, but what about the semantic web? You care about standards and accessibility, but how does this help either of the two?

    I wonder what your code looks like… hmm.

  5. Gareth commented on July 23, 2008 at 11:32 AM

    I care about a lot of things. I care about standards and accessibility, I also care about having a geeky domain name.

    I even care about the price of Jaffa Cakes, but that doesn’t factor into a lot of the decisions I make during my working day.

    I like to think that my domain name doesn’t hurt any standards (unless you rely on geolocation of websites by their TLD – a practice which is inherently dodgy, and only really useful for commercial entities)

    I’m more worried that I still haven’t gotten around to putting anything on that web space yet.

Post a comment