I’m just having a look at the domain names for sale on the Yahoo auctions site. There seem to be a lot of domains that the owners think are worth a lot of money (judging from the minimum bids required) but that nobody else does (judging from the complete lack of any bids posted). Some of them are, of course, of severely limited appeal; as if the people who have registered and paid for them are just hoping that their target market happens to come across the name and want to cough up.

For example: Russiasport.com will set you back almost $5000. And that’s USD. How about trendymall.com for a bargain USD$29,900? "trendymall"?! That’s the sort of URL that some people wouldn’t be seen dead surfing to.

And you should see all the Austin Powers related names: yeahbabyyeah.com, austinpowershagorama.com, and IShaggedAustinPowers.com to name a few! I guess we have Mike Myers to thank for the world now knowing what "shag" means.

But who would buy these names? I’m not sure about the logic behind this. A lot of the demand for easy to remember domain names seems to hinge on the probability of people firing up their web browsers, deciding they want to buy - I don’t know, let’s say sausages… and guessing (completely incorrectly in this case) that a good place to buy a sausage might be www.sausage.com.

The rest of the demand seems to hinge on companies advertising their URL somewhere offline - TV, radio, print, smoke signals, that kind of thing - and having people remember it. But US domain names are getting a little like Hotmail - because anybody can register anything, nothing really memorable is left. So unless your company’s name is already well known, you’re pretty much outta luck. And if your company name is already well known, some enterprising person has probably registered the domain before you anyway.

And of course if you’re starting a new company, the chances of getting "yourcompanyname.com" are so unlikely these days that you’ll have to be very very creative in making up the name. Which I reckon probably accounts for names like "Inprise" and "eBay".

I’ve launched a pre-emptive strike against my hard drive. I’ve pulled all the data off it and done a low level format on it before it died on me. Oh, make no mistake, it was in the process of kicking the bucket. Ever since I dived into the innards of my PC last week to install a new CD-ROM drive (one of those super-snazzy recordable/re-writable jobs), the hard drive started behaving in a decidedly dodgy way.

Maybe I shouldn’t have fired that burst of static electricity into it. Nah, just kidding. But perhaps I bumped it or something. Okay, so I admit at one point I did unplug and replug a few cables and the IDE cable to both hard drives went in the wrong way. Hey, it could happen to anyone! And the other drive didn’t complain.

After fixing that, everything seemed okay, but this one drive started playing up. A quick whiz with Scandisk revealed that bad sectors had started appearing. Then, even worse than that, evil clusters started appearing. These clusters were so nasty that they actually slowed Scandisk down to a snail’s pace.

Things were looking bad. Thankfully the new CD drive was happily working, and made it fairly easy to do a backup of my all-important data. Okay, so it’s nothing that would cause a world crisis if it all got zapped, but it wouldn’t be excessively convenient to lose it all, you know.

That done, I did what must be one of the most fun things you can do in the world of computing: I formatted the hard drive. I could just feel the PC quivering as I typed FORMAT D: and pressed Enter. It was probably thinking "Wow. Gosh, does he really mean that?"

Actually it didn’t work anyway - what I needed to do was a <deep voice> low level format <end deep voice>. This is serious stuff. A normal format is like vacuuming the carpet. A low level format is like vacuuming, steam cleaning, then ripping up the carpet and throwing it in the incinerator, then polishing the floorboards and going out and buying new carpet and laying it down instead.

It seemed to do the trick, and I’ve since re-installed Windows and most of the applications I use. <yawn> What a fun job that is. But such are the joys of computers. I’d rather make a pre-emptive strike like that than have the whole drive suddenly implode on me, leaving no trace of my e-mail, my writing, my company books, and of course my unrivalled collection of unfinished projects, and my installation of Visual J++ that I’ve never used…

The forecast last Thursday was for showers.

Showers my arse! That was not "showers". Showers don’t fall at a 45� angle, drenching everything in their path. That was torrential rain. The kind of rain that people’s pets get washed away in. I know: I was out there in it.

I didn’t have the car on Thursday afternoon, but I did have my umbrella. I thought it should provide some protection against what was a reasonable amount of rain falling when I left work. I stumbled up Bay Street to the station, trying in vain not to step in too many puddles, and got onto the platform without having gotten excessively wet.

