We get mail.
Dear EricMy name is David Cuthbertson and I am working as an adviser to the
Council of Ministers of Interim Government of Iraq. I've become very
interested in the of the .iq domain name and a colleague of mine has
pointed me at your very useful site, nic-iq.nic-naa.net.Although I am an international adviser and am funded by the British
government, my terms of reference clearly state that my client is the
IIG. I have worked on a number of technical project for the CoM in the
past six months and am now involved with the attempt to have the .iq
domain redelegated to an independent Iraqi organisation.Would you please let me know how uptodate your website is regarding
recent movements on the .iq registration as I'm trying to get a clear
picture of the state of play.Many thanks
David Cuthbertson
Adam Smith International - Iraq
British Embassy, Baghdad
Iraqna: +964 7901 438 029
MCI: +1 914 822 7786
I've gotten another two since then. The last lot was when the BBC and The Register plagerized my "What little I know about the .IQ delegation" website, and some Dodos wanted to repurpose .iq into a namespace that offered names like "subnormal.iq". To each I try to explain, but to no avail. The woman who writes Riverbend is better qualified to write the policy for a .iq registry operator than the people who contact me.
My letter to Vint Cerf is here. He's an MCI suit, and rather dapper in one at that, but he used to do semi-honest work. And he'll get the wicked secret can-we-please-have-dot-iq request from the Allawiites sometime real soon now.
If you want to help, let me know. There are lists to make -- schools, hospitals, and so on. I've already done airports and provinces, Those I convert into non-delegated subdomains, like ac.iq, and eventually real addresses, in Iraq or not, can be associated with the names, and eventually, whole pieces, even the whole thing itself, can be fobbed off on ... er ... delegated to people like Riverbend. They exist, they just don't have ICANN creds or access.
Meanwhile, Haliburton will claim a bunch of wicked expensive computational overkill in a wicked expensive disconnected vault somewhere staffed by morons and priced at millions (which is just a minute or two of a day's cost of the Aggression in Iraq anyway), is the better choice and the choice approved by our Dear Leader.
Posted by EBW at January 5, 2005 01:51 PM | TrackBackRead what Hackworth had to say recently on work arounds in the Army. Telling and somewhat relevant.
[sftt.org]
My letter to Vint Cerf is here. He's an MCI suit, and rather dapper in one at that, but he used to do semi-honest work.
Careful, Vint's Da Man. My hero, and still a good egg. :-)
Posted by: NTodd at January 5, 2005 04:44 PMIt is a big site. Where?
Posted by: Eric at January 5, 2005 04:48 PMNow why would Vint be your hero?
He was able to come over to the bar at the Rome meeting to find out what Amadeu Abril i Abril and I were chatting about (the .cat proposal, you'll find it on the side-bar), but he wasn't able to bring himself to sit down and actually have a beer.
Seriously, have you ever worked with him? Have you ever seen him make, by himself, the right call?
Posted by: Eric at January 5, 2005 04:57 PMHe's my hero because he worked with my company on some multimedia training we were doing for one of our biggest customers back in the early 90s, and always seemed to have great vision and an excellent way of communicating that vision. I wish I'd almost had a beer with him!
Just remember great genius is oft-accompanied by great insanity, including the inability to relate to people at a social level.
Posted by: NTodd at January 5, 2005 05:32 PMBTW, I think VJ's talking about this article.
Posted by: NTodd at January 5, 2005 05:36 PMI hope not. That 1k words is as content free as the Old Farmer show on MPR every Friday night.
The freebsd-isp list got one oddball request for how to wire an ATX connector ... Now this is improv:
Thank goodness for both of you. I have been struggling with having to mannually power up my router machines for the past three months. I am
in Iraq, and the darn local-national have generated power, hence they have to shut down the huge deisel generators, frequently. I was in
school for computer engineering prior to getting activated, so I have some knowledge of capacitors, and circuit theory, however, obviously not enough to grant me the ability to solve this problem by myself :) I am about to get back to the states, so I will try the capacitor trick when I get back, however, the grounded wire solution may be the solution that is most viable, right now.
Eric - LOL!
Posted by: NTodd at January 5, 2005 07:04 PMUh, that was real mail from some guy now in Baghdad to the freebsd-isp mailing list. I was interested too because using boat anchors for low-load nameservers is reasonable, assuming you can get them to reboot without tying up extra hardware, like a keyboard. I've one in my basement ... and three in my attic.
Anyway, Vint just acked-at-length my fax of three hours or so ago. He's in India, where I hope he's doing good. I mentioned the Andaman Island access problem to him.
Posted by: Eric at January 5, 2005 07:13 PMVint acked via fax from India. Jeebus. Is that not cool?
Posted by: NTodd at January 5, 2005 07:18 PMI sent faxed to Marina del Rey, someone there faxed it on. Vint acked via smtp from somewhere (logically) interior to an MCI machine room in Kansas City (where my traceroutes disapear).
Posted by: Eric at January 5, 2005 07:34 PM