NeverWalz.com and anti-aliasing...

It has been many years since I dealt with this, but it occurred to me some folks just aren't as smart as they think they are.

It's State Fair time in Minnesota, so that's going on.  And there is always a lot of competition for booth sites for many things.  There are some booths, however, that are usually available right up to nearly opening day.  As was undoubtedly the case this year.

Some of you may have heard that there's an election coming, and we here in Minnesota are a little more invested than we had been as our governor is now campaigning to become the third man from Minnesota to serve as Vice President, following Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, both within my lifetime.  

Our State fair is pretty widely recognized as one of the biggest and best in the country.  There is no single focus area.  With all of the agriculture in this state, the Ag barns are a huge focus.  Unfortunately, due to the smaller number of farmers out there, Machinery Hill isn't what used to be.  But there are still a lot of agriculture-focused exhibits.  

 And there's the food.  In the world of fair food here, everything ends up sooner or later on a stick.  Back in the early 90s, Microsoft launched Internet Exploder and brought "Internet On A Stick" to the fair.  

There are also hundreds of exhibitors for all manner of service or product you might be interested in.  And there's the Midway, with rides and fair games.  There are a large number of stages with performing groups, along with the Grandstand show, where Blake Shelton recently did a show.

And because we're almost always heading into some election, there are booths for both local media and political candidates.  And parties.

Which is where it's just a little surprising that some disgruntled putz decided to put up a booth with signs saying "Never Walz" complaining that he'd been selected to fill an opening a bit bigger than Governor.  So they put up a booth.

However, it seems that, if you're going to market your idea to more than the 130,000 or so folks (or many more) who visit the grounds, you'd like to have a web site, wouldn't you?  Seems the folks who put their money into a NeverWalz booth were not smart enough to spend the $10 to register a domain ...  Someone else did, so when you go to NeverWalz.com, after a brief pause, you end up on the HarrisWalz campaign donation page.

I had a much worse problem, some months after warning my executive team that we needed to do this back in the day when web sites were a lot more difficult and expensive to set up.  Someone registered the .Net version of my employer's name, and I had to tell them we had issues because it was full of porn.  Fortunately, we had a good, internet-savvy