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.

This Had Better Be The Best Internet Ever, Part 3

I'm on a boat.

Went swimming yesterday on Christmas Eve in Half Moon Cay. It's been a little cooler this time... only about 23 degrees. At sea today, heading to Jamaica tomorrow. I really, really hope it's cold back home right now.

I'm (almost) On A Boat

We're leaving tomorrow to fly down to Fort Lauderdale. On Thursday we board the ms Noordam for 56 3-hour tours. Stops include The Bahamas, Jamaica, Cayman Islands and Mexico. Back on the 30th. I'll see if I can get some of that really expensive Internet while I'm there.

Why Are You Still Using Facebook?

If you have a Facebook account and are active and use it to post comments, status updates, photos, videos, links, etc... this isn't about you.

If you have a Facebook account but aren't active with comments or photos, but keep your page active as a way for people to find you and contact you... this isn't about you.

However, if you have a Facebook account and have, for all intents and purposes, abandoned it... if you don't check it regularly, don't post content, have email notifications turned off, and ignore friend requests and messages sent... what's the point? Why don't you delete the page? Because if someone is actually trying to get in contact with you, there is a reasonable expectation of some sort of response. To not respond, because you have long since stopped being active on the site is, for lack of a better word, rude. How is someone coming onto your page to know that you'll never see any message sent?

Please do everyone a favour and clean up your online presence.

You And Everyone Else

I went to Gamestop to buy a TV mount for the Kinect. Here's how the transaction went:

Salesgirl: "These things are pretty complicated. I hope you have an engineering degree."
Me: "As a matter of fact..."
Salesgirl: "Oh right, this is Waterloo."

So not only is my degree nothing special around here, the mount was ridiculously difficult to put together.

I Wish I Knew A Word That Sounded Like "Kinect" So I Could Make A Funny Title

Yeah, I picked up a Kinect for my Xbox 360 on the weekend. It looks like it has potential. So far I only have the one game that comes with it, but hopefully they can get some other applications built for it soon. Browsing the menu is pretty easy, and it can be done from sitting down, although there's not much to browse through, as the main menu are still controller only. It recognizes gestures really well and picks up voice commands no problem. I have to give watching a movie a shot still, so that can be good.

Best Movie of 2010

I finally got to see the movie Scott Pilgrim vs The World last week. There wasn't much hype surrounding it when it was out in theatres, so I didn't know too much about it. But I knew enough that those who had seen it spoke highly of it. I didn't even know that the director was also the director of Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two of my favourites (I saw that on the box just before putting in the movie). After watching it, I immediately knew it was my favourite movie of the year, and an instant personal top 5 of all time.

I don't really want to give a review of synopsis, but I think that it is very important that you all see this movie, especially if you're close to my age (give or take 10 years). Movies like this aren't made very often. It's not a normal movie and it's something really fantastic.

That's all I'll say on that.

What A Deal!

I'm approaching the end of my cell phone contract and I was informed by my provider that I have an upgrade credit available to me to upgrade my phone. So I go into the store to see what that credit involves as applied to a Blackberry Torch, and the answer I got was that I get the privilege of purchasing the phone for exactly the advertised price for anyone else. The guy at the store even still called it a "credit".

Tell me, service provider... where is the credit in that?