Do you ever reminisce and wonder what would have happened if you'd done just done one tiny little thing differently?

Back in 1994, back when the Internet and the web was just beginning to really take off, and back when domain names (you know, those things that often end in .com) were free to anyone who wanted to register one, I registered southwest.com.

I live in the desert southwest of the United States, and in the southwestern corner of Utah. I thought the domain name sounded cool, and could be used to start an Internet company, perhaps named "Southwest Internet Services" or something.

I also registered lds.net, in part because I happen to be LDS, and uv.com because it was a two-letter domain and it was the very last two-letter .com domain available at the time (excluding domain names with digits in them).

Then in 1995 the InterNIC was authorized to start charging money for domain registrations. That put a crimp in my style, as I was but a poor college student. I decided to let my registration of lds.net and uv.com expire.

But southwest.com was just a cool domain, so I scrounged up $50 and hung on to it.

Here's a copy of my (rather ugly) and useless web site looked like back in 1996 and 1997:

• December 1996
• February 1997

Then in 1997, I decided to sell the domain to Southwest Airlines (who at that time used www.iflysw.com as their domain name). I sold it for a few thousand dollars in cash and some airline tickets, a package worth significantly less than $10,000.00 US in total value. At the time, I thought it was a pretty good deal.

Looking back now, I should have hung on to the domain for another ten years and put the domain into use as I'd originally intended. What if I had? I suspect I'd have had offers to buy the domain for amounts far greater, likely in the hundreds-of-thousands at least. Perhaps I'd even be a millionaire.

Oh well!

As for uv.com, who knows who registered it after I let my registration lapse. I wish I'd kept it so I could have a 2-letter .com domain. As it is, I later registered eq.net and formed a Utah LLC that uses it today.

Not too long after the lds.net registration lapsed, Burgoyne Computers in Salt Lake City, Utah registered that domain. The Internet Archive has some archived copies of some of their older web pages. It looks like today they still own it and use it for web mail services. Burgoyne Internet Services, L.L.C. is listed as the current owner.

I don't look back with regret at all for having missed out on better capitalizing on the southwest.com domain. I couldn't see the future. A few thousand dollars cash was a lot of money to a single guy in his mid 20s. And the plane tickets were a blast.

With the plane tickets, I flew out to Washington D.C. and stayed a week with my friend who was working at the time as an intern for Idaho Senator Larry Craig. I met the senator and many of his staff. My friend also gave me an insiders tour of the U.S. Capitol building, taking me out onto the floor of the Senate chambers.

During the day while he worked, I wandered around all over the mall, loving the D.C. Metro, enjoying exploring the Capitol and office buildings of the Senate and House on my own, and the mini-subway that connected them to the Capitol building. (Remember, this was all pre-9/11. I wonder today if perhaps some random person were wandering around much like I did then, if security would pick them up for questioning.)

I also did other D.C. tourist things, like take the tour of the White House (and since it was around Christmas time, the tour guides passed out little Christmas cards from the Clintons to all tour members), ride the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument, visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (which I remembered and loved from when I visited it as a teenager while on a high school band trip), visit the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the National Archives, take the tour at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (where they print money), tour the U.S. Treasury Building right next to the White House, visit the Holocaust Museum, as well as many other things.

Although I was there an entire week, I still just scrached the surface, not having explored the other Smithsonian offerings, not explored Georgetown, not having visited the Arlington National Cemetery, nor the many, many, many other places in and around D.C.

So as you can see, it doesn't bother me to have missed out on the profit potential that the southwest.com domain might have had, had I kept it. I sold it. I had a blast with the proceeds. The enjoyable experiences in my memories are priceless.

But it is fun to imagine sometimes, "What if?"

Thumbnail image of Killer Robots campaign flyerLast year, when my sister was running for a spot on her high school student body Executive Council, for the fun of it I registered a domain, voteforjuje.com and put up a web site for her campaign.

Now the domain registration has run out. voteforjuje.com no longer exists (unless someone else has since registered that domain themselves and put up a web site).

For the fun of it, I've archived the web site. It's available here:I quite like the poster and flyer art work my other sister Janna did for the campaign. Some samples are on the above archived web site.

It was fun working on bits of a soundtrack for Juje's campaign skit using the freely-available Audacity audio software.

