Rob Lifford

Just stumbled across the list of the 100 oldest currently-registered dot-com domains. Number one is symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985… and amazingly, it looks almost as if the site itself is unchanged since March 1985!

Interesting to see how many household-word companies got their .com names registed nice and early — Xerox is #7, HP is #9, IBM and Sun tied for #11 — and just as interesting is how many of those 100 you’ve probably never heard of and never would.

Most shocking, though, is that none of them seem to have anything to do with porn.

On November 6, I’ll be running 5 kilometers in the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Race for the Cure. Every year a whole lot of Hooverites participate, and this will be my second time out. My teammate Sarah had the bright idea to blog this request for sponsorships instead of forwarding an email, and I’m jumping right on that bandwagon:

I know you’re probably tapped out from all those hurricane-relief donations in this rough season, but you can sponsor my participation online if you still feel charitable. One in seven women will will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime, so it’s an undeniably worthy cause. If you’d rather snail-mail a check, send it here:

Komen Austin
PO Box 2164
Austin, TX 78768

Donations are fully tax-deductible.

Crazy busy lately; can’t seem to find a moment to come up for air, let alone blog about anything.

Recently, though, I’ve quitely launched our Out of the Blue band website. Yes, I know it still needs a lot of polish on the layout and it’s probably hurting bad for some pictures — I’m really not finished with it, but we handed out a bunch of business cards at a recent gig, so we had to have something up there. It’ll be nice when it’s done, really.

If you’d asked me yesterday what I think of my web hosting company, I’d have told you I was satisfied with the pricing and the service.

Ask me tomorrow and I’ll tell you I’m proud to be their customer. Here’s why:

…if your billing address in our system was in a zip code affected by Katrina (according to a list at ups.com) we gave you a free year of web hosting to hopefully give you one less thing to worry about right now. [via their company blog]

If you’re looking for web hosting, do yourself a favor and try these guys.

It’s really bumming me out that the process of overcoming a massive tragedy like Hurricane Katrina and all the associated challenges has so quickly deteriorated into the kind of heated partisan rhetoric that characterizes… well, just about everything these days. Democrats and Republicans alike, nearly everyone holding office right now just looks like a blustering moron to me.

All we can do is try to rise above it in our own little spheres of influence. I’m really grateful to and proud of my company, for the way our Community Service Committee has pulled together a very productive food/clothing/bedding/supplies drive, as well as our parent company, for doubling our personal monetary donations via its matching gifts program, making a corporate contribution to Habitat for Humanity‘s “Operation Home Delivery” program, and supporting local initiatives in its various branch locations.

A couple of weeks after launching this new design, I’ve finally decided what to do with the homepage of the site: it just features a random image pulled from a collection of favorites I selected today. I didn’t go through any of the Korea/Asia photos in creating this gallery, because that might have taken all weekend, but I’ve still managed to snag a nice collection of around 50 pictures (for now, anyway) of us, extended family, friends, and their pets. Go on, take a look.