Soo-Foo.com Sold

I finally received my $600.0o check from Network Solutions’ Certified Offer Service for the sale of Soo-Foo.com, yesterday.  I had been awaiting this payment for quite some time and the whole transaction was mired with delays.  I am certainly glad to have finally received this payment, although I now know to charge more per sale if I ever get a an offer through this service ever again.  Although NetSol offered me $600.00 and paid me exactly $600.00 for Soo-Foo.com, this sale was well over a month in the making and once the transfer of the domain name had been completed and verified, it still took over 10 days for them to process the payment, issue a check and for me to receive it.  Heck, I had it transferred over to NetSol within 5 days.

The main problem is that NetSol only looks after itself, not its customers.  They use every trick in the book in order to screw their clients.  Once the transfer is complete and verified, the payment is authorized for processing.  Except even then, once the transfer has been completed and verified by Friday, the payment isn’t actually issued until the checks are printed the following week, on Thursday.  Talk about a racket, NetSol has purposely structured everything in order to give everyone else the shaft.  Obviously no one gets their check until next week, so NetSol is sitting on this payment an unusually long time before the funds are ever deducted from their bank account.

Every other domain name broker or sales service is paying the seller immediately upon a successful transfer verification through PayPal or the user’s set payment method.  That means that I would be paid on the very same day, anywhere else.  It just shows what an evil attitude NetSol uses in conducting business.  They really have no sense of fairplay at all.

Note also that Network Solutions uses the very same contract for every single one of its customers.  The same contract covers domain name sales of any type, and is extended to be overly and dramatically long to cover the specifics of each and every domain name extension, and all other legal speak, as well.  It also covers its web hosting, design services, along with anything and everything else it could ever thing of selling or taking commissions on.  The contract itself is a breach of contract by its very design as a way to buck the first law of business, because it fails to constitute any attempt to do business fairly by any stretch of the imagination.  NetSol’s conglomerated contract is unrealistic to any consumer, or anyone else that NetSol does business with, and is purposely meant to create confusion and make the reader give-up on making sense of the crap.

Obviously, NetSol hasn’t changed.  It’s this crappy “holier-than-thou” corporate law attitude with virtually no support  and complete lack of social responsibility that made me become my own domain name registrar at Domain Hostmaster.  Unlike NetSol, we take pride in delivering extremely low prices and offering full customer tech support on any issue.  But NetSol continues doing whatever they want on the mere basis that they control the registry, which of course is their primary business (and probably why NetSol so flagrantly abuses its human customer relationships).

I am sure that the buyer was happy, as whoever it was messed-up in the first attempt to purchase the domain at the agreed upon price after the first month was up and hadn’t sent the required FAX that NetSol’s Certified Offer Service was looking for, and I did not quibble about the price once they re-initiated a contract for sale after the previous offer and contract had expired.

I have made a mistake, though.  I deleted the sales listing for Soo-Foo.com from my Sedo account.  I should have just set it as ‘not for sale’ because the new owner still hasn’t changed the name servers for the domain.  That means that any PPC funds the domain produces using the old name servers set for Sedo will be lost to me since I can not add the domain name again as I won’t be able to be verified as the owner.

The new owner might be able to recover those funds if he/she signs-up at Sedo, though.  But probably won’t if he/she/they wouldn’t even bother trying to purchase the name through Sedo, originally.  Or maybe the buyer hasn’t actually taken possession of the name yet and it is still sitting in NetSol’s escrow account.  That would figure.

Despite NetSol’s attempt to treat anyone as badly as possible in order to leverage all advantages to itself, the sale of Soo-Foo.com did go through and I am happy with the outcome.  But I am not happy with the process as noted above, but that isn’t even the full story.  After acknowledging the successful transfer of the domain name to their transfer holding account in one email, the Certified Offer Service sent another email indicating that the transfer was unsuccessful and the sale was stopped.  This was obviously a hick-up in their system programming, but it is truly an enormous problem.  Why the heck can’t this giant corporate player get simple domain name transfer monitoring programmed correctly?

