Big Brothers' Curling Fundraiser

Hey guys, it's that time of year again. I'm in the Big Brother's of Sarnia-Lambton Curl For Kids Bonspeil. I've had a stretch of successful fundraising over the last few years, and if you've donated, I thank you for that. If you'd like to make a donation for the fundraiser this year, click here to go to my fundraising page. There you can make a donation by credit card (and get a tax receipt emailed to you almost immediately) or you can let me know if you'd like to make an offline donation via cheque or cash.

This year's 'speil is March 5. I'm not sure, but I think we may be undefeated in all our years so far. Or maybe we lost once, I can't remember. There's not really any keeping track of those things.

Anyway, thanks once again.

A Little Slow On The Uptake, But I Get It Now

An unusual number of people were independently suggesting that I use my new domain to have the address m[at]brouwer[dot]ca I just thought people were hung up on the one letter shortness of it. But now I see that if you say the @, it become m at... or Matt. Clever people you are and not a bad idea. The only problem I see with it is that I would verbalize that address as "Matt Brouwer dot See Eh", it would be more like "Em at Brouwer dot See Eh".

So yeah... good idea. Doesn't quite work for me though.

And yes, I freely admit it took me too long to realize what everyone was getting at.

Best Purchase Ever!

Say hello to the new owner of the domain name brouwer.ca!

Nowadays, one of the most useful things you can have on the internet is a domain of your very own. It can be your personal online identity. Of course, each domain can only be owned by one person at a time, so pretty much every premium domain name is gone... including personal names. For example, my arch nemisis/coolest guy I've never met has the domain mattbrouwer.com, and that's something I can never get now.

A few months ago I decided that I should have my own domain. Knowing that my name dot com is gone, I looked at other alternatives. There still is mattbrouwer.ca out there, but I got thinking that having an address that reads matt@mattbrouwer was kind of redundant. So, taking a longshot, I looked up the domains brouwer.com and brouwer.ca... both of which were registered, and had been for a long time (1997 for the .com and 2001 for the .ca). However, brouwer.ca was listed as coming up for expiry in about a week from when I was looking. I thought "wow, that would be cool if it was left to expire". Unfortunately, when the expiry date came, the whois listing showed that it had been renewed. That just started my journey of leaning how domains work.

Turns out that there's a grace period after expiry to give the previous owner a chance to renew, and to someone on the outside, it looks like it was renewed. Thinking it was gone and wanting to register at least something, I snagged the domain saxwithmatt.com in the meantime. However, on a whim about a week or 2 ago, I decided to check the status of brouwer.ca again. This time it was listed as "to be deleted" or something similar. So, I waited until expiry (hoping a domain reseller didn't get to it first) and was able to snatch it up. All for $15 per year.

Now I have my ideal email address. Of course, it just forwards to my current gmail account for now, so either address will work the same. It's just going to be so much easier (and cooler in a geeky kind of way) to be able to tell people what my email address now is.

Any Brouwers out there want an email address?

A Few Cruise Photos

For those that are interested, here are some photos I took while on the cruise last week.



It was a great trip, once again. Warm weather... not hot though. The only hitch was that we weren't able to tender into Grand Cayman due to sea conditions on one day.