Who is your Domain Registrar? Probably not Domain Renewal Group!

It's not often that I write a blog post, but something that bothered me the other day meant that I could not put down my thoughts in a 140 characters. 

I received an offical looking letter from the Domain Renewal Group, now as you can see at first glance it looks like an invoice that you would get from your domain registrar. However look closely and you will see that “This notice is not a bill”.

 Now I own a few domains and I know that Domain Renewal Group are not my registrar. It got me thinking about the people I know that just have one domain, do they know who their registrar is? Most of these people have got them as a package deal when they set up their website and if this letter came into their company they probably wouldn’t question it. Apart from the fact that the price is more than likely three times what that would pay.

So please be very wary of anything that looks to be a little odd. If in doubt give it a quick google search and as you can see that Domain Renewal Group is number one in the results, the rest of the page should warn you off.

I just have to agree with the second link “Screw you, Domain Renewal Group!”

Daylight Savings Failure at Chirstchurch Airport

April 4, 2010 is the change from New Zealand Daylight Time (NZDT) to New Zealand Standard Time (NZST), see Time in New Zealand. I never thought that I would get more than just another hour in bed, but I got a little gift from Christchurch International Airport in the form of free parking. Check out the parking ticket that was issued to me.

I entered the car park at 11:55 am (NZST), however the ticket machine had not had its clock changed so it issued the ticket with the time 12:55 pm (NZDT). When I left and went to pay that machine had its time adjusted correctly to 12:37 pm (NZST). I'm no Dr. Who and can't travel through time and leave the airport before I got there.

This may be a funny story to me and others may have got free or cheap parking. It's not that funny to Christchurch Airport or if this time slip happened to my time clock at work and I lost an hour of pay.

I'm assuming that this scenario was not tested and for the program that calculates the charge it can only deal with with the data it's presented with. Just because this system doesn't cross any physical time zones on a map, it does cross a logical timezone twice a year. If the time stamp written to the magnetic strip on the parking ticket was based on Zulu Time (UTC), then any changes to the time zone would not have any adverse effect to calculating the parking fee.

This serves as a reminder to myself that when I'm thinking of how to test, it's most likely the improbably situations that will happen n the real world.