To top that off, upon receiving the first email saying that the transfer to their specified holding account was verified early in the day on Friday, that second email indicating that the transfer had failed and therefore the sale halted came late in the day on Friday and I did not see it until after the close of business.  Of course I wrote back, strongly objecting to their apparent failure to fulfill their contract of sale and threatening legal action if they did not complete the transaction.  And of course, since it was the weekend I did not expect a reply until the next week.  But I didn’t even get that reply on the following Monday.  It was late on Tuesday before I heard an apology for their mistake.  I can’t believe how unprofessional they are.

Thank God I have setup Domain Hostmaster, because as a Domainer I require great honest support available 24/7 at the kinds of competitive prices that anyone can afford along with all those free extras I include in every package.  And yes, I am my own best customer. 

By the way, what does “Soo-Foo” mean, you may ask?  That is the nickname for the city of Sioux Falls (pronounced Soo Fahls), where I live.  So I did have some designs on that domain name, myself.  Luckily, I have a couple of other options for local area branding solutions that are still in my possession. 

Widget Droid

I registered the domain name WidgetDroid.com yesterday.  I think that Android 2 is a big hit and it just needs some decent devices to take advantage of it. Verizon has already announced that they will be releasing the Droid to the public on Friday, which appears to be a very highly capable smart phone/device.

I didn’t register WidgetAndroid.com for 2 reasons: widgetandroid.com looks more like Widget And Roid than Widget Android, and because Google has declared the Android name as a Trademark and seem to want to protect that name.

But I want to get an Android powered smart phone someday, when I can afford it, and I think this domain will be a good one for recommending and selling widget downloads for the Android operated devices that will be coming out, now.

Wish me luck! 

-Doug

A few Notes for a Potential Employer

A few notes for companies that might be interested in hiring me:

1. I answer my phone with “Symbiotic Design, this is Doug, how may I help you?” …because I work out of my home office as Symbiotic Design.  Please don’t hang-up on me, you have the right number.
2. If I’m not at home, my son or wife might grab the phone, and they still answer it as “Symbiotic Design”.  And even though my son is only 9, he does a great job taking messages.  Don’t hang-up because he’s a little kid, please.  He’s an advanced gifted child, holds a black belt and is a member of the local divisional pee-wee football champion team, the Warriors.  I will get the message, just be sure to leave your number.
3. If the answering machine picks-up, it will allow you to hit a button in order to contact Symbiotic Design, Domain Hostmaster or HD Web Hosting.  They are all me, you can hit any button or just wait for the beep.
4. I can quit doing work as Symbiotic Design for the right position.
5. I am more than happy to relocate right way (immediately) for the right position.  I can send for the family later.
6. Although you will find this blog (as well as my personal portfolio) a bit gruff, I market myself to potential clients and they do need the personal touch.  I am often gruff, or brutally honest.  But I am a company man in a corporate environment.  My clientele has to know I am a human, they prefer dealing with me in a personal manner.  But I will check my personal attitude at home and perform my job as a professional. Unless you require some attitude, of course. 

Just don’t take anything I say/do in my personal blog/portfolio too seriously.  I’m working on a professional portfolio, but it is all done in HTML5 and CSS3.  That’s because that’s what I will need to know next, for you, to do my job.

I have a great work ethic and I am tired of not having a steady paycheck.  I need you, you need me if you want a graphic & web designer that is capable of managing a team, understands SEO and both online and social marketing techniques, works well with others and loves to be creative.

I am an expert in Photoshop, Illustrator & Dreamweaver.  I have some Flash & QuarkXPress/InDesign smarts.  I know (X)HTML, CSS, domains, branding & advertising.  I write great online web copy.  I also know video & how to leverage it on the web to the company’s advantage.

I’m not saying you would be making a mistake if you pass me up.  If you do, you are probably looking for a programmer.  But I am the best creative director you could imagine and if you need a creative guy, you would not do wrong grabbing me before anyone else does. 

Your call…

Thanks!
-Doug

Posted my Logo Designs to Facebook

I’ve posted quite a few of my logo designs to Facebook.  As I am looking for a decent career somewhere, I am hoping that my talents with logos (which I absolutely love doing) might help win the right company over.

