A surprise birthday present for me was a week in the UK after, I think, a six year absense.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time out to meet up with the family, especially Catherine for putting up with the four of us for a week, and Mike, Paul, Guy for their generous hospitality.

The kids loved it. Audrey has been before but is too young to remember it really. Liam is overwhelmed with Paul, his new hero! [God knows why]

Some of the photos are here:

The local town hall has finally come through.
We can start to renovate this delapidated house.

Every room will have a make over. The garage will become a spare bedroom with en-suite shower room.
We’ll add a study and a utility room.

The outside terrace will be closed off to create a new veranda type dining room.

The kitchen will be completely replaced.

The bathroom will be completely replaced.

All bedroom walls and ceilings will be re-plastered.

All new floor tiles.

New doors and shutters.

Landscape garden and terrace.

Phew!

Budget of 50.000€…

Pictures to follow.

I received an email from a guy in America who is interested in my boxclever.com domain name. He currently has another suffix added to boxclever.

Now, this is the third time that someone has written asking if I am interested in parting with the domain name. It’s not like it’s a magic word. I’ve seen it used in the press, often relating to boxing matches or a particularly fierce football encounter, but other than that I cannot see why it has interested three people on three continents.

And it got me thinking. Would I be prepared to part with it?

I wasn’t the first person to have boxclever.com. I remember when I started my company that it wasn’t available. And then, in 2000 I was in an hotel in Los Angeles one evening idly browsing the web when I saw on register.com that the name was available. I snapped it up on the spot. After all, I had a company called boxclever and was working internationally; it made sense.

Since then I have used the email address everywhere. I’ve been trying to think of what I would have to change if I surrendered the domain and thus the email address that goes with it. From MSN to Amazon, through to the GUA and Total France and back again to my current company. It would take forever and a day to modify everyhting and even then I’d be sure and miss out on a number of places.

Now, I also have a huge problem with boxclever.com. And it’s not my fault.

In 2004 a UK TV rental company changed its name to boxclever. They have the .co.uk suffix. Their IT department told staff at their headquarters that they had the .com address and created emails accordingly. They even printed up letter headed paper, compliment slips, invoices and so forth with the .com address. I don’t know how many people work for boxclever in the UK but it’s probably a few hundred. You can imagine how many emails I was getting each day [that they weren’t getting obviously] from angry customers as well as confidential accouting information.

But, there was this one git in London that must have signed up for every porno site in existence and signed up for the daily pic to be sent to his .com address. He’s probably annoyed that he never actually got anything in his inbox – it all came to me – and bloody well keeps coming, too, albeit rerouted to a generic “not know here” address.

All this adds to the dilemma. If I sell boxclever.com, whomever purchases it will think I’m so kind of sicko with a porno fetish for grannies and men with big willies!

S.

A painless exercise. Nice touch from the WordPress developers with their jokey little comments during the installation process. So, if you want to go back a step to the older Blogger site the go straight back to www.boxclever.com otherwise stay here and I’ll try and move everything across.

Google’s Blogger no longer allows me to upload from their site to mine via FTP. So, I’ve moved over to WordPress and we’ll see how we get on…