Domain names - going, going...!

The year is somewhere around 3007, and the Galaxy is poised on the brink of war. This will be the conflict to end all conflicts, making the oil, water and Moon wars of the mid-third millennium look like mere skirmishes in comparison.

This is the battle for the Last remaining Domain Name. Slowly but inexorably, for the last thousand years, the domain-squatters, spammers and Google subdivisions have been buying up all the possible combinations of the 256 allowed characters. All permutations in languages known and unknown have long been spoken for and for the last 500 years the race has been on to lay claim to zxzxzxzzxzzzxzxxxzxzxzxxzxzxzxzxzxzxxxzzxxxzzzxxxzzxxzzxxzxzzzxxz.com, zxzxzxzzxzzzxzxxxzxzxzxxzxzxzxzxzxzxxxzzxxxzzzxxxzzxxzzxxzxzzzxxx.com and other still relatively desirable combinations.

But the end has finally been reached - battle lines have been drawn across the galaxy laying the ground for a Final Battle that will determine the owner of the Last Remaining Domain Name:

lkhsdfsdfgjhsfdlgjhsdfgluysrethsklf
dhgskldfgskldfgliuyliserhthsdlfgsui
odyfglkheskletlskejhrtlekhfddfhlkd
hgflkhsdlgfsdfgyuewtmnbzxvciopa
skjsmnbdmnbdgskldgfyullsenbgsjd
bfgs,mdbgmshfdgskdhgfhsdljhsfdgl
dfgiuwqrewpoewkretmnxmncvmbx
vcaljsnrgfxnvcxlvcsljhrlsopwkx.com

Poo-poohed by most a mere century ago as being "too hard to remember", this is now the most desirable piece of cyber-real-estate of all time, and many will die before the final victor lays claim to it.

Let battle commence!!

(suddenly, future-phobia.blogspot.com doesn't seem half such a bad choice, most of it was decided for me, for a start!)

Top 6 list of top lists to list on your blog

It's a Well-Known Fact (I read it in some Top 10 list of top list tips) that "lists" are The Future if you want to "drive traffic" to your site/blog, so here we go - this is a Top 5 List of Top Lists that I desperately hope will top the list lists:

1. Top 10 lists - the original, the Granddaddy of all lists, the figure 10 suggesting an authoritative and comprehensive, if not exhaustive overview of the matter in hand. These always carry the risk of a couple of lamers towards the end just to bump up the total.
   
2. Top 5 lists - a shorter, more compact, snappy form of list. Less comprehensive but better suited to a low-attention-span readership. Always the danger something really important might get left out.
3. Unnumbered lists - these show a touch of daring. They suggest that you are a mine of useful information and would not be so petty as to try to enumerate the treasure-trove of wisdom you have at your disposal. Only problem is you can't really then call it a Top n list (where n is the number of items) - it has to be something like Essential list of....bla bla which defeats the attention-grabbing purpose of Top Lists.
   
4. Top 9 lists - this is a no-no, tantamount to publicly confessing that you were essentially scraping the barrel and could not think of a 10th thing to put in your list.
5. Lists longer than 10 - these can be a double-edged sword. They can make you seem frightfully knowledgeable, but at the same time nobody actually reads beyond about 7 anyway (did I not mention that under Top 10 lists?). Also, you don't want to use up all your ideas on one list. A Top 15 list can almost certainly be broken down into a couple of manageable Top 10 lists by adding a few more items, or better still, into three Top 5 lists - now they really could go a long way!
6. Wrongly-numbered lists - an avant-garde approach whereby the title of the article refers to, say a Top 12 list of ways to make stacks of filthy cash off the Internet, when in fact the article only contains 11 such tips. Though you may appreciate the post-modern irony of this, your visitors may be forgiven for thinking you just forgot to count them, or couldn't think of any more clever things to write.
   
7. Top 6 lists - to be avoided at all costs. A top 6 list is an open admission that you thought the 6th item was just way too clever/witty/important to be left out in favour of a straightforward Top 5 list. Even a Top 7 list is the lesser of these two evils.
   

Well, we must conclude our list of Top Lists before we get too carried away. Until next time, happy listing.

Do NOT send Shane Bernier a card!

I knew this would happen sooner or later: the "virus" hoax would turn out to be true! Not actually a virus hoax, but one of those "sick kid" emails. The usual scenario is that there is a child sick in hospital whose life will be immeasurably improved by your sending the email on to all your friends. This child, in almost every case, does not exist, except in the mind of the original email prankster and the gullible recipients of the mail. The only truth in the email may be an echo of the story of Craig Shergold (see later).

Well, this time the child was Shane Bernier, and the email was true! Shane wanted to top the record for the most birthday cards received and, contrary to my prediction in the above-quoted article, years of "wolf-crying" did NOT deter gazillions of well-wishers from getting into the spirit of the campaign.

Now, I have to be careful here, I have every sympathy for Shane and his family and wish them well in their fight against this horrible disease. But I am really not sure if they thought this through. They should perhaps have first talked to the family of Craig Shergold to see what it is they are getting themselves into. Craig was the original get-well-card-kid, whose campaign was launched in 1989. To this very day, three hundred and fifty million cards later, Craig, now a fully-recovered, healthy young man STILL receives countless get-well cards. The family were forced to move house, unable to halt the deluge of cards, which now go to a special post-office box number and get pulped on arrival. According to the Wikipedia article, the Guiness Book of Records is NOT taking any more record attempts in this category, (though it is not clear whether the birthday-card category is still up for grabs). The Shergold family has pleaded many times for people to stop sending cards - in vain it seems.

Shane Bernier's family limited the appeal to Shane's birthday on the 30th May 2007, and some sources suggest that he had received some 5.6 million cards by then. But the family could have courted disaster by fulfilling Shane's request - one site even suggests that Shane wanted to hit a figure of 350 million cards, which sounds suspiciously like the Craig Shergold record. Chain emails have a way of sticking around, evolving as they go, and this may be happening already. Details may change, but the address could stay the same and the family could be saddled with a burden for years to come that could approach the disease itself in its magnitude. What seemed like a nice idea at the time could turn into a curse like it did for the Shergold family.

Future-Phobia says - and I know I am out on a limb here - the appeal is OVER! Do Shane Bernier a favour and DON'T send him any cards. And we hope that when he recovers he will thank you.