My head's going to explode

UGH. It's one of these high humidity mornings where I end up waking up with a headache. It's not one of those migraines I get every once in a blue moon, but it's here. Enough to make me want to curl up somewhere and sleep.

Unfortunately (?) or fortunately, I have a lot of work to do. And if I don't do it..... nobody will.

I'm kinda running up against a situation with another competitor "Company A". It seems in this past week, Company A is either directly or indirectly involved with one of my current clients, AND involved with a new client that is courting my work.

One client likes the work that Company A has done for them on a personal project, so would like me to make something similar to what they did. I don't have a problem with that....aside from the fact it's not really my style and the sample site my client demonstrated to me was somewhat broken. So it's kind of a weird benchmark to use.

Another client, had some work done by Company A, and because there seems to be some designer block or something, has approached me to see if I can just jump in to fine tune what's left. I don't have a problem with that either but I can understand how Company A might take affront to that.

I've been asked to do this type of thing before in the past and it's 50/50. Sometimes I have had success cooperating with other designers to make things happen, other times it can get really sticky once a designer is all pissed off that his or her design is being touched my someone else. I don't know what will happen in either of these cases. I'll have to wait and see what approach Company A might take towards my involvement.

I DID get 2 cool things happen to me yesterday. I got my laptop...which is way cool but perhaps I may have chosen a laptop that is slightly bigger in size then I need. While it's going to work well when I have a desk nearby to use, it might be a bit of a chore using that while I travel.

The 2nd thing that is cause for my personal celebration is the fact I purchased the domain name "lowestudio.com" for my business. This name had been taken by some inventor in Ohio or something and I had to wait out all these months till the domain expired before I was could get it.

It gets nastier then that. If you're ever involved in trying to get a domain name for yourself that's presently owned by someone else, it can be months of aggrivation and potentially very costly to get your business or personal domain name from them.

I found out even an expired domain name is difficult to get. There's no ruling body out there to police domain names....so if someone out there knows that you want "mybusiness.com", they could steal that domain name overnight by registering it and then turn around to offer that to you only of you purchase it from them for hundreds of dollars.

This online article explains all about it: How to snatch expiring domains.

I lucked out.... I risked everything in the attempt to try the "stealth" mode. I gambled that "lowestudio" was not something in high demand. So I didn't do any searches or "Whois" reports on the domain for months so that nobody could somehow catch that I was an interested party.

At first, on the day the domain was up for grabs again I thought I had lost the domain. The status said it was registered again to some company in Washington DC for the next year. I thought, "Crap...guess I'll have to try again next year to get the name".

Yesterday, I check again on a whim....and POOF the domain is available. You have no idea how fast I registered that name. $9.99 Whooohoo!

So now after I set everything up I can finally USE my business name in my email addresses and websites. *golf clap* Yeah I know, it's an accomplishment only I could appreciate.