kierenmccarthy.co.uk

My computer was shifted to Outlook Exchange yesterday with the result that this morning I have had to re-input all my email account passwords to get at my email.

I knew most of the passwords but the more important ones I have very complex passwords for and rely on accessing my domain accounts directly to recover them. I have been able to do this for my personal domains - this one, kierenmccarthy.co.uk, for example - and I have tracked down the others. But one has been lost.

I haven’t used Eclipse as an ISP since I left Oxford in October last year, although my email account - kieren@kierenmccarthy.eclipse.co.uk - was still running and a number of friends continue to use it. While the account is still live, Eclipse has killed my access to their website so I can’t recover the password. It was a purposefully complex one as well. So, the upshot is that I am killing it off. By my rough estimates, this is the sixth email address I have killed off. Not including those like university and work email addresses that are ended for you when you leave.

I would say that I will keep “kierenmccarthy.co.uk” for a very long time into the future, so if people want to be certain of getting me, then kieren [at] that domain is going to be best long-term way forward. So sayonara Eclipse.

I wrote a quick 800-word blog post for the Guardian’s Comment is Free site on Sunday on the fact that iTunes has now become the number one music retailer here in the United States.

It felt good to have a bit of a think and a type. I still amaze myself that I buy any iTunes songs at all. And I also bought some CDs for the first time in nearly a year this month - but only because my van only has a CD player at the moment, my iPod radio thing doesn’t work in the van, and Los Angeles radio is absolutely dreadful. Even then though, I hesitated with buying a CD. Now I have to rip the tracks - what a pain.

Digital downloads *are* music from this point on. But because of that iTunes needs to make sure it doesn’t rest on its laurels. Anyway, you can read my blog post on the Comment is Free site here - complete with argumentative and aggressive comments from members of the public who have only read the headline and sub-head.

So I filed my first US tax return yesterday, and it was pretty good in two senses. One, I used this great online tool provided by H&R Block that did it all for me, walked me through, provided useful pointers, calculated the tax and sent it to the IRS within an hour - very impressive. Secondly, and rather wonderfully, I have actually been granted a tax rebate, or refund. And it is a HUGE one - $8,000.

I’m going to put the money aside and into my van and helicopter lessons. But hang for a second. How come the government is *paying me* such a huge sum of money. All the Americans think that this refund - nearly four thousand pounds - is terrific. “Aren’t you lucky?” And it seems that getting a tax refund is a very common event. The systems are all in place and look extremely efficient - a sure sign in government that it happens alot. It seems talking to people as well that many of them actually wait for their refund - even look forward to it - in order to do something special. There is the sense that this is somehow free money. That you’ve lucked out.

Which is quite clearly collective madness. Having a massive refund doesn’t mean I have massive amount of cash to spend - it means I have been hideously over-charged on my taxes through the year. It means I have effectively given the US government a huge interest-free loan. And it means that the systems my company has put in place is taking, completely unnecessarily, more money out of my wage packet than it needs to - a LOT more than it needs to. It means that those months in which I have had to judge how much of my credit card I pay off, and figure out when my wages will appear in my account, have been completely unnecessary.

And yet somehow I am supposed to be overjoyed about this and go spend the money handed back to me on pumping up the failing US economy. Talking of which - another really odd thing. President Bush has given everyone - or appeared to give everyone - $600 direct by simply taking it off their tax bill. Or, if your tax bill is under $600 (which still strikes me as crazy) GIVING people money. I don’t understand - isn’t this direct manipulation of the economy by the government? Doesn’t that go 100 percent against the concept of the free market that is held is such enormous regard here in the United States of America?

Considering this is the most capitalist society on the planet, I simply can’t understand these two interventionist economic policies - holding your money interest-free for a year, and directly injecting funds using the tax system. I may have to read up on this. In the meantime, because I don’t know any better, I will have to simply enjoy the fact I have a big chunk of cash I wasn’t expecting.

This is a picture of a beautiful 1966 split-screen VW camper can that I have just bought on eBay for $10,000.

I am currently arranging for some mechanics to go check it out, and if it’s all good will head down to Poway, California (near San Diego) to go pick it up possibly this weekend.

What you need to know about the split-screen VW camper van is that it is one of only two cars I have ever really properly desired. The second is the Citroen DS. It made sense to get the camper while I’m living in California because the climate is fantastic for curs not rusting, which means the cost of campers from 1960s is much lower as it hasn’t needed a complete rebuild.

In the next 10 years or so, the only split-screens available will be those lovingly restored (at great expense) by enthusiasts. Anyway, I am fulfilling a dream of nearly 16 years with this camper and I intend to drive it up and down California, checking out the coastline, the vineries north of Los Angeles, and north of San Francisco, the Joshua Tree national park, the Grand Canyon, Tijuana, and whatever else springs to mind.

Anyone that fancies jumping in the back and coming along for the ride, you know where to find me. Plenty of room.

I am going to have to make a determined effort to update this blog more often. I always feel better when I am writing. Anyway, just as an update: I am currently in New Delhi in the Maurya Hotel following a busy conference week. I’ll be heading to the airport soon to go to Paris, where I hope to meet up with various folk that are integral to the next two conferences coming up both in June: the OECD ministerial in Seoul, followed immediately afterwards by the next ICANN meeting in Paris.

