However, as good as these browsers are, they have a few common problems which annoy me to no end. For one thing, if something in one of my Firefox tabs screws up, the entire browser goes down. Most of the time Firefox will restore my session, but there are times when it doesn’t and I find myself trying to remember which sites I had open before the app crashed. I don’t like how I have to cripple new sites with the NoScript plugin for Firefox because I’m worried about malware.

Google seems to be changing that with their Chrome browser. Every tab will have self-contained processes. If the process of one tab crashes, it doesn’t take the entire browser with it, it will just close out the one tab. This also means that malware won’t be able to affect other tabs. Google also dealt with malware by not allowing it to write to the hard drive!

Chrome is also supposed to be faster. I wrote an HTML parser/browser a few years back for work just before CSS became popular and I can tell you that although object placement for a web site can be tricky, it can be done if you work it out on a whiteboard. Adding in all of today’s CSS, XHTML, and other items are far beyond what I did a few years back and I hope that they optimized their object placement code.

The entire project is open source. That’s classy on Google’s part because rather than keep all their code to themselves, they give it away so people can learn from it and hopefully improve it over time.

As of the time I’m writing this, they haven’t released it yet, but I’m anxiously awaiting in. In the meantime, you can click here to read Google’s comic book about how they came to build Chrome and how it works inside.

Ok, I figured no big deal. I’ll just call Sprint, update my expiration date, and that’ll be the end of it.

Nope.

We’re currently on our way to my sister’s house and so I took the bill with me with my account number on this, thinking I could start calling on the road. However, the bill has no phone number on it. Instead, it asks you to dial *3 on your Sprint phone to get to the billing department. Hey, Sprint, I don’t have an actual Sprint phone. I remembered that when you try logging into EVDO and fail, it’ll give you a phone number to call for customer assistance. I called that.

The first thing you have to do when you log into the system is to put in your Sprint 10-digit phone number. I was doing this from the road so I didn’t have the phone number they gave me when I activated my EVDO device. It’s at home in a Sprint box, written on a sticky note. I waited on the line to see if it sent me to an operator but instead I got “it is required to put in your 10-digit Sprint phone number to continue”. Oh, that’s just great. So, for the heck of it, I pressed “0″ to see if I could get any further. I did.

Once I got a real person, I couldn’t understand a word he said. Let’s call him Mr. Mumbles (or MM for short). MM asked me for my 10-digit Sprint phone number. I said that I have an EVDO device and I don’t have an actual Sprint phone. He seemed to be frustrated with this and asked for my account number. I had that. Then I had to give him my Sprint account PIN number. That too, is on the sticky note. So I had to answer a secret question, to which he couldn’t understand how to spell the answer. I had to use Army codes (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.) to spell it out for him.

We got past that hurdle, and he had my account up. I told him that I just wanted to update the expiration date on the card. He can’t do that because the card had expired and is no longer in the system. Who wrote this system of theirs? Many other systems allow you to update the expiration date and continue service (Apple, Amazon). So I had to read him all the information from my credit card. Not a big deal, but that’s 30 seconds of my life I’ll never get back.

Once that was done, I asked if that card can be used for autopay. He said no, that only happens if you call in to pay with that same card three times. How ridiculous is that? He has access to my account, why not just mark it for autopay? His solution was to log into the web site and only there can I set the card for autopay.

So, epic fail from Sprint for their customer service. Someone over there really needs to look at their computer system and find where items can be optimized.

Checking out the domains with my real name in them, they were all taken. Even if I tried different iterations of my name, they were all taken. However, I tried with Godaddy.com which doesn’t give you detailed information about the sites unless you do a little extra work. Since I’m on a Mac, I pulled up a terminal and did a “whois” on each of the names. Some of them expired in 2010, but one expired a week from when I first checked. Checking the site, there was no content, no forwarding, nothing at all. It was a dead link to a seemingly abandoned domain.

So my first reaction was to run out and ask the person who owned the domain if they wanted to transfer it. My immediate second thought was that people are probably not as nice and giving as I am and would probably ask for a ton of money had they known that someone wanted to buy it. Instead, I decided to be patient and wait for the domain to expire. It did. It wasn’t renewed.

However, it took a while to revert back to being available. I did some research and found that there are grace periods for when domains expire. If person A buys a domain from company Z, company Z can still hold it for about 30 days. Past that, it can be let go. To be honest, I didn’t read any ICANN documentation on this procedure, but it seems to be the consensus of how it worked.

Thirty days went by. Forty-five days. Longer. After a while, I decided that one of two things are going to happen: the domain’s going to expire on its own, or the people that own it are going to want to dump it, so I sent out a charming email to the registrars asking if they would be interested in transferring the name to me.

This is the response I got:

Dear Mike,

The domain name is no longer in active use. We would be willing to release the name to you for $995.00. Please let us know if this is acceptable and how you would like to proceed.

Thank you.

–
Best Regards,
Christine

Yes, you read that right….$995.

I used webmail to respond so I don’t have my actual response but it went something like this:

Christine,

That is a laughable amount for a web site that obviously has no true value. It’s a site for someone’s name, unless they themselves have a ton of money to blow on a business, it’s not going to sell for that much. I’ll be willing to give you $200 for it, but no more.

Mike

And I never heard from them again.

It had become a habit of checking the web site’s domain with whois every once in a while. Today, I checked it on a whim and I had to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The name was released. I actually went “OMG!” out loud and quickly snagged it for myself, saving $969 in the process.

So, be patient when it comes to domains expiring. Emailing the person who owns the domain can always be tricky. Will the person be honest and give you the domain for a fair price, or snag it for another year out of spite? I got lucky. VERY lucky. I think my email told them that there’s no real demand for that name (and I was being truthful) so they probably decided to let it go. Or, maybe the domain actually expired under their noses. I really don’t know, nor do I care.

I will say this: if you have ANY reason to think you may need to register your real name for something in the future, just do it. Don’t wait. Don’t let someone snag it from under you. There are Godaddy.com codes above you can use to lessen the price if you want (disclaimer: this is not an ad for Godaddy.com. People that know me know how much trouble I went through to get this).

Now, if someone can get me starman.com, that would be great. I’ve been trying for at least 6 years. I called, and he won’t sell