On Domain Name Service

Years ago, when I was a University co-op (alright I feel old now), I worked for a time at a company that was in the Insurance industry. One guy, an actuary, had a trade magazine at his desk, yes believe it or not there are in fact trade magazines for actuaries. Now I know most of you are probably thinking "what does an actuary do?" The truth is actuarial science is probably the most straightforward branch of mathematics, you start by observing some statistical trend, life expectancies, number of car crashes per hundred thousand drivers, number of house fires per million homes, etc, then you tell an insurance company how much they should charge for a particular policy. Sound boring? Well from what I hear, it is. Anyway this actuary has a trade magazine and as I was waiting to talk to him about his computer I read the article that the magazine was opened to.

The article was written by another actuary who was pleased as punch that he was able to help his neighbour with a professional problem, specifically the neighbour wanted to know if he should keep his whole life insurance policy or go term life. (If you don't know the difference between whole and term life, don't worry about, you will find out, sooner, much sooner, than anyone really ought to.)

I do not have the problem of having the useless profession on my block. Short of a TEOTWAWKI event (A Y2K expression, The End Of The World As We Know It), I suspect neighbours, friends, family, will always be knocking on the computer guy's door asking for help with their wireless or their email, or word processing, or... & cetra.

I should have listened to my mother and become a doctor. At least then when I have an ache or pain I wouldn't have to weigh the cost of waiting (always far too long) against the potential benefit of actually seeing the doctor.

Anyway much as I'd like to, on further reflection I realise I really cannot go into specifics here, but suffice it to say a friend of mine was having DNS issues and so for the first time I looked into registering a domain name for someone other than my employer. Holy smokes, domain names are cheap! For the princely sum of $10 you too can own: EverythingIEverWantedToKnowAboutLifeInsuranceButWasAfraidToAsk.com.

Only try managing that domain once you buy it. Registrars have it in for us! What a convoluted ugly, and I do mean ugly process. Sure you can pay with a personal credit card, but then if you do that you need to supply the home address. You can specify that the address should be hidden but what if you are doing your friend or organziation a favour? What if you want their address to show? So for example, suppose the Prime Minister of Canada started a Kitten Lovers club. So maybe Mrs. Harper decided to register primekittens.com. Only instead of the home address being say 24 Sussex Drive, she wanted it to be 1600 Pennsylvania Ave Washington DC (I hope the Obama family's new Puppies get along with cats).

So Mrs. Harper (The Prime Minister's wife) goes to some Registrar and fills in the information, Lauren Harper, 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa ON, K1A 0A3, and submits this to the registrar. Now of course anyone who wants to, can easily find out where the Prime Minister of Canada lives, but until I was able to modify the DNS record almost 24 hours after I set the record up anyone who did a whois against the record I created could see my home address. Even better than that, once I did start to configure things I left certain fields empty, my friend did not have a mail server, so no MX record. What does the Registrar do? They add an MX record for their own mail server. Guys, if I order a corned beef sandwich on rye, please do not serve me a chocolate cake because I did not bother to order desert, assume if I did not order desert I don't want any!

I guess the point of this whole post is, stop assuming I am incompetent, this assumption is really starting to frustrate me. I miss the glory days when all you needed to blow the system away was rm -rf * and talk of email worms (viruses) were all fiction.