But in between, and for Thursday and Friday this week, I will be at Domainpulse in Vienna giving a talk partly about my book, Sex.com, and partly about the history of making money from domain names. You can see the full programme here. It should be interesting: Wolfgang Kleinwachter, Peter van Roste, Sabine Dolderer, Patrik Faltström, Daniel Karrenberg plus a number of people I have yet to meet and look forward to doing so. If you’re going, see you there.

I’m writing this in that neverworld of an airport waiting for a slightly delayed plane.

And, of course, as it always is, that airport is Heathrow. I hate Heathrow. I’ve always hated Heathrow. Even as a kid, I remember the sensation of life ebbing away from you as you sit in uncomfortable chairs next to grumpy people, eat dreadful food and get annoyed with snooty staff. It’s Heathrow, it’s British Airways, it’s delayed, and I’m flying economy, seat 49J, which means no sleep, cramped legs, and an incredibly frustrating effort trying to do work on my laptop for the next nine hours.

Still, I’m on my way to the ICANN meeting in Delhi which should prove to be the usual mix of fun, exhaustion, confusion and interesting events. Plus I’ve never been to India before. What’s happening at the ICANN meeting? Well, plenty. Discussions on front-running, on domain tasting, on new gTLDs and IDNs. And the JPA. And the translation programme - which I have been working very hard on and should really help ICANN become an international organisation. And, you know, all the other sorts of issues that underpin the future evolution of the Internet and which I now concern myself with every day.

I have to say though that I felt an itch as a journalist to get stuck into the US elections yesterday. Shame I wasn’t in the country for Super Tuesday. Ah well, new gTLDs and IDNs are going to have a bigger impact on the world than the next US president. And I mean that too.

It’s been six weeks since I last posted here. That can’t be good. And I have a ton of stuff to get out of my mind through my fingers. The one-day trivia brain of Los Angelenos; the US presidential election process; the insane bureaucracy and mind-control of this peculiar and remarkable country. Plus, lots of pics - some with world famous stars of the screen. And the tale of trying to get hold of my possessions after 16 weeks now.

Why is this material still in my brain and not on the page? Because of work. Too much work. Far too much work. This job is a constant invitation to burn-out. I think it is the three international meetings a year that is what really makes the workload impossible: there is never more than a week in which you can get on with all those things that need quiet periods to get done. I thank god that the cycle ride home (along the beach - it’s nice, even in crap weather) is 35 minutes. It’s the one conscious hour of the day I can’t be at my laptop. Although I did take two phonecalls on my way in this morning. How long before I’m balancing the Dell on my handlebars, trying to pick up WiFi signals from the beach houses?

Still, I’m going to Delhi in a week’s time. It’ll mean 37 hours in economy there and back (I’ll be in London, Paris and Vienna briefly if anyone desperately wants to meet up), but I should have time to go see the Taj Mahal at some point. And I’ve always fancy seeing that and India. The urge to take off a month and travel the sub-continent is pretty intense, I have to say. Anyway, more work, then sleep, then more work…

There are some advantages to not being able to sleep - you get to catch the sunrise in my new flat on Santa Monica beach.

The organic food-market is an extraordinary thing. Supermarkets always claim to be providing what their customers want, and so since a large number of people are growing increasingly concerned about the chemicals shoved willy-nilly into our food, supermarkets provide organic food.

But you know their hearts aren’t in it. All the mass-produced, completely supply-reliable, unrottable, choose-your-shade-of-green foodstuffs that the multi-nationals supply them with make supermarkets’ lives much, much easier. And so supermarkets cheer themselves up by ripping off organic customers, charging an even greater mark-up on organic produce, and making their mass-produced products look more and more like the organic versions.

In the UK you can tell organic food because it looks weird. All bumpy, misshapen and vaguely threatening. It’s been pulled out the ground for chrissake. No beauty competitions underground, believe you me. As we speak, the chemical maniacs that produce most of our food are inventing new fertilisers that distort vegetables sufficiently to pass the ugly test but still just creep in under legal toxicity limits.

So I thought organic food would take the same design in the United States. But no. In the US, organic food still has to look as if it is an Oscar nominee and has been in make-up all morning. The crucial differentiator in the US is: organic food comes dripping wet.

Continue reading ‘Wet veg, everlasting salads and other mysterious secrets of the American supermarket’

I’m quite excited about the fact that Amazon has brought out a new ebook reader that it calls the Kindle. I haven’t seen one in the real world but I am assuming with the effort they’ve put behind it that the screen technology is what it claims to be - easy to read without straining your eyes.

I believe ebooks are the inevitable future. It’s just another step along the digital revolution. But - and what a but - have you seen the state of the “Kindle”? It looks like a prototype. A prototype designed by 18-year-old students back in the 1980s. Here is good technology and big demand with crappy design - i.e. the perfect opportunity for Apple.

Continue reading ‘Can someone please get to the ebook reader before Apple’