Dot CC

Years ago during the dot com boom of the 90's somebody was selling the .cc domains cheap. cc was for Cocos Islands. I guess they made a pile of money while it lasted. since many of the names were already taken with dot com people felt that they should get their name on dot cc or somebody else's name on dot cc so they can sell it to them later for a profit.

A few days ago I was at a meeting for African Top Level Domain Registry's. I am on the board of TzNIC who was sponsoring the meeting and as the meeting was in my home town the other board members asked me to help the chairman represent thme.
I was a misfit. First of all I am white if you don't already know. And Top level country domains tend to have pride and nationalism sentiment right now, so what is a white non citizen doing on the board?

Secondly the attendees were either very technical guys running cctld's (country code top level domains), or the experts brought in to do a very specific seminar for them, or government bureaucrats who wanted a vacation and were clueless about what was talked about, or Tanzanians who someone convinced their ISP employers that this course would be useful. I fall into the last group, but not quite anymore. I am the token board member to fill a chair when needed. Sometimes that chair was next to the honorable Deputy Ministers.

The board said our ISP better be prepared as Internet connection backup. Well it turned out they needed us the whole time.

During a tea break I meet a guy who has come in for just two days to demonstrate software used by cctld's. Turns out he was one of those who was there doing the dot cc thing and now he can live like a hippy. That was pretty cool trading stories about being "Internet cowboys" during the early days.

But what does this have to do with bicycles? So we go sit down in the back row and like everyone else at the meeting we are all browsing instead of listening. Somehow we mention bicycles and we go off into another world, showing our trips, our fixies, our commuters, and so on.

Keep em rolling