Richard Giles

I’ve been trying for years to lay my hands on a few personal domains: giles.com or giles.net. However, I’m not sure I’ll manage to grab them because one is run by a legit company, and the other is a domain squatter that sits on it and sells for an obscene price.

The other day I checked on the .com version for richardgiles, and was amazed to find that it had expired: it has been held by a squatting company for years. So I immediately jumped on GoDaddy and bought a watch for the domain.

Last week I thought I’d lost it. For some reason it appeared as if someone had managed to grab the domain before me, and they even emailed me to let me know I could buy it “by covering our acquisition costs and a modest profit.” By “modest profit” they meant about $600.

So I was awesomely surprised to wake up this morning and find an email from GoDaddy, telling me I’d captured the domain.

I then added the domain to WordPress.com and now use it as the primary landing page for my blog.

We’ll be recording Scouta TV Episode 9 and streaming the recording live on Ustream.

If you’re interested in seeing what goes on behind the scenes, the chaos, outtakes, random strangeness, and being a little involved via the Ustream chat room, then you can join us at:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/scoutatv

Streaming will start at approximately 8pm Australian WST (10pm Australian EST, or 2pm UTC/GMT).

Hope to see you then!

I stopped using a news aggregator (RSS reader) a month or so ago. It was refreshing to let go of a daily routine that I’m not sure accomplished much.

However, there are several blogs that I still like to read, and I just make sure that I visit them every few days. I also use Techmeme to keep abreast of any really important news. I figure whatever I don’t hear through word-of-mouth, twitter, and Techmeme, isn’t worth knowing.

Today I took one extra step that I think plants the nail in the blogging coffin: I added my favorite blog’s feed to Twitter (that would be BoingBoing). I’ve noticed that I’ve been missing a few too many gems recently, so I googled for “boingboing twitter,” and discovered they already have their own Twitter account.

So that’s the end of the news aggregator for me.