09/03/2005

Birthday update for 2005-03-09

Oh here we go again

rjy dot org dot uk

I woke up to find in my email a link to a domain registration site and the message "happy birthday!"; the upshot is that I have a(nother*) real, actual domain name. In fact for a while that morning I didn't know what the hell to do. I had always planned to use the two DynDNS names on which I've been squatting, since 4th January 2003 or before.

Anyway so for now rjy.org.uk is an alias for rjy.ath.cx. troa.ath.cx is more precisely www.troa.ath.cx; I might make some other things with *.troa.ath.cx domains, I don't know yet. SNAFU, which is currently planned to be at www.troa.ath.cx/snafu, for example. I might give that its own subdomain, just for the hell of it.

Anyhow, thanks to Dave and Nelis - jesus, everyone has their own domain name these days!!

*You may remember I had therealmofanarchy.co.uk as a freebie with my old dialup account, but I had little to no control over it and it was only an MX and I let it lapse, replacing it with a DynDNS account. It was way too long and hard to type in anyway.

OH GOD I'VE GOT MY DARTBOARD BACK OH SWEET HALLELUJAH

Okay look I don't know how many people knew this but way back in the day like when I was about 8 or 9 or something I had a dartboard. It was a proper dartboard, as well, not like my pool table which is as tiny and rickety as you'd expect a child's pool table to be.

The pool table never really had a place to go in my dad's house and since it wasn't very good it got put away. The dartboard was on my bedroom wall right up until they redecorated my room in 1992, at which point it disappeared into the loft. I never got it back. I was never a good player, I'd miss the board completely on an embarrassingly high proportion of throws and sometimes I'd deliberately throw the darts at something other than the board... I don't know, kids, eh? I don't think my father was ever very happy about the state of the wall, at any rate...

Anyhow, just before my parents separated and my mother and I moved to Earlsdon I'd rescued the pool table and set it back up, inspired by the pool table in the sixth form centre and, well, not so much the proper one the popular kids played on all lunchtime but the broken one in the corner that I and a few other outcasts had invented a weird variation on the theme of pool which I'd called "pond" (discworld reference), anyway, uh, never mind that now. The point was when we moved out the pool table came with us. And of course I wanted my dartboard to go with it.

But, and this was another of my father's little quirks, he wouldn't give it to us, and we didn't know where he'd stashed it. I suspected the loft, but the loft was the realm of ghosts and goblins and monsters and places where if you put a foot wrong you'd go through the floor and end up in the bathroom and little chittering things and dust and basically it was where mortal man feared to tread so I thought it was gone forever.

Well, no. Fast forward nine years and I guess my mother must have brought it up and said she couldn't think of a decent birthday present (fair enough, I never ask for anything and am impossible to please) and my father must have changed his mind, I don't know, who cares, I've got the damn thing back and its up on the wall in the back room and I'm still shit I mean I was stuck on double one for about fifteen minutes and I still miss the board completely way too often but oh god I can't stop smiling this is so cool I'm going to go play again