The link to my Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/symbioticdesign

You do not have to be my friend to see my the ‘photo’ album: Logos by DP at the next link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23644&id=1628191759&l=c081e8a41a

Enjoy!
(If not, comment me with your criticism)
-Doug

twidrops: twitter backdrops & website backgrounds

I am happy to announce that I have finally gotten twidrops online.

Although only a small collection of twitter backdrops and themes are live, I think that anyone who checks it out should be happy with the quality of what is available there.  I started with some photographs that I took at the 2009 Sioux Falls Air Show on July 25th. So there are at least 3 shots of the Blue Angels on the site as I write this.

The twidrops site also offers a default theme allowing you to upload your chosen twidrop and simply plug-in the suggested color codes to produce a handsome looking twitter profile right away.

I also have about 20 repeating psychedelic pattern tiles available on the website, so far.

I am still working on the twitter backdrop design tutorial, but it is quite far along and is online now in the blog.

More will come, I am scanning my image files for some other backdrops and background tiles right now.  Now that I have a little online I want to add some other files to add some variety and diversity.

Be sure to stop by twidrops (twitter backdrops & website/blog backgrounds) to check it out!

twitter is a social blogging platform where you share bits of information 140 characters at a time.  If you would like to follow me on twitter, I am Domainating (of course).

Thanks for reading!
-Doug Peters

The Very Best CSS Tutorials

If you are a web designer, you have to be familiar with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  If you aren’t, you are doing it all wrong.  No designer should ignore CSS.  He/She should use it for website design layout as well as styling and formatting.

However, CSS is a bit more difficult than HTML.  That said, the positives of employing it far outweigh any of ignoring it.  Heck, you can’t even be considered a professional if you don’t know CSS.

Despite the steeper learning curve, CSS coding is absolutely required in effective website design because CSS structurally designed pages load much quicker and use many fewer resources than when using tables.  CSS also allows more flexibility in design than using the old grid based table layouts, which were never anything more than a hack in the first place.  Additionally, pages utilizing CSS are more optimized to allow for better results in the search engine listings because of the faster page load times and a much better content to code ratio (less junk and more relevant meat for the spiders to suck on).

Yet, simply reading the CSS standards and reference books are not very inspiring or really unveil the power of CSS.  This is why I would like to point out my very favorite CSS tutorials.  Although I have very few listed here, I promise you that if you explore these methods, you will be quite involved, becausethe first couple actually point to a whole host of others…

• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/20/50-new-css-techniques-for-your-next-web-design/
• http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_design_101_floats/
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites

Enjoy!

Paul Iverson Memorial Today

There will be a memorial for my cousin Paul Iverson today at 11:00am at the Heritage Funeral Home (on South Minnesota Avenue at 57th Street) in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Paul died of multiple system failure at Sanford Hospital in his room on the 6th floor on the Saturday morning of July 25th, 2009.

Paul was my favorite cousin. We went to SDSU at the same time and enjoyed taking a break and watching the older (more violent) cartoons together, laughing at the toons, but eventually we would guffaw at each other’s funny laughs. You know, the kind of laughter you only let out when you let your guard down because it can be embarrassing? We both believe that laughter has a great healing quality and is great for the soul.

Paul was an excellent draftsman. He was well educated, very talented, extremely smart, mild mannered, had that great sense of humor and wit, and was a great friend to all who were fortunate enough to know him.  Paul cherished his family and friends above all.  He just loved spending time with my son, Max.

Paul was also a crack shot with the rifle, a real shark when it came to playing pool, and he loved old movies and TV. He didn’t ever have a computer, though only this year when I showed him my Sony laptop loaded with Windows Vista, he actually said that now he might consider getting one now, as they seemed to be more reasonably designed and user friendly. I insisted, as I do now, that we are still in the dark ages as to usability.

Paul Iverson is survived by his wife Julie Iverson. Although Julie had divorced Paul, they remained close. But she did not want to be his enabler and hoped he would change his ways. Unfortunately, Paul did not make that wake-up call and his vices eventually killed him.

But Paul was not scared of death. He knew Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and had no quams with meeting his maker.

Paul took care of his aging father at the end of his life, who has recently lost his wife (and Paul’s mother, Joan). Unfortunately, his father Jim now has to bury his son.

