As you may have noticed, I now have a domain name, nathanoliver.net. My website will stay at this address forever, or at least as long as I continue paying for the name. I got it for only $8/ yr, so barring any price increases, my address will never change.

I mentioned the economics of the name on my home page, but I’ll go throught them here. If I were to give you the actual URL of my site (olvr86.freeserverhost.com), you would be able to see my site, but if I ever moved it, or if the host closed down or went out of business, that link, and any bookmarks you might have had will just stop working.

On the other hand, there are free redirect services availible, (like my uni.cc address). They can be re-directed to new websites, and actually, my old address now points to my new website. The problem with this is that either the address makes all pages of my website look like they have the same address, which means that bookmarks all end up pointing to the homepage, or the re-direct sends you to the site(like I had it set up), and then shows you the real URL, returning us to the situation described above. So I got a domain name. All problems solved, adn I feel cool. 🙂

In other news, the man auction was last Thursday. I started writing a letter to the high school staff, and the first thing I thought about was the auction, this is what I wrote:

The Man Auction is Villa’s fundraiser for charity. Each dorm holds one fundraiser for a charity. This year, we were supporting a school of 150, grades 1-12, in Bangladesh. The cost to run the school, house the students (travel is not practical, so they board), and pay all the staff is $9600 for the year. Our goal was to raise enough money to support the school for next year.
For the auction, there were twelve groups, each performing a skit of some sort. Two had live music, one was a narrated slide show, and the rest were skits, dances, or something in between. Each group has also put together a date, which is then bid on. The dates varied in quality, from a home cooked meal and a movie at one end, to a private plane ride to the beach, a sunset stroll, and a starlight tour, by air, of Portland at the other end. Then the bidding begins. Groups of girls bid on the groups, which can accommodate a certain number of dates. Groups ranged from 3-8 in size.

An anonymous donor had stepped forward with a pledge to match, dollar for dollar, anything we raised. That meant that we needed to raise $4800. The first few acts did not bid so well, and it was looking as though we were not going to reach the goal. By the intermission, we were well off track. However, things were about to improve. Several of the acts in the second half received high bids. The single highest bid was on a group that called itself the “Men in Black”
The group consisted of three priests, one of whom is Italian, and one of whom was formerly a professional chef. They will prepare a 6 course dinner, with (live) Italian singing. The dinner is to be given in the house of the University President, in the formal dining room. Needless to say, this date was open to bidders of both genders. They had two groups interested, and ended up at the end offering two dates, one to each group. The final bid was $1000, meaning a cash total of $2000 raised, or $4000 with matching. Other groups also did well, the final group (which included my roommate) fetching $900+. By the end we had raised $8800, for a total with matching, of $17600. No word yet on what will be done with the extra funds.

Last year, they broke all records by raising a bit over $7000.

I’m going to bed.

–Nathan