Zeltus

Because Pipex is staffed by a load of scum-sucking, bottom-feeding arrogant barstewards is why.

They very kindly took the renewal fee for my original domain name from me and then swiftly proceeded to hand my domain name back to Nominet for reassignment. And they, just as swiftly, sold it to some Herman the German (well, an Austrian, actually)

Any chance of an apology? Not likely. And as for getting the domain transferred back to me – forget it. Nominet do have a Dispute Procedure but it (at the time) relied on Herman responding to their correspondence. Which of course, he didn’t. And to take it any further would have been frighteningly expensive.

I guess I was lucky to get my money back from Pipex – eventually.

I didn’t even start off with Pipex – I originally registered with Magic Moments (anyone else remember them) because they promised that some of the fees taken from me would go to Good Causes (ha! that idea didn’t take long to dive bomb into the ground either) – and one way or another, Magic Moments became part of the Pipex empire.

Still, I didn’t really need that specific domain name any more when Pipex gave it away for me. I just needed A Domain Name. And of course, all the good ones have long been snapped up. My criteria were: short, easy to spell and type, and memorable. A .com name would be nice but by no means essential – .eu domains were just about ready for release then and hey! .eu is shorter than .com. I’ve never understood why someone would think that thisismyveryownfulllengthdomainname.com would be in any way desirable – there is no way I could type that without error more than one attempt in three, that’s for sure.

Now, I lived in Malaya as a boy (yeah, I know, it was then and is now, Malaysia, but this was the dying days of the British Empire, and to us it was and shall remain, Malaya) and there I took a keen interest in the local Lepidoptera. And I still have my highly-prized copy of Corbet & Pendlebury’s Butterflies of the Malay Peninsula. It seemed to be a good idea to browse through it and see if any name took my fancy. And zeltus amasa maximinianus, the Fluffytit, hit the spot. And so zeltus.eu was born and became mine.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t learned my lesson and continued to do business with Pipex (have I said they are scum-sucking, bottom-feeding arrogant barstewards by the way?) and yes, I came to blows with them again later on – and that’s a story for another day.

Pipex have been taken over in turn by GX Networks now, so I can only hope that this will generate a sea-change in the attitude to their customers.

And Pipex Internet, who I never dealt with and have heard nothing bad about at all, are part of the Tiscali empire.

Personally, the day the Pipex name disappears altogether will be a red letter day for me.

Gosh, doesn’t a good rant do you the world of good? :-)

Technorati Tags: dispute, hosting, nominet, pipex, scum

This is an update on my earlier page, describing my experiences with True Font Family.

Remon Lammers, the author, has now released version 1.4 of this product, and it is a significant improvement on version 1.0 – faster, cleaner and if possible, even easier to use. One of the major improvements to it as far as I am concerned, is that it is now as easy to use in Opera as in the other major browsers.

Remon is already working hard on WebfontZ, the successor to TFF. If he keeps up this rate of progress, then I forecast and hope that this will be a highly successful product (especially if he keeps the cost at the altogether too reasonable price he charges for TFF). WebfontZ has been advertised around the font-oriented web forums since February and I had wondered if it was going to just be vapourware. But no, Remon will, I’m sure, make it a truly professional and useful product in very short order.

A beautiful feature of this product is that it integrates quite seamlessly with font-aware browsers (currently, that’s just the Webkit-engined Safari as far as I am aware) – developers can use TFF/WebfontZ now and not have to worry about having to change their code if as and when their favourite browsers also become font-aware – Remon’s product will continue to work quite happily and most importanly, swiftly.

One well known alternative to this product is sIFR, a Flashbased product that i’m afraid I found quite difficult to install and use. And Flash is a bit heavy on resources. But still, YMMV – personally, I’m sticking with True Font Family/WebfontZ.

Technorati Tags: embed, font, LinkedIn, opera, sIFR, true font family, webfontz

We lost Shadow, our cat when in Spain earlier this year (he came everywhere with us) – unfortunately, a black cat at night on an unlit street is not a recipe for success and Shadow finally lost his 9th and last life.

We won’t be getting another one (yeah, heard that one before) but to remind us of how selfish, self-centred, egotistical and completely self-oriented, and yet un-ignoreable(!) he was, I found these short animations on YouTube.

Magic, absolutely pure magic.

Update: No sooner did I create this link than Simon released a new cartoon. So I’ve included that here as well.

TV Dinner

Cat-man-do

Let Me In

Technorati Tags: animated, cartoon, cat, cat-man-do, humor, humour, shadow, simon, spain, youtube

I have already created a page describing my 2004 adventure, when my neighbour and I traversed across France & Germany to the Elefant biker Rally in south-east Germany.

But two years later I re-traced our route, this time on my own. The occasion was the 50th Elefantentreffen, and that seemed like a good enough reason to go. And indeed, it was just as much fun as the first time.

Originally I planned to web-page home for my photos, but on reflection it would have been just a repeat of the 2004 one. And so it never happened. But now I’ve loaded my photos onto Flickr, which is a much more satisfactory home for them.

Click on the photo to go to my Flickr album.

And this link takes you to my original Elefantentreffen 2004 page.

Technorati Tags: 2006, elefant, elefantentreffen, germany, motorcycle, passau, snow