I’d like to dispel a common misconception – that operating a site like UpsideDownText.com is easy. To be fair, it’s not hard. The programming is so basic that a one week long crash course in Javascript, PHP, and basic HTML would be enough to teach someone to build it, but that’s exactly the problem.

The fact that it’s so easy to build poses the first real obstacle – competition. They’re more than a dozen upside down text websites that do exactly what our website does – take text and flip it upside down. The product is practically identical from site to site, and since it’s limited by the constraints of Unicode there’s little anyone can do to improve the product, apart from adding side features. So in order to compete, one must focus on advertising – in fact one must focus about 95% of their efforts on aggressive, cheap and effective marketing. I mention cheap because websites like this cannot have even a $0.50/user marketing budget; there’s simply not that much revenue to be made per person. A person visits the site, flips his text upside down, and leaves. That’s it!! That’s the whole transaction. The only potential for revenue then is if a mass of users (say a few thousand a day) visit the site, and even then it’s difficult given the short duration of a time a typical user would spend on the website.

For this reason, we spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to promote UpsideDownText.com using every strategy imaginable – we’ve researched keywords and carefully crafted every piece of text on the site for optimal SEO results, we’ve launched this blog (horray!), we maintain a Twitter account and actively tweet and respond to messages… we even built a Facebook app that does exactly what our website does, just to attract the Facebook crowd. We encourage blog owners writing about Upside Down Text (or Flip Text as it’s often called) to mention our website, and we actively listen to what people are saying about our website and promptly respond if necessary. We actively search on Yahoo Answers, and Twitter for people asking how to flip their text upside down, and then reply with an explanation + link. We’ve even taken up Google Ads, and Facebook Ads (through a third-party), and we carefully monitor the peaks and troughs in our daily traffic through Google Analytics to see which of our strategies are most effective. To be honest, these are tasks that every successful webmaster must do, but it becomes all the more important for a site like UpsideDownText.com where the main distinguishing factor between us and our competition is marketing.

The interesting thing that this teaches you is that there’s more to a website then building the product (building the upside down text converter in our case)… people need to know about it, and as obvious as that sounds, I’ve seen numerous instances where companies and people have created brilliant full-featured websites, only to find that at the end they have neither the resources nor necessary time to devote to the equally important task of marketing.

Just to give a little background, Mount Kisco recently replaced their parking meters (the ones by Cosi and Okinawa), with two centralized machines where you punch in your stall number, select a time, and pay.  It’s definitely not convenient for the people parking – it’s an extra walk and an extra delay.  But I suspect Mt Kisco installed the new machines for two reasons:

1. Ease for the Parking Officer: It is more convenient for the parking officer to deal with two machines than numerous individual parking meters. Further since the machines are electronic, I’d assume there’s a device to see which spots have/have not been paid for.
2. More Revenue: This is the more interesting point. Mount Kisco generates additional money. The old meters often failed, but more importantly the new machines don’t tell you if there’s time left for your spot. So let’s say a person paid for an extra hour on a typical meter.  The next person to occupy that spot would notice the extra time and [often] not have to pay anything.  But with the new machines, you have to enter your receipt number to add time and there’s no indication otherwise of the remaining time for a given spot. So if one person overpays, the next person still has to pay his fee.  This means Mount Kisco gets overpaid for a given spot.

Anyways, take a look at the receipt & ticket below (click on the image to see the enlarged copy):

Mount Kisco Parking Ticket

Or if you prefer, here’s the original (unannotated) image.

First, here is a quick overview of who can/can’t use the .gov domain (paraphrased from gsa.gov):

Who Can Use It

• agencies, departments, programs, and commissions run by the U.S. federal government
• federally recognized Indian tribes
• state and local governments represented by an elected body of officials (Note: State/Local governments were not allowed to use .gov until 2003; Initially .gov was reserved only for the U.S. federal government)

Who Can’t Use It

• international organizations
• private organizations or commercial firms
• military entities (they use .mil instead)
• local government programs (while the local government itself can have a .gov domain, local government programs cannot)
• local governments not represented by an elected body of officials

If you’re interested, there are more details on who can/cannot register a .gov domain, here. But otherwise, let’s move on to the more important question: Why is .gov controlled by the United States government and why can’t other countries use this top-level domain?