I also had fun coming up with the wacky little one-to-two-line campaign slogans that appears in italics at the bottom of the black-backgrounded portion of the page, selected randomly from among eight. If you reload the page, you may get a different one.

Though my sister didn't win, she had fun running and Janna and I enjoyed helping her.

Rest In Peace, voteforjuje.com!

Fascinating Sky Over the Rio VirginCache Found: A Bridge Over Troubled Water by call2teachfamily

Saturday, 28 January 2006 - 5:00 PM MST (-0700)

Found at last!

Nests on the BridgeYou might not know it, but there's been an unregistered cache hidden only 50 feet away in the rocks by the trail since March of 2003 (Wednesday, 19 March 2003 at 3:45 PM MST (-0700) to be precise). I hid it when my sister from Colorado was visiting, then promptly forgot to register it with Geocaching.com. I even visited it again in the summer of 2003 (Saturday, 20 Sept. 2003 at 7:00 PM MDT (-0600), with a friend) with the intent to register it.

The Setting SunThat's what I get for not being diligent in registering it with www.geocaching.com. Besides, I love the name you picked for this cache, and I love the little bit of history of the Quail Creek Reservoir dike-break flood of 01 January 1989 washing out the bridge that you included in the cache, call2teachfamily!

Spiky SilhouetteI took a Dory toy (You know, Dory from "Finding Nemo") and left a "Polar Express" DVD in exchange.

Riverside Grass SilhouetteAnother SilhouetteAfter writing in the log book, I extracted the old 2003 cache from the nook in the rocks by the bike/walking trail. Apparently it didn't survive the January floods of 2005 unscathed. It was completely submerged by the flood. In spite of an otherwise weather-proof plastic jar container, the contents inside were still soaked, though the log book was only damp, having had an additional layer of protection in the form of a ziploc plastic bag.

It was surprising to see that lewmil, who registered a find of this cache on the 13th of December 2005, apparently stumbled across my old unregistered cache a day earlier on the 12th, and made a note entry in the log book. Wow! That's funny.

Sky Over Bloomington HillPower Pole SilhouetteI've removed the unregistered cache so no one else will accidentally find it and think that it it this cache. I'll go hid it somewhere else once I clean it up and dry it out.

Thanks, call2teachfamily, for a fun evening find!

Oh, and the sunset was absolutely stunning. I stuck around for over an hour just to watch the colors change in the sky.

Then I grew impatient and left shortly before the sun broke through the clouds on the horizon and lit up the whole sky in a blaze of glorious color, illuminating the clouds from beneath. When I did notice, looking up out my car window, I immediately pulled over and snapped a few more pictures of the sky.

-Astounding
St. George, Utah

A Spiral Galaxy (NGC 3370)Okay, I'm a sucker for Hubble Space Telescope images. Two images, in fact. Following up after my previous post of two stunning Hubble images, I've got to add a few more. The first is of NGC 3370, a spiral galaxy, and the second is of NGC 1300, a barred spiral galay, the same type of galaxy as our own Milky Way galaxy is (which was once thought to be a plain spiral, but is now believed to be a barred spiral).

Once again, many thanks to the excellent web site, hubblesite.org, for the source images..

A Barred Spiral Galaxy (NGC 1300)Like the earlier images, the source images for these desktop backgrounds are in the public domain (see the hubblesite.org copyright page).

To view or download the full-sized widescreen 1920x1200 desktop wallpaper images, click or right-click on the following links:

• A Spiral Galaxy (1920x1200).jpg (NGC 3370)
  Courtesy NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team, and A. Riess (STScI)
  
• A Barred Spiral Galaxy (1920x1200).jpg (NGC 1300)
  Courtesy NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

While these two galaxy pictures are nice, they're not nearly as colorful as the earlier images, but they still appeal to me.

After having removed my old email address off this web site to slow the flow of unsolicited, unwanted messages from spammers whose robot crawlers periodically visit my site searching new addresses to spam, I intended to add a web form for visitors to use if they needed to contact me. Unfortunately, I've been a slacker

I hereby repent! You can now click the Contact Me button on the left side-panel menu to send me a message if so needed.

Fun, huh!

Oh, and since commenting on articles and posts doesn't work on my site, if you have something impressive to say about an article, feel free to use the Contact Me function to send the comment to me. If you do, please, please, please include the full web address (URL) of the article so I know what you're commenting about.

