Plant Wars

I was playing with this neat tool for searching for short domain names that was on Hacker News and discovered that the domain name jon.to was available. I figured I’d never come across the opportunity to get jon.anything again for a long time, so I searched for how to go about registering a domain name with the .to TLD since none of the big names seemed to be support it.

I found tonic.to eventually and attempted to register it. They reported that it was taken! At this point, I didn’t know that the whois records of .to domains are rather limited, so I figured that the lack of a record meant that it wasn’t taken. I e-mailed Tonic’s support e-mail, and they promptly replied that the domain was available and they just had to update their records for whatever reason.

So I registered the domain name and waited. After a few days, I e-mailed them and asked why it still wasn’t working. Apparently using afraid.org’s free DNS service triggered their fraud prevention mechanism. They sorted it out for me quickly after I contacted them, although it certainly would have been nice if they had let me know. The person I talked with did tell me to just e-mail him if I ever registered another domain name using the freedns.afraid.org name servers and he would insure that it went through, however. (By the way, if you want a subdomain of jon.to, that’s one of the features provided by afraid.org.)

The next day, I got a phone call from my bank saying there was a suspicious charge to my card from the Kingdom of Tonga. I told them it was okay and then I finally got my domain name. Everything’s set up and working marvelously.

I’m still not sure what to do with the domain name, though. So far I only have a toy project for determining how many of something it takes to reach the moon.

Any ideas for what to do with it?

Also, while purchasing a .to domain turned out to be slightly more involved affair than I’m used to, I ended up a happy customer and recommend tonic.to as a registrar for .to domains. Since none of the big names support the TLD, there are many short domain names still available. I know that when I was searching for available .com domain names for my company, I was becoming increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t even make up a nonsensical word that wasn’t already taken.

We ended up calling ourselves Artful Dodger Software LLC, by the way. Papers were filed with the Secretary of State on February 1st, 2010. I’m attended a new business tax workshop on the 23rd that’s put on by the Oklahoma Tax Commission to try and figure out what we need to do from that perspective. Ergh.

Oh yeah, and the first set of adventures is finally out on Plant Wars. It’s short, but I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. A sequel will be out… some time.