A look at the IANA website (iana.org) reveals that the .gov domain was established on January 1st 1985.  It turns out January 1st 1985 is also the date that the popular .com, .net, and .org domains were established. .us, the first county-specific domain ever created was formalized on February 15th of that same year, about a month after the .gov domain. This means .gov was one of the first top-level domains to be created, and was established even before the existence of a single country-specific domain. On January 1st 1985, it would have been impossible to have a domain such as .gov.us because there was no “.us”.

But this only begs more questions: A) Why the United States? Why couldn’t the .gov domain be controlled by Canada, or England, or some other country? and B) Why couldn’t the United States government wait a month and use their .us domain for government websites, instead of having the .gov extension just for themselves?

A brief overview of IANA, followed by a quick glance at the history of the Internet as it pertains to IANA and domains will help to answer these questions.

IANA is an acronym for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. This sounds confusing, but just remember the name “IANA”. You’ll learn more about them soon. Most important to our discussion is IANA’s role in managing top-level domains. A top level domain is something like .gov, .com, .net, .org, .us, or .tv. IANA does not manage the top-level domain itself; in other words, IANA does not actually manage the .gov domain or the .com domain. Each top-level domain is managed by different organizations. .gov is managed by the General Services Administration, an agency of the United States federal government, while .com and .net are managed by VeriSign, a for-profit corporation that trades on the NADSAQ.

IANA’s role in managing top-level domains is to administer the data stored on a set of computers known as “root nameservers”.  Please bear with me. I know this can be confusing. These “root nameservers” store a list of top-level domains, such as .gov, .com, .org, and .net. Though these “root nameservers” themselves are not managed by IANA, the list of top-level domains stored on each of these computers is managed by the IANA. So just for clarification, I’ll say it one more time: the IANA manages the list of top-level domains (such as .gov and .com) and this list is stored on a bunch of computers known as “root nameservers”. If you wanted a new top-level domain (say .jake), the IANA would have to add “.jake” to the “root nameserver” list.

Now let us look at how the IANA was founded and its role in the Internet. Today the IANA is managed by ICANN through a contract to the United States Department of Commerce. Though ICANN is a non-profit organization, the IANA maintains strong ties to the U.S. government. But these ties were even stronger in the past, during the time that the .gov domain was established. As we go through IANA’s history, let’s keep in the mind the date – January 1st 1985 – that the .gov domain was established.

Initially, there were only a few computers connected with each other through ARPANET (the predecessor to today’s modern Internet). ARPANET was a project created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the U.S. Defense Department. So many of these early computers connected to ARPANET  were Defense Department computers, combined with computers from American universities such as UC Berkeley and MIT. Each of these computers had a form of identification which allowed one computer to communicate with the others. As the number of computers connected to each other grew, a more structured, formal, efficient system was needed to identify each computer.

And so in 1972, the U.S. Defense Department created the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which was responsible for assigning unique numbers, known as IP addresses to each computer.  These IP addresses provided an efficient, systematic way to identify a computer connected to the Internet, just like a street address identifies a house. Here’s an example of an IP address used by Google: 74.125.95.147.

As the Internet expanded, these long numbers became difficult to remember. So in 1984, and 1985, respectively, the name server, and domain name server (DNS) were invented. Along with DNS came top-level domains (like .gov and .com). And guess who was put in charge of managing the “root nameserver” list, the list which contained these top-level domains? None other than the United States Defense Department’s IANA. The IANA was already managing IP addresses, the numerical identification of each computer, so it was only natural that they’d manage the “root nameserver” list, which helped to identify computers in an easier way.

