One of the advantages of having an uncommon name from a small country that might (or so I’m told by someone from said country) have been subject to some Ellis Island-style butchering during the immigration process!
I’ve been the donor in a similar situation. I took my first pseudonym from a river in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the “Gilrain” (“wandering star” in Sindarin — as an older nerd, I learned that “Gilrandir” would be correct for a personal name), and my early blogs were at “gilrain.com”.
Eventually, a German family of that name contacted me and asked if they could have it. By that time, I’d learned of my grammar error and was anyway eager for a new identity, so it was easy to oblige. (I see that it’s owned but adrift at the moment.)
I still think personal domains are terribly cool and own many for various uses.
Ah, I found that part of the story relatively boring. He asked his IT guy to handle it. The IT guy called their hosting company, who gave them a so-called “auth code”. With that auth code, I could instruct my hosting company to take control the domain.
Sometimes asking just works best… for a hackerevent we were using eth-0.nl, as eth0.nl was already in use by the owner of a car-dealership. For a second edition of our event we tried to get the dash-less domain-name, so we e-mailed the owner and they agreed to hand it over to us for free, as long as we kept a single mail-alias/forward in use.
As a teen, when we first installed TCP/IP on our not-Internet-connected-LAN, it prompted for a domain name, so I started with “malx.net”, then did a lot of TCP/IP software development using that as an identity. 20 years later it became available and I snagged it, still surprised that four letter combinations with the “original” suffixes are available sometimes. (The only reason I’m “malxau” everywhere is because “malx” was so often taken, and some early 2000s site recommended “malxau” by appending country code.)
This reminds me of how I got my own domain name (after my own name) a decade ago. Although in my case it was just a matter of looking it up constantly every now and then with a domain registrar.
However, a few months ago I changed my first name, and now the domain name that includes my full new name is taken. :’)
I’m sharing here because it contains some technical context.
I added the
satiretag because it says “…and other humor” and this blog post counts as fun in Germany (we have a very very low bar!).Still waiting for my family name’s domain to be free. Or I might need to buy a whole company.
Right, ideally I would get fb.com or braun.de ;-)
One of the advantages of having an uncommon name from a small country that might (or so I’m told by someone from said country) have been subject to some Ellis Island-style butchering during the immigration process!
It’s a lovely story!
What does your aunt charge for consultancy? I can think of a few other problems her approach would solve.
🤣
Congrats!
I took the easier path: when getting married I made up a last name that no one else had and made sure the domain was free.
my wife actually has her last name (and the kids’ last name) as
.desince the nineties.Sounds like you have a cool wife
Kind of related: My mom has a single-letter address on a quite popular e-mail hosting service.
I’ve been the donor in a similar situation. I took my first pseudonym from a river in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the “Gilrain” (“wandering star” in Sindarin — as an older nerd, I learned that “Gilrandir” would be correct for a personal name), and my early blogs were at “gilrain.com”.
Eventually, a German family of that name contacted me and asked if they could have it. By that time, I’d learned of my grammar error and was anyway eager for a new identity, so it was easy to oblige. (I see that it’s owned but adrift at the moment.)
I still think personal domains are terribly cool and own many for various uses.
It’s a fun story thank you for sharing
I just felt it ended prematurely without covering how the actual transfer of ownership went down
Ah, I found that part of the story relatively boring. He asked his IT guy to handle it. The IT guy called their hosting company, who gave them a so-called “auth code”. With that auth code, I could instruct my hosting company to take control the domain.
How that works in the backend is actually something I don’t know and now I do want to learn more! :) I’ll queue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_registrar#Domain_name_transfer in my reading list. Maybe you’ll get there faster.
Sometimes asking just works best… for a hackerevent we were using eth-0.nl, as eth0.nl was already in use by the owner of a car-dealership. For a second edition of our event we tried to get the dash-less domain-name, so we e-mailed the owner and they agreed to hand it over to us for free, as long as we kept a single mail-alias/forward in use.
As a teen, when we first installed TCP/IP on our not-Internet-connected-LAN, it prompted for a domain name, so I started with “malx.net”, then did a lot of TCP/IP software development using that as an identity. 20 years later it became available and I snagged it, still surprised that four letter combinations with the “original” suffixes are available sometimes. (The only reason I’m “malxau” everywhere is because “malx” was so often taken, and some early 2000s site recommended “malxau” by appending country code.)
This reminds me of how I got my own domain name (after my own name) a decade ago. Although in my case it was just a matter of looking it up constantly every now and then with a domain registrar.
However, a few months ago I changed my first name, and now the domain name that includes my full new name is taken. :’)