We will all miss him, but we know he is in a better place with his mother and other members of his family.

Rest In Peace, Paul. I love you, man.

My Cousin is on His Death Bed

My best cousin Paul is lying in his death bed.  The hospital has removed his life support and are just trying to make him comfortable.  He would have wanted it that way.  He was not afraid to die, he new Jesus Christ is his Lord and Saviour.  And he would not want to be confined to a bed in long term care even if they could save him.

My cousin loved life.  He was a great guy.  I had many friends and he clearly ranked amongst the very best of them.  He loves his family and friends.

His wife is clearly distrought.  Although she had divorced him in order to shock him into changing his bad habits,they did remain close and I know that Paul cherished his relationship with her.

I don’t know what to say, what to do.  Because I can’t.  I can’t do anything. I feel weak and alone. Though we both tried, we clearly could not fix him.  Though others tried, he did not seem to feel as if he needed fixing.  In many ways he fixed me, many times.  But we couldn’t do anything for him.

No one wanted to enable him.  There were long periods of isolation as when we tried to make our point.  And although it often seemed that our point had sunk in, he was also a smart, clever, funny guy that knew just how to win us over again.  And we had already missed him too long.

Often I thought that he got it.  He completely understood, I am certain of it.  But he could not help himself and learned how to fool the whole world.

He isn’t fooling anyone now.  We aren’t laughing together anymore.  He does not know how sad his condition makes us, how deeply his distant soul effects us, because knowing how much he did love his family and friends, he just wouldn’t have done this to us.  He couldn’t have, if he had known how terribly this tradgedy effects us.

Still, I love that man.  He was the sober voice in many of my relationships, helping me understand where I have gone wrong.  Yet he was always at odds with his own relationship with hisself.

We all wish we would have done a better job.  But he was so good at hiding his pain.

I don’t want to miss him, ever.

And yet, I know I will, always.

Still, I pray for a miracle.  Please Lord? I know you have sent me many.  Is another asking too much?

We laughed together, even at each other once we realized the other was making us laugh harder.  We knew laughter was good for the soul and had great healing properties.  I want to make him laugh again.  I need him to laugh. I don’t want to lose him.

Browser Address Bar Hijacking? -Not! Or IS it?

I love FireFox.  It works much quicker than anything else and is much more reliable.  And there are all those neat little plug-in add-ons that really increase its convenience, versatility & effectiveness.  There are many great and useful little add-ons that I have used reliably and loyally. Until now, when I just noticed that something has hijacked my browser’s address bar!

It must be one of those great little FF add-ons that has hijacked my FireFox browser’s address bar, and I find that extremely annoying and a bit troublesome.  Especially since I have now uninstalled every single add-on that I have ever installed, including things like the Norton security toolbar, except for the few web designer/developer add-ons that I have found to be trusted tools.  Still, the error persists.

Or is it MY MISTAKE?  I bet it is.  Yup, it is.  Heck, the same thing happens in IE.

What is happening is that I am entering a typo when I search and I am getting Search.com results for my typo.  What is the typo?  Any name, with an extra dot com.

For instance, let’s say that you are at your home page.  Then you decide to go somewhere else, but instead of following a link on your home page or selecting a bookmark from the menu, you know the address and so you use the address bar.  Let’s just say that your home page is a dot com (.com) tld (Top Level Domain).  So in order to save typing, you just select the sometextstring in http://www.sometextstring.com/ and with that text selected, you simply start typing in the domain’s actual name where you want to visit.  But, if you also type in the extension of .com out of habit, you wind-up with the address of  http://www.foosite.com.com/.

Although http://www.foosite.com.com/ is very obviously a typo domain, c|net was smart enough to grab the domain.  So now they get all this typo traffic,  which is significant.  So obviously this is what confused me, because then c|net uses the domain at search.com to interpret the referring URL into a search term, and it looks like some search engine has hyjacked my browser address bar via some toolbar or plug-in.  So I went and uninstalled nearly all of them.

