I turned on my PC the day of Christmas. It's clear.

There were some tasks to do on the net of course. I had to check the Graphic Art Galleries website, with my personal online presents to internet users.

You can still find a special greetings card at the start of the main page, while some cool animated gifs have been removed now.

http://GraphicArtGalleries.com

http://graphicartgalleries.com opsites/autorank.html

http://graphicartgalleries.com/links.htm

That made me feel all right, as having sent the greeting card to selected lists of contacts. I was on a Christmas mood finally, after too much stress.

I was thinking about a short travel for fun and amusement, finally.

But when I checked the mail, the following days, I didn't find a RE:... only the usual hideous spam messages arriving from not existing addresses full of stinking proposals in 99% of the cases, but ten times more numerous.

So I understood that there are many, many persons that do not follow absolutely one of the first advices that really help us live better, do not do to the others what you don't want others do to you. Or better explained for the internet scenario, don't harass others, finding it a nice way to spend your time, but expecting that nothing arrives back to you.

Unfortunately not only my email accounts were overcharged with excessive annoying stuff. I found problems on the main business related and serious component of my activity, domain names.

I own many of these internet assets, and some are extremely important, and valuable. Some of them are of course active websites, as Free-Europa.com, Free-America.com, Free-Japan.com well ranked in the search engines.

I had to complete many renewals, and it was a month I was involved in this boring task, and I had to handle the managing of NamesLeaser.com. But it didn't loaded!

A possible solution? There are many. One is the following, I had just rejected a listing for a domain name the previous day, a short one word domain, but not a nice word for me, and active with a website with affiliate programs to commercial adult services sex related.

I don't work with commercial adult websites, I never did it, and I don't give for free links to commercial adult websites. And no one can decide for me!

I had to contact the webhoster, and as an answer it was told me that they saw no problems to the website(...), but it was enthousiastically said that not important what I said or did, they could close my account at any time as they liked!

Gosh... there is still someone thinking that you can successfully work on the internet with no serious rules. And a new, more serious example that the first helpful advice I wrote some paragraphs above is totally unknown by many, many, many persons!

To clarify it once again, there is the 1st rule, called the 'golden rule', for anybody interested in doing business on the net. You can find it at this page at point number 1:

http://www.truste.org/webpublishers/pub_modelprivacystatement.htm l

But it seems that nobody remember it.

Well, this was really making me upset, and I had no more possibilities to consider to leave for a short travel for fun and amusement at all!!!

The last night of the year? Not nice at all, not spent online anyway (of course). Rather totally nauseated by the behaviours of persons that hide behind a PC.

I came back to the big net the first day of this new year anyway. I had to solve the problem with the webhoster as the website still was not loading, done forwarding email receipts of renewals.

I had also decided to restart the rank of the Graphic Art Galleries Top Sites (guess why?), and I also had to complete more renewals.

Well... do you imagine I found a Christmas present? Not at all. At the opposite, my account showed no domain names in it! The system was totally out of order.

I notified this fact to the list of Domains REALM Insider, surely interested in the important news.

Could you consider a short fun or amusement travel if you were experiencing something similar?

I could only dream of a whole sabatic year to recover from these events!

But unfortunately it is not possible nowadays for me, as it isn't easy to be paid when you make a big sale on the net, you are in Europe, and the company that must pay you is in the USA.

Another day passed. The account that showed problems, and the whole whois, seemed restored.

I completed all my controls and decided to see if I could find some interesting domain names for new projects and websites for my actual (and growing) network.

Some of the good ones I found not registered and picked up?

internet-fun.org internet-circus.com

and of course...

internet-art.org

Gotcha!

At least a positive aspect and some nice moments of internet Christmas time 2002, one of the worst Christmas of my life (I remember a decent or normal one no earlier than 8 years ago).

Let's hope in the next ones.

And a last thought, I don't think you will find these new names listed on DomainsREALM.com anyway.

Respectfully submitted

Gian Luigi Ruggeri (aka XmX on the net since 1997)

http://MakeFeelBetter.org