If you hold any international domains (.com, .net, .org etc.) beware of this:

I received a letter in the post today from the ‘Domain Registry of America’ asking me to switch my domain over to them from my existing registrar. I was not interested from the get go as the prices were loopy (25 GBP a year!!??) and I like my existing registrar (also the host of this site) thank you very much. I decided I’d confirm my existing registrar still held the domain admin for me, which they do, and they were also good enough to point out to me that DRoA are basically in the business of charging rather ‘ambitious’ fees for registrations, renewals and transfers of domains. I kind of already guessed from the prices on the letter, but this only confirmed what I already thought.

So if you get a letter from these guys then open it, have a good laugh, then burn it

Yeh, sorry, I’m not having an interesting time atm. MacWorld was a bit of a let down, the Air is a nice looking, ne stunning, lightweight laptop but it has fundamental drawbacks that even an ultra-portable user will eventually find inexcusable. 1 USB port? No FireWire? Oh please…

In other news, I bought 2 500GB drives for the Mac Pro because I’m sick of running out of hard drive space. I found out the Apple Wireless (Bluetooth) Keyboard works flawlessly with my Windows Mobile 6 HTC Touch. I also worked out how to use the Bluetooth phone system with sad same HTC Touch in a Land Rover Discovery 3 the other day and I have to say it’s DAMN cool

Wait, that all sounded vaguely interesting. Oh well, whatever…

This pisses me off. I mean yes I know CES is a healm of capitalism and crap consumer goods that no-one wants, but really guys, there are limits. Once would probably have been funny, no, wait, no it wouldn’t.

Think about it like this. You’re a poor hack from a TV company who’s probably getting paid far too little to stand there trying to put a presentation across about your newest product and some retard decides it’d be funny to turn off all the TVs. You look an ass, your company looks an ass and people walk away because of it. Just imagine how pissed off you would be, for a second. Not only are you making these people’s lives even more of a misery than they undoubtedly already are. I mean who is gonna enjoy giving the same presentation full of corporate pap 5-10 times a day anyway? Have you not morals?!

Well I hope you’re happy. You play a stupid prank, not once but multiple times. You then post it on the net and sit around laughing like a bunch of stupid high school drop outs who just pushed an old lady over. Now it’s all over the web that bloggers are pulling stupid pranks at CES. Great. So when CES refuse to invite bloggers because you can’t be trusted to conduct yourself like proper journalists then I hope you’ll be even happier, having set the clock back 5 years and returned CES to the journo hacks, who go and butter every company up and write resultantly biased drivel.

Congratulations, idiots. Just because CES is barely worth attending these days is not an excuse to try and get your asses banned.
via Gizmodo

First my boss got it, then my mom, now me, and it’s a real mo-****** of a cold I’ll tell you.

via Daring Fireball

As a keen reader of the Macalope I accustomed to the acerbic dissection of Journalism surrounding the subject of Apple, Inc. Unlike Apple ‘fanboy’ articles that waft scented roses at Apple and Steve Jobs, the takes bullshit analysts and journalists articles apart and plainly points out exactly how much BS they are by countering them with raw fact and applying proper journalistic rules to them like what was done in the old days. They are often a joy to read.

Anyhoo it’s nice to see John Gruber getting in in the act, this particular dismemberment of this article on Fast Company, by Adam L. Penenberg, is a real piece of genius. Parts of it had me rolling in the aisle, not because it was funny but because of the inate stupidity of the original author.

Warning: get your facts right if you talk about Apple in public or you WILL get dressed down for it.

via BoomTown | AllThingsD

This is sad. You’ll recall I linked to this video/story a while back. It was a perfect parody of Web 2.0 but I guess someone didn’t find it quite as funny as the rest of us!