But c|net doesn’t mention any of this on their Search.com site (that I can tell in my search, using their own engine).    Instead, they seem to blame this deliberate action on a malicious software, toolbar or add-on.  VERY DECEPTIVE, c|net.  This lack of honesty and these type of deceptive business practices is exactly what I hate about corporations.  It is not immoral to do this, it is actually smart.  But if you are hassling us by deceiving us as we land there and blaming other crap over the stunt you pulled on us, you are quite simply railroading us with lies, c|net.

One has to wonder why “com” was not a reserved word in the first place, like domain (you can not register “domain” in any tld or country code domain extension).  There are simply a few words that are reserved because of such mistakes on their authority or perceived use.  Why wasn’t “com” one of those, this all seems perfectly ridiculous to have overlooked it.

One also has to wonder why c|net, usually a pretty smart cookie, can’t treat it’s visitors and patrons with any sort of respect.  I had nothing but admiration for them before now.  Now it sticks as a craw in my butt that they cannot treat me with respect and offer me the very url I am seeking.  Instead, they offer advertiser crap that I don’t want and has nothing to do with the original intended URL.  Search engines are supposed to be helpful utilities, not deceptive ad engines.  Clearly, they are making gobs on the traffic they are getting, but they could make a great deal more by treating us respectfully and honoring our intentions, which is exactly what a real search engine does.

Where is the ethics department at c|net now, in the toilet?  Don’t they understand what is considered ill-will can be hurtful to them as well as their patrons?

I am absolutely astonished that c|net has stooped so low.  Not because they did this, but because they hid it and were not honest, open and forthright about it.  They could have been seen as saints, and instead they are seen as thieves and scum spammers.

Grow up and get real, c|net.

Domainer’s Names Update and Portfolio Clean-up

I updated Domainer’s Names.  I didn’t do much, but I created a new Twibe, “Names“, so I added my Twitter and Twibe links to the site.  I also added my Facebook info and a Twitter tweets widget to the bottom of the page.

I still have to add a couple of “Follow Me” buttons for Twitter and for Facebook to the site.  I am still looking for a good selection of Facebook buttons, but I did find what I think is possibly the best collection of free high quality public domain Twitter icons ever, at http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/07/50-free-and-exclusive-twitter-icons/ – both raster and vector masters are included so that we can do anything we want with them (whether for personal use or for commercial use).  I hope I find some that are near as good for Facebook.

I did start a fan page for Symbiotic Design (my freelance design studio) on Facebook, but all I have done is create it and so I want to actually do something with it before I start linking to it (like design something there).  Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time as then I would wind-up messing with my unemployment.  I’ll also leave you a link to my facebook profile page as username “symbioticdesign“, even though I’ve never even sat down and looked at how I might actually design a decent facebook profile/wall/page, yet.  I need to get that stuff done, but I don’t have a large staff working for me, either.

Once I rewrite my resume (again) and  get my portfolio straightened-out for potential employers I probably will be able to tackle that, next.  Looking for a decent or dream job takes up a lot of time and energy, though.  And I’m not allowed to get too sophisticated with my new designs anymore because unemployment will only let me work a few hours a week on my own websites as that is deemed as work.  So I am trying to develop some clean and simple website designs to base others off, for now.

Right now I am just trying to clean-up My portfolio and make sure it’s presentable, as I am sure my next job will count on it, should I be lucky enough to find something in the lines of my chosen career path. There are a few domain names that I need to delete from the domain name portfolio at domainers.name/portfolio/, and a couple to add.  But I did update my main portfolio list at Symbiotic.Biz.

I did pick-up four new domains that I will use to showcase some of my photography and art as Twitter backdrops.  I’m going to use WordPress and post them via blog at TwiDrops.com (eventually) so that I don’t have to spend time designing a site for them.  Backing-up that main TwiDrops.com domain will also be TwiDrop.com, TweeDrops.com and TweeDrop.com.  Once again, I am making sure that I cover any possible misspells or misunderstandings of the brand so that the site can easily be found.

These 4 TwiDrops brand domains are the only ones that I have left off of the Symbiotic.Biz names list, but that domain name list is static and is actually short by about 100 other names that are more adult/poker oriented.   That list is easier for a kid to access, so I try to keep that one family friendly and kid safe.   I do try to list all my domains at Domainers.Name, and I am still updating that name portfolio now.