James Galvin

Inspired by Adam’s repository of silly domain names (verbo.se, foot.ie, explic.it, …) and others like pix.ie, I am now the proud owner of galv.in. Unfortunately jam.es was not available.

The Forrester has compiled a list of the 100 oldest .com domain names.

I just paid £30 to renew a .com domain for one year. Thats €43.26 - about eight times what I usually pay with eNom. Had to renew it before they would transfer the ownership because it was already expired. And I thought it was funny when I was quoted $10 per user per month for standard pop3 email accounts. I thought these kind of prices went out in 2001.

In 1997 I started messing about making websites on free hosts. To have my own domain was out of the question. I was earning about 1 euro per month, and domains and hosting were expensive at the time. It broke my heart when I realised that the domain I had my unimaginative eye on got snatched up by some American guy. I could have understood if it was the famous poet or Munster’s Jim Galvin (who scored the winning drop goal for Munster against the All-blacks in 1993) or a site dedicated to the memory of the baseball player from the 30’s. I would have happily yielded to these men who deserved the domain more than I did… or even to the murderer, or the aviator, or the neurology professor, or the nutrionist who has “James Galvin” as a surname… I could go on forever. Instead, as I scraped together my pennies in the hope that some day I could afford the registration, it was the Geocities James Galvin from New York who swept my dreams from beneath my bare, poverty-stricken feet so that he could write about his career with the NYPD and “other interesting things”.

I hate to gloat, James, but if you’re reading this… it’s MINE now! 9 years on, thanks to Domain Status Reporter, I was ready for its expiration. I must also thank the spam email I received reminding me of the upcoming expiration of the domain. Its the only time I can remember receiving helpful spam, even though I was worried at the time that it was some bot that would automatically register the domain NameZero-style and try to sell it to me.