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According to GoDaddy, you should maybe stop buying .tv domains because Tuvalu, who owns all such domain names, is currently sinking underwater. Once Tuvalu no longer exists as a nation, the domains will also disappear.

Sure, the island nation is slowly falling underwater, but all hope may not be lost yet. Valleywag points us to a USA Today article from 2004, which says there are exceptons—.su domains from the ancient Soviet Union are still active. But DomainNameWire refutes this, mentioning that factoid came from a VeriSign, a company that handles all domain transactions for Tuvalu, and their reasoning might be skewed. They instead reference an ICANN rule which states that domain names from any defunct country must be phased out.

So who knows what will really happen when Tuvalu decides to swim with the fishes. But seeing that .tv domains have huge time marketing appeal, I’d have distress believing they’d just nix the domains. Still, I’m no internet domain lawyer—domain squatters, you might want to heed this warning: BEWARE OF SINKING ISLAND. [Wreck and Salvage via Eddie Codel via Boing Boing and DomainNameWire]

Today was a terrible day. Unrelated, gadgets were misbehaving. Someone had to pay for it.

I was rushing off to meet with Owen from Valleywag, and I was late. I forgot that a surfboard on my roof was not tied down on my roof rack and as I stopped for a stop sign at the bottom of a steep hill, it just slid off and jammed itself under a car. Thank god no one was hurt. As I strapped it back on, carefully, some guy in a teal benz rolled down his window and said “nice pahking jaab!”, to which I shook my fist and made a giant “errrrrrr” sound. I was a small annoyed, since the board belonged to a friend and is now scratched up.

Through this mad, mad lens, every gadget’s flaw is amplified 1000 fold. It has nothing to do with how much they deserves the scorn. Sharp edges and obtuse design bother me more when in a wicked state because I’ve become more sensitive to their design hiccups and less patient.

I got back in my car and drove a block, now really late for my meeting. I tried to call to say I would be late, but the call dropped. And I was mad, so I did that thing where you try redialing 20 times in a row, pushing the buttons really hard. Then I noticed that I couldn’t get my car’s GPS to simply route to an intersection without clicking through two dozen buttons presses. And later on, every moment my phone hung while going through apps felt like an eternity. My rage built upon itself, one red wave after another, driving my ability to see clearly down deeper and deeper.*

Once, I crossed a line with my gadget-rage. I was trying to install a music player on a new notebook, and, as many of you know, sometimes wireless settings do not stick. It doesn’t matter who makes the operating system here, that’s not the point. What happened was that I was having a pretty frustrating day for various reasons, and after an hour of setting it repeatedly and having it reset repeatedly, I finished up discus throwing it onto a couch and punching in the keyboard. Ridiculous, I know. I am guilty of ridiculous things, often. But I never would have been this incensed on a machine that worked flawlessly.

The point is, I wonder how many gadget companies test user experiences when users are rushing, focusing on other things, stressed out about work, or plain pissed off. Maybe they should, because I bet they’d find such a test—a super user experience test—to be most useful for their designs for gadgets to be used in the real world.

Just like phones that can withstand drops from table height without shattering, and militarized solid state drive laptops that are dust and moisture proof, I would bet that testing gadgets to be smooth and invisible during user experiences where the users are in less than ideal states of mind would probably go a long ways towards making them better for all users. Mad or cool as monks.

*To feel better, I spend time with my dogs or hang out in the water.

The H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act wouldn’t dismantle the H-1B program providing visas for guest foreign workers, nor does it attempt to change the cap numbers. Instead, the proposed legislation takes aim squarely at employers abusing the program.
– Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois
and Charles Grassley of Iowa are
continuing their quest to reform the H-1B visa program, on April 23 reintroducing
legislation aimed at reducing fraud and abuse in the controversial program. The
H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act does not seek to dismantle the program or …

In what’s possibly the meanest anti-Apple pun ever, Consumerist reader Ryan was sold an actual brick in a box instead of the MacBook Pro for which he paid over $2,000.

He bought the “MacBook Pro” at a Best Buy in Texas, and the retailer is citing the problem as Apple’s responsibility rather than its own. The box was apparently sealed with the brick (a paving stone, really, but I’ve already eked two jokes out of calling it a brick and I refuse to let that kind of thing pass me by) inside, which does seem like it would be a bizarre screwup on Apple’s end. Ryan hasn’t gotten the mess sorted out with his credit card company, Best Buy, or Apple, but this is so ridiculous somebody’s bound to refund his money. [Consumerist]

Unlike some smartphones we know, phones running WinMo 6.5 will get a pretty incredible connected voice command interface, courtesy of Microsoft subsidiary TellMe.

There are already TellMe apps out there, where the service listens to requests—search queries or requests for other data—and carries them out online. BlackBerry and Sprint Instinct have them, and the newest Ford Sync system uses TellMe for traffic data too. But in WinMo 6.5, TellMe isn’t just an app, it’s a one-button hub for voice commands of all kinds, including text messaging, making calls, and also jumping to Microsoft Live Search with natural language queries like “weather in San Francisco, California,” “pizza in Kansas City” or “mother’s day gift thoughts.”

Microsoft has long been huge on the voice command thing, with PocketPC versions of it dating back five or more years, so it makes sense that they’d make a larger push with Windows Mobile 6.5 than others have done. Things are also more connected now, so it also makes sense that a new voice command system would blur the line between what’s happening on the phone itself (texting, etc.) and what’s happening in the wireless cloud (searches, etc.).

I am a huge fan of voice commands, and am still pissed off that Apple has ignored their safety benefits, as well as their convenience, in iPhone development, and I’m glad to see at least one of the power hitters pushing the thought towards the next logical stage.

The service will be free at WinMo 6.5 launch, either as a download from the awkwardly named Windows Marketplace for Mobile, or pre-embedded by the carrier or handset maker. [TellMe]

TellMe promo video:

A high-profile murder that started when a woman who advertised on Craigslist was found dead in a hotel room has brought new scrutiny to the online listing site.
–
BOSTON (Reuters) – When Marissa chose to switch jobs from nursing
to prostitution a year ago, the online classified site Craigslist was
pivotal, she said. Friends told her she could make lots of money just
by advertising there.
quot;I would never walk the streets. I would never do that kind…

Will Verizon ever wrest away iPhone exclusivity from AT&T? We don’t know for certain, but tonight we do know that the wireless carrier is working hard to make it so, possibly by 2010.

The revelation comes to us by way of USA Today, where we also learned that Steve Jobs was involved in the negotiations when they first started a few months ago. The year 2010 is a magic number of sorts too, as that is when the super secret exclusivity contract between Apple and AT&T is rumored to expire. You can bet AT&T is working equally hard to extend its contract and keep Verizon at bay.

In remarks made to USA Today, Roger Entner, head of telecom research for Nielsen, said “breaking the (iPhone) exclusivity with AT&T is a huge thing. That would send shivers into AT&T’s stock and senior leadership.”

It would also send shivers, of the positive kind, through the spines of current Verizon customers that really, really want an iPhone. Choice is excellent. [USA Today]

YouTube isn’t the only video site experimenting with crazy new marketing thoughts. Vimeo is at it too, teaming up with Honda to make an Insight ad that makes the entire page a small light show.

Beyond the ad, the “making of” video below is worth a gander too, as it shows how Honda was able to make a large “LED screen” using hundreds of Insight automobiles.

Which is cool and all, but, um, isn’t driving all of those cars out to a remote field just to shoot a commercial kind of defeating the point of the whole “green” message? The gas and energy consumption for such a venture, but cool, must have been enormous. As a hipster (weekends only), I simply cannot get behind such a hypocritical message.