The train arrived and I gratefully took a seat, relieved that no moron had left any windows open. I went the two stops to Elsternwick then got off and sprinted up the ramp, silently praising myself for always taking an umbrella to work. Even a small, rather pathetic broken umbrella like this one. Better that than drowning in this downpour.

The rain was getting worse. I came out of the station and looked across the road at the tram stop. Rain rain and more rain, floating down from the heavens, and drenching anybody who happened to get in the way. People waiting for the tram were huddling under the fortunately larger than average shelter, attempting not entirely successfully to get too soggy.

Looking down the street I could see the tram was just coming, so I crossed the road and joined the masses clambering aboard.

We rolled along through the squalling wind and the rain. We got to my stop. When the doors opened, me and another bloke getting off went down the steps and found ourselves facing whatever the rain equivalent of a blizzard is. I fumbled for my umbrella and managed to get it open, though it did me little good.

This was the 45� rain - not so much a downpour as a sidewayspour. Millions of drops of water descended, lit up in the street lights. I made it to the footpath and then across the street and took cover under a shop awning. I looked around and surveyed the scene. The rain was pissing down, the car drivers were wisely taking it easy in the wet and had their lights on, the tram had taken off down the road, and what few foolish pedestrians there were on the street were either taking cover or scurrying home hoping they had dry clothes waiting.

I looked into the shop window. The two blokes working inside were staring back out in amazement at the amount of H₂O falling. I paused for a couple of minutes to see how drenched I was, and to see if the rain would let up, even just a little bit. It showed no signs of doing so.

Rather than wait in the cold, with my wet clothes, I (perhaps foolishly) elected to risk getting even wetter, by walking the last two minutes home. The footpath was drowning in water; in fact the grass seemed not exactly dryer, but at least slightly less wet. The rain kept falling at that magic 45� angle, and was being blown around by the wind in enough different directions to make using the umbrella virtually impossible. I arrived home soaked to the skin, all my clothes drenched, in severe need of dry clothes, a heater on max and a hot dinner. Thankfully, all three were available.

Around a year ago, just a few short months after I’d got my car, a mate of mine (in the sense that I see him perhaps once a year, but when I do, I say something like "Mate! How’re you going?"), Mike, asked me "so, has the car changed your life yet?"

At the time, I said no. After a lifetime of relying on (and, believe it or not, enjoying it) public transport, just because I had my own wheels propelled by more than just a couple of pedals, it hadn’t fundamentally changed my life. But, a year later, I think it may have. Bit by bit.

There are things that you just wouldn’t contemplate in this city without a car. Traipsing out to Broadmeadows after dinner is probably one of them. My dad’s been in hospital there for a couple of weeks after a hit and cycle incident. He hit his head when he fell, and they’ve kept him in for a while now, because they were worried about his head, not to mention his… uhh… eccentric behaviour. At first he was in the Royal Melbourne, but now they’ve moved him to the new Broadmeadows hospital, which in a way is good because it’s a much nicer hospital, but is a pain because it’s right over the other side of town.

But thanks to the romantically named FYU463, I think nothing of driving out there to see my dad every few days. Easy, you just take the airport route for most of the way. I set out to do this last Wednesday night, also planning to drop past his flat to get some stuff that he wanted. Naturally Mr Murphy was present, ensuring that I got halfway there before realising that I didn’t have his key.

The 40 minute detour back to home again to get it delayed me somewhat, and by the time I’d got home, then back to the flat, then to the hospital, and back home again, not only was it way too late to be doing anything but yawning. But in the process, thanks to the humble internal combustion engine, I’d also covered more ground in one night than my ancestors of several hundred years ago probably covered in a lifetime.

Thanks to these hospital visits, not only have I got to know the Tullamarine freeway quite intimately, but I’ve also got the giant roundabout at the top of Elizabeth Street just about licked.

Speaking of driving, the RACV board elections are on right now. Now, I’ve got my little RACV membership tag on my car keys, and I’m all for participating in democracy, but this strikes me as being a complete waste of time. The ads on the radio and newspapers encourage you to vote to protect valuable member services, like roadside assistance. Uhhh, hold on, are any of the candidates for board membership actually proposing to stop providing roadside assistance?!

Fact is, if you read the stuff in the members’ magazine about the candidates, it tells you absolutely nothing about how they’d like to run the RACV, what their beliefs or political views are. So unless by some unlikely coincidence you actually know any of them, you might as well just vote at random. How would you know who you should vote for? What is the point?