Maybe someday I'll get comments working...

Yeah, that'll happen soon... *laugh*

Update (27 January 2006): Thanks go to my sister for using the new contact form to alert me of an unfortunate typo. Unfortunately somehow lost an e. It has been remedied. The missing e has been found.

Orion NebulaI came across this stunning high resolution image of the Orion Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope at the www.hubblesite.org web site this morning. So I downloaded the highest resolution version I could find, then trimmed it to fit a 1920x1200 computer desktop.

Yeah, I admit it, I love my Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24" LCD monitor. The image looks wonderful on it.

Center of the Milky Way GalaxyA few days later (I'm writing this paragraph on the 14th of January), I ran into another gorgeous high resolution image, this one of the center of the galaxy. I trimmed it to 1920x1200 to try it out too.

Because the source images for these are in the public domain (see the hubblesite.org copyright page and the Spitzer Space Telescope Image Use Policy for more information), they can be freely distributed and derivitave works can be freely created.

To view or download the full-sized widescreen 1920x1200 desktop wallpaper images, click or right-click on the following links:

• The Orion Nebula (1920x1200).jpg
  Courtesy NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
  
• Center of the Milky Way Galaxy (1920x1200).jpg
  Courtesy NASA, JPL-Caltech, S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech)

My many thanks go out to the many folks who worked to produce such marvelous images of the magnificent universe in which we reside.

Comments:
On 29-Dec-2011 at 2:30 AM, 'Damian' posed "a question":Aaron responded on Thu, 29 Dec. 2011:

MERLINFor a little rest and relaxation, I wrote a tiny JavaScript puzzle implementation, Magic Square Puzzle, that emulates the Merlin's Magic Square puzzle from the old 1978 electronic game.

I remember getting one for Christmas as a kid, probably in 1978 or 1979. I had wanted a Merlin so desperately, but doubted my parents would get one for me. Oh, what joy and excitement filled my head when on Christmas morning, there, beneath the tree, I saw it, in all its dazzling, smooth, shiny red plastic glory.

The magic square game (one of six) was one of my favorite, if not my favorite. Fortunately a quick web search turned up some information about the rules of the original electronic game. With a little HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I could once again play the game that had delighted me in my childhood.

Try it out (use the link at the top of this article) with a web browser that supports JavaScript. It's pretty easy to figure out, quite simplistic. In theory, a perfect player should never have to click a single button more than once to solve it. At best, a single click might solve the puzzle, and at worst one might have to click on all nine buttons a single time.

The following rant is one I posted to digg.com as a comment in response to a link where someone explained their own troubles with Buy.com. I thought I'd share my own experience with them and why I refuse to do business with them.

Here's my comment in full:

Sadly, this is par for the course for Buy.com.

Last year (2004) in September I bought...

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The crew of the ship SerenityI've borrowed the lines from Seinfeld, "Serenity now! Serenity now!" and corrupted them to express my own impatience waiting for the release of the Joss Whedon movie Serenity on DVD after it left the local theaters. This morning it was finally released.

After a midnight visit to Wal-Mart to buy the new Serenity DVD and pick up some movie munchies, my brother and I drove over to Cassidy's house to watch Serenity on his big-screen HDTV with several others. It was sweet! Great movie, good company!

Now I see that on Amazon.com's Today's Top Sellers list, Serenity is the number one top seller. Sweet! I hope it can stay up there on the list for quite some time.

The Amazon.com top sellers list demonstrates the demand for Serenity. Too bad other retailers won't benefit as much. This morning at Wal-Mart I noticed that much more shelf space was devoted to several other new DVD releases in contrast to the smaller spot Serenity occupied.

If the demand for Serenity keeps up, maybe fans can prove once-and-for-all that this movie should have had more marketing dollars behind it. I think if it had been marketed more, it would have made much more money in theatrical release, and DVD sales too would be greater than they will be. I think it's a missed opportunity.

But at least I've got my Serenity now.

There are many good things that I have to be thankful for. Today, three in particular stand out.

Back in July of this year, the last Sunday in July, a letter from the First Presidency was read in Sacrament Meeting in which President Hinckley challenged each member of the Church to read or reread the Book of Mormon before the end of the year. This challenge was reiterated in the First Presidency message in the August 2005 issue of the Ensign magazine as well. In it, President Hinckley said...

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