Reason to renew your domain name number 241: If you don't, then your domain stops working.

You can imagine our suprise when one day we look at Anytini.com and see a cybersquater website instead. Lots of horrible thoughts run through my head. I consider madly logging into the server to make sure it wasn't hacked. I consider dealing with some fradulent DNS transfer. I read about dealing with those, and it sounds like a pain. The whois output still listed Nick as the owner, but it didn't list our NS servers. After a bit of puzzlement, I noticed that the domain had expired two days earlier.

This isn't the only domain I own with this registrar, and on all the other domains, I get a reminder email when its time to renew. This time, I didn't. This isn't too suprising, because its actually Nick who owns the domain and his email address is listed as the contact. What is suprising is that he didn't get an email either.

Fortunatly we were able to re-register the domain and have everything working again in a couple of hours. Some more investigation revealed that Nick indeed did get the renewal email, but it was marked as spam.

I just about read a neat bar trick over at You Look Like I Need a Drink.

Scenario: You are at a bar, and because there is a lack of coasters, your cold frothy beverage is placed on a napkin

The inherent problem with this oft used coaster replacement is that as the condensation forms on the outside of your glass, it eventually follows the laws of gravity and inevitably, the napkin ends up stuck to the bottom of your glass as you are toasting to your friends.

I won't spoil the solution... head on over to http://chalkline.blogspot.com/2006/12/salty-napkin-trick.html!

Disclaimer: I haven't had a chance to try this yet... your milage may vary.

Metacafe has a great video demonstrating how conical glasses can look mostly full, even if they're not.



Conical Glass Fraud - video powered by Metacafe

Some All Hallow's Eve recipes for your Halloween weekend.

First, take your traditional "bobbing for apples" game, add some vodka and an I'm feeling sober button... and you get Bobbin' For Apples Punch!

Next, get frighteningly drunk * from the spooky Jagermonster. A nice formal drink, served in a beer mug.

Now, howl at the moon with the scarily blue Moontini.

Lastly, when you're feeling dead from a night of hijinks, revive yourself with the Corpse Reviver.

*please consume responsibly

We've been working on and off on Anytini.com for nearly a year now. It's been mostly working on our day jobs lately, but we want to change that.

We have some neat features in the pipeline, but we'd like to find out what you, our users, would like to see.

So, if you have any great features, let us know!

The last Rails upgrade knocked out Typo. But we can't upgrade Typo without upgrading Ruby, which I didn't want to do to anytini.com. For whatever reason, we weren't able to get a working second installation of Ruby from which to run typo, so now its just Serendipity, which seems pretty usable so far. Importing the old posts from Typo wasn't too hard, and now we have blog (and using much less memory on the server than Typo ever could!)

I'd like to take a moment to highlight three drinks from Anytini.

The Good

One of my favorites, The Manhattan. A bit of burbon, vermouth, and a dash of bitters makes for a wonderfully strong yet smooth drink.

The Bad

A recent addition to Anytini, the Tunatini is horrendous, but could certainly be worse. The comment by Ryan says it all…

The Ugly

Our third drink is aptly named Ugly. Some beer, some tomato juice and a guttural scream of ”UGLY!!” awaits you with this crazy recipe.

If you have an idea for an Anytini Drink Highlight posting, please send us feedback.

Thanks to some great design work by Tom, and some tweaking by myself, we have a new site design! Personally, I think it’s much better.

If you’d like to comment on the new design (or anything else for that matter), send us feedback.

Last night, we hit 100 drinks!

Thanks to Ryan, and myself, we have over 100 drink recipes in Anytini!

At least once we let the world know we exist, there will be more than a couple of recipes available.

Thanks to everyone who has entered recipes thus far.

I’m feeling sober!

Feeling sober? Now you can fix that problem! Simply navigate over to http://anytini.com/recipe/random/, and get yourself a random drink!

We've gone live! With lots of work, and lots of traffic on over the ssh tunnel We're emailing our friends about the site, and hoping it doesn't become popular faster than we can keep the server from emitting smoke. Early testing shows the server can take some heat, but that there are way too many unique files that need to be loaded. Furthermore, its past my bedtime.