Good thing that Boys Stuff isn't in the US. I'd be quite a bit poorer.
I've got a bunch of domains. A few times a month, I get an email wondering if I want to sell, rent, lease, give away, etc. one of them. This morning, I got one from a guy who wanted to know about dennis.com
The owner of dennis.com
This it to inform you that we are pursuing the ownership of your domain dennis.com. We are a US company, who have the rights to this domain.
Please let us know if you are willing to part with this domain without legal action.
If not then please confirm that you are the owner and when your ownership / registration ends, business address and communication details so our lawyers can get in touch with you.
Yours,
Richard Dennis
Managing Director
Ohhh, scary! So, I decided to see what I could find out about our Richard Dennis.
richarddennis.com isn't much help -- an annoying flash app where all the links point to yahoo.com. Whois for the domain doesn't give us much more -- no phone numbers, no addresses, just a whole lot of Richard Dennis.
Interestingly, GN-solicitors.com, the domain for his lawyer, isn't even registered. A google search for GN solicitors turns up nothing as well. Odd.
The richarddennis.com webserver is in Britain, but the bulk of the content is hosted on geocities. The flash app lives at http://www.geocities.com/rdenniswork/rddotcom/index.htm, so maybe going up a level to http://www.geocities.com/rdenniswork/ will give us some more detail.
Sure enough, that URL has a message from our friend: "buzzzzz.co.uk brought to you by Rich". Well, let's check out buzzzzz.co.uk.
Hey, Rich aka Buzz is a backpacker! This site doesn't give us a whole lot of personal detail about Buzz, since most of the content is stolen, whole hog, from gapyear.com, but we do get a nice pic of Buzz playing with a kangaroo (mirrored since his site has shutdown on me a few times this morning due to bandwidth caps).
So, our "Managing Director" turns out to be a twenty-something UK backpacker. But why would he threaten to sue me? My guess is that another Richard Dennis probably threatened him with an (ungrounded) lawsuit, so he decided to give it a whirl with me. My response to Buzz:
Buzz:
Thanks for the great laugh!
Dennis.com is in use and not available. If you believe you have a legitimate legal claim on the domain, I'm sure your barrister will be able to tell you how best to bring suit against us.
Best,
--
Patrick Michael Kane
Sue away, Buzz!
Lemmings written entirely in HTML/Javascript. Remarkable.
(Thanks Blue's News!)
Tragically Obfuscated has received its first MT comment spam! Woohoo!
Comrade Exley points out the existence of a Bizarro World Patrick. Scary!
Yukari and I were returning from a private screening of Sixteen Candles yesterday evening when Yukari mentioned that she knew where to find Ginger Altoids. Apparently a co-worker had recently spotted them at a nearby 7-11.
I was doubtful, but we drove to the 7-11 anyway. While Yukari waited in the car, I went into the store. And, to my surprise, there they were, carefully nestled between the Peppermint and Cinnamon Altoids. The harsh flourescent light of the 7-11 reflected softly off their ginger-colored tin. I grabbed the whole case, rushed to the checkout counter and was off!
The interesting thing is, the checkout clerk said that they get Ginger Altoids on a fairly regular basis. Too good to be true? We'll see!
