Life is grand

Sadly there is no GTalk client for Mac OS X. So when I swapped to OS X I switched to Adium which worked great with our internal IM (jabber based), with my old MSN Messenger buddies (you dinosaurs!) and supposedly my new GTalk contacts.

Except GTalk didn’t connect at work because of firewall restrictions. The MSN Messenger connection in Adium has a handy “Connect via HTTP” option which works fine. But the GTalk options don’t have that.

Instead I found this little gem which tells you how to use port 443 (HTTPS, normally open on firewalls) and voila! GTalk now works at work.

Ain’t computers grand?

Seems like I am unfortunately in the middle of a tug of war between eNom and RegisterFly.

For the past few years I have used RegisterFly and it was fine. Not great but then I didn’t have many domain demands and RegisterFly did the job.

It turns out though that RegisterFly didn’t actually do the registering. They passed it on to eNom. So if you do a whois on one of my domains it says that eNom is the registrar.

Who cares, right?

Well eNom are now severing their relationship with RegisterFly and so the domains I normally manage through RegisterFly won’t be available as they are actually registered by eNom.

RegisterFly sent me an email saying if I pay for the transfer from eNom to RegisterFly then I get $7.99 from them which I can use next year when domain renewals are up.

Frankly I don’t want to pay any money for my domains right now, they were renewed recently and I paid for them then. I am a bit angry RegisterFly took that money but actually were using eNom and so now I have to pay RegisterFly more money. I don’t care that they are giving me a free year (from next year only), that isn’t the point. RegisterFly should absorb the cost now and transfer my domain from eNom. Instead they are trying to get $5.99 out of me.

So I think I’ll just ditch RegisterFly and go with eNom who it turns out are the second biggest domain registrar around.