As we discussed earlier, the top-level domain .gov was established on January 1st 1985. At this time the organization essential in managing top-level domains, the IANA, was controlled by the U.S. government. ICANN, the non-profit that manages the IANA today, was formed later, in 1998. Further, ICANN’s authority to manage IANA become effective even later, on January 1st 1999. So, the United States government, which controlled ICANN in 1985 and had a significant influence on the internet, could create a “.gov” TLD [just] for themselves.  And why not create a TLD for youself if you could?  As we have seen, the U.S. government was instrumental in the formation of the Internet and top-level domains. Having spent so much time, money, and effort helping to develop the early Internet systems, it can hardly be described as selfish to desire your own piece of the top-level domain pie.

Of course, one could argue, and perhaps rightly so, that “.gov” should be opened up for use by other countries, but at least now we can understand the history behind why the United States government enjoys exclusive control over the “.gov” top-level domain. I sincerely hope that this blog post has helped fulfill your curiosity for this question – “Why is .gov controlled by the United States government?” -  for which Wikipedia’s information (at least at the time of this writing) was scarce.

As a special Black Friday promotion, Go Daddy has given us a special promo code for $5 .com domain names. Use the code ‘BLACKOUT’ (without the quotes), starting at 12:01am on Black Friday 2009 (11-27-2009) thru 11:59pm on Cyber Monday 2009 (11-30-2009) and get a .com domain name for just $5. Here’s the important part, this code will ONLY work for the first 250 people, so think of the perfect name now, and reserve it first thing on Black Friday!

GoDaddy is selling these domains at a loss, which would explain the 250 person limitation. As of Oct 2008, GoDaddy pays $6.86 to VeriSign for each .com sold (on top of the ICANN fee). Anyways, I just bought http://www.venkatfolio.com/ using this coupon.  Works perfectly. The total actually comes out to $5.18, with the 18 cent ICANN fee.

In my scenario, I was trying to add a “View HTML” button to UpsideDownText.com.  I wanted this button to work even if a user’s browser didn’t support Javascript (say they were on their Blackberry).  So it was necessary that the View HTML option act as a standard button (so that it could pass whatever text needed to be converted into HTML to the server).  Yet the most natural interface design for a “View HTML” option is a link, not a bulky button.  Here’s what I did:

First, I added a standard submit input to my HTML file:

<input type="submit" id="viewHTML" name="submitText" value="View HTML">

Then, in my CSS file, I added the following lines:

input#viewHTML {
background-color:white;
border:0;
color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;
font-size:1em;
font-family:inherit;
cursor:pointer;
float:right;
padding:3px;
}

This trick works in all major browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. But there are three interesting things to note:

1. For some reason, when I set “background-color” to “inherit”, IE rendered a grayish off-white background, instead of the white one I had intended.  This could have been due to some other code on the page, but I’d recommend just defining a color for this property (so “white” in my case).
2. In order to get “text-decoration: underline” to work in Firefox, you have to include “float:left”, “float:right”, or “display:block”.  In my case it was easiest to do “float: left”, but any of these three options will work. This is possibly a bug as it doesn’t make much sense.
3. Although this trick works for the most part, there is a small problem in Internet Explorer: whenever this input link (#viewHTML) is pressed, IE shifts the text down and right, as would happen on a normal submit button.  Without any padding, this effect looks awkward.  With some padding (say 3px as I used) most users won’t even notice the effect.

Hope this helps!  If you have any questions or problems, feel free to post a comment.

She is surprised, unsure, shaken. A tear forms, but she quickly suppresses it, her face hidden by the hair drooping over. Calvin is staring, intently – staring at her eyes, looking for movement, body language, feeling… Always trying to pick a part. Pick apart everyone, pick apart her. Looking for problems. Looking for something to “talk” about. And then there’s nothing to talk – nothing to be said; he says something anyway. Always searching for what doesn’t exist. Vacation, family get-together turned sour. Calvin makes everything sour…

She picks up a handkerchief, turns around, and pretends to blow her nose. He is still staring. Instead she shuts her eyes, pulls back her hair, and gently dabs her face with the cloth. She stiffens, smiles, and turns again, facing forward, staring at the barren wall besides the window. Avoid his gaze – his preying eyes. That’s what she must do. What does he think when he’s staring? What could there be to think? It’s Conrad. Conrad. He’s thinking about Conrad. Has he ever considered what this has done to her? Even once? She gets up, avoiding Calvin. She walks into the kitchen, and rinses the dirty dishes. Calvin is walking upstairs; she can hear his heavy, sluggish footsteps. A door creaks; he must be checking on Conrad. He always checks on Con. Anyway, Calvin’s gone now. Good. But why did Conrad hug her? The preliminary rinse is done; she puts each dish in its proper place in the washer, pushes back the handle, and makes her way up. Conrad’s door is ajar. She passes by it, stopping at the bathroom to change clothes. Calvin is already asleep. She gets into bed, lying as far from him as possible. She’s flat on her back, head tilted toward the lamp, positioned center on the bedside table. The lights are off and she quickly falls asleep.

Sunlight streams in. Calvin makes his way to the bathroom. “Where is Conrad?”

“How should I know?” She’s staring into the mirror above the sink, adjusting her hair. First thing he asks. No good morning. Instead, “Where is Conrad?” She heads downstairs.

“Does it bother you at all? His school doesn’t start for another two hours. Where could he be? Do you even care?” Cal follows her to the kitchen. Does she even care? How dare he.

“Cal, I wish you’d get over it. He’s not your baby anymore.” She flips on the light switch next to the washer. The dishes are clean now. Worrying. It’s the thing he does best. Always worrying. Always creating problems. Always blaming, making guilty. It’s as if he believes it’s all her fault. But is she guilty? No, of course not. She hasn’t done anything wrong. She moves away, towards the table.

“Did you even notice this?” Cal points at a note left under the switch.

“Leaving early… school…. work on project with Lazenby.” He has signed his name below in cursive, Love Con.

“No,” she replies. So what if she didn’t notice it?

He sighs. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m fine.” Is she okay? Is SHE okay? She can handle herself. No, she doesn’t need help, especially not his. He never helps. Just finds fault, makes every situation worse. Even a pleasant evening with Ward and Audrey, ruined – a fight, argument, about Conrad. He always brings Con up. Does HE need help? No doubt. His whole life revolves around Conrad. He tries to control Con – always wondering if he’s okay, wondering where he is at every moment. Tries to control everyone, always sharing his philosophy, expecting others to follow. Always sharing with her the nasty things Conrad says. Why does he take that? He accepts it. Why doesn’t he accept her? It’s always her fault. Never his. False sympathy, that’s what it is. And he asks if SHE’s okay.

“I’m sorry. Hey, are you playing tennis today?” He takes an egg, and cracks it over the pan.

“Yes, I’m going to the club. Need to prepare for the big event.” She sits down at the table. So why did Conrad hug her? Cal thinks too much, worries too much about him. She’s won’t fall victim to that – over-thinking and over-worrying. It’s simple. Conrad is okay. “I need a break.”

“Where should we go?”

“I don’t know. I need to go by myself.” How could she not know? She always knows. Always knows exactly what’s she’s doing – down to a precise hour, minute. So, why doesn’t she know this time? She just needs to get away, get away from everything. No, get away from him, from Cal.

“Okay, how about we see Berger first? I’ll make an appointment with him right now. We can meet him when you’re back from the club. I’ll tell Ray I need some time off. He’ll understand.”

“Cal, I don’t need help. You do.” There she said it. Finally. It’s him who needs help, not her, not Conrad. Just him. He’s the one who wants to go see Berger, not her; so he should go see him.

Cal sighs. “Fine.” Is that all he has to say? Fine?

“I’m going to pack tonight. I’m leaving in the morning.”

I’m sure a lot of people have had this feeling, but I often wonder why I do things… when 90% of what you do fails, why try?  When I’m in the shower thinking about this, I think about my goals – what I eventually, some day, in the distant future want to do with my life.  Someday I want to start a really big software company, live in Manhattan in a two-story apartment, and eat sushi everyday. But it’s like reaching for a star; these goals seem so distant at the moment, that they provide only brief relief.  And so instead, after that shower, I think in more grounded terms, and come up with a short-term objective that’s still quite unreal but at least POSSIBLE given my current circumstance… and then when I realize that the short-term goal is unattainable, the cycle is reborn – I look at the big picture, and when this proves evanescent, I envision some large, but short-term, thing that I really really want to accomplish (that short-term objective).  But the worst period is the time in-between realizing I can’t accomplish my short term goal, and picking a new one. That in-between period usually lasts a month or two, and it really sucks.  So, that’s the period I’m in right now.

After a brief re-read I realize that the whole last paragraph sounds way too sane, professional, and “together” – it’s merely a casual struggle to keep up motivation, or so it reads.  But such a take would be a superficial description of the true problem.  If I had embroidered it [the last paragraph] with story and anecdote, the true extent of the struggle and emotion would be apparent, but since this post is “Sans Anonymity” I can’t bare to share the gory details. So instead I’ll simply state (tell and not show) – that the matter above is one of a complex struggle for much more than motivation. Further, I’d rather not assess my state from a polished, indifferent manner, even though this is how it appears. This [the last paragraph] affects my life a lot.

That’s the problem with  ”Sans Anonymity”.

School Schedule – 11th Grade, 3rd and 4th Quarter

Six signs. It’s ‘09.

“Well done.” The curtain starts to close. Welcome to ‘09! ; ) Now, the director shuffles through the closing curtains, and walks onto stage. “Winks are hot now,” he says. He proceeds to wink, bow, and then exit just as the right half of the curtain meets the left.

1. Use a To-Do list. Honestly, I have to do this or else I’m gonna die of sleep-deprivation and insomnia. It’s 11PM. I have an essay due tomorrow. Most sensible people would grab a Red Bull, waffle or two, and get cracking. Instead, I watch Arrested Development on Hulu and then at 2 in the morning, I grab a Steaz Organic Soda, Vermont Bread Honey Wheat English Muffin, and finally, after all that, get started. I’m up working ’till 6. And ya know what? That’s tough when this routine is an every-other-day ordeal.

2. Don’t do nothing. Anything is better than nothing. I spend about *hmmm* 15% of my life doing nothing. And by that, I mean sitting at my desk, thinking about what to do… or lying in bed ’cause I don’t know what else to do. Okay? It’s not that I don’t have anything to do. I have lots to do. In fact, I have so much to do, that I could forfeit a whole week’s sleep and still have more left to do. From now on, when I find myself sitting at my desk pondering what to do, I’m gonna do one of three things: A) Work on Depity, B) Read something (preferably for English class or see Resolution 6), C) Watch a video on Hulu (at least I’d be having fun). What I’m not going to do is stalk random people on Facebook.

3. Break up assignments into chunks. This fits in quite well with the To-Do list. Instead of keeping that Chem Packet for the Thursday before it’s due, I’ll start on Monday. I have work on Mondays, so maybe I’d do 7 questions that day if it’s a 50-question packet. But I must write exactly how many questions I’m gonna do on the To Do list or else I’m not gonna do anything.

4. Close unneeded windows/programs on my computer. This might seem silly… but it helps. Whenever I have too many things open, I end up off task. If I’m doing an essay, I should have Word open to type, and Firefox open to look up synonyms in a thesaurus (that way I can use “big words” and sound “sophisticated”). Exception: AIM, Skype, etc, etc, are okay, because without them I feel totally disconnected… but CLOSE Facebook. Facebook and Hulu are the two top reasons I’m so bad at getting things done… and my favorite scapegoats. ; )

5. Go on the elliptical once a day for 30 minutes. I better put this one on the To-Do List too, ’cause like everything else, it’s not happening otherwise. Dude, I gotta work off the bad food I’ve been eating.

6. Learn about one new thing each day. Okay, this one’s the “extra”. (EXTRA EXTRA) Everyday, I’m gonna teach myself something. It could be about a certain country, person, exotic vacation destination, or catchy pickup line(s)… anything really.

And that’s it for New Year’s Resolutions ‘09. Stay tuned for next year’s show…. Oh, and please leave a tip. The producer/director/actor would greatly appreciate it. Send an e-mail over and I’ll give you the address.

Happy, happy, happy 2009! Most importantly, remember winks are HOT in ‘09. ; )

At the same time, I had another fantastical dream – “GX Great”.  This was an imaginative company that was formulated as the result of hours spent sitting at my desk, daydreaming. One day, I decided that GX Great would eliminate death.  Exactly how that would happen was not including in my concoction. Bare in mind, though, that it was not to be done placing the Grim Repear under house arrest and serving him dinner (Family Guy). Another day, after running out of space on my own computer (I was a software junkie and would download anything and everything I found online), I decided that GX Great would solve the computer storage problem. Every GX Great computer would be equipped with unlimited storage… “unlimited” in it’s most innocent sense – as much as you’d like, to your heart’s desire, no strings attached.  GX Great would also solve world hunger, and bring peace, prosperity, and high wages to all.

It was this imagination that kept me afloat; I never slept with a teddy bear nor ever had any desire to.  And as I grew older, I left my sports elimination and GX Great plans behind. I substituted impractical dreams with ambitions more realistic, plausible, and in line with my growing sense of maturity.  I made a website, GamerzParadise.biz, and with it formed a new aspiration.  I would be an entrepreneur.  Now please understand that I’m omitting numerous intermediate steps – from GX Great and “eliminating sports”, grew a Pokemon, and later Computer club, then a goal to raise $100 for the Computer Club, along with a few other small projects along the way.  Only after all these ventures were abandon, did the website begin.

GamerzParadise.biz was started as a tutorial site for Runescape, a multiplayer online computer game.  It soon branched out to Roller Coaster Tycoon, Neopets, and other popular games of the time.  I envisioned GamerzParadise being the number one destination for Runescape, but sadly at it’s the height it was probably the 53rd.

After GamerzParadise.biz, TrackMyProfile.com was launched. It was a success – number two in it’s category.  Soon after launch, I went off to an educational camp against my will; it was a place called CTY and I was in their Saratoga Springs location.  Every night the counselors would take our cell phones, and every morning we would get them back.  This was testament to the cruelty campers had to endure.  We were also forbidden from bringing laptops, and computer time was not provided.  In addition, we had to have our lights out by 10:30. No matter how tired, no matter how much I wanted to do something else in the short gap of time between the end of class and “lights out”, I never failed to call my dad.  Ever night I’d ask him to check how many new users had joined TrackMyProfile.  I had typed up a detailed set of instructions and made sure he was thoroughly acquainted with the process before leaving home.  The number usually swelled around 7 or 8, or on occasion 9.  After returning home from camp, I continued work on my new venture.  After only 5 months in existence TrackMyProfile was racking in $300 a month.  Then two months later, the figure grew to $500. Finally, at its peak TrackMyProfile signed on 100 to 200 new users a day was earning $800 monthly.  Given that I was in middle school, this was a hefty sum.  I’d work on TrackMyProfile at every opportunity – while watching TV, at school, and when I should have been doing homework. Naturally, I was optimistic.

My dad was quite the opposite though, and when I asked my mom why he never seemed too excited about any of my success, she kindly replied “everyone’s optimistic as a child”.  She continued, “as you get older, you’ll become more like dad”.

I’m 16 now, a junior in high school. Sadly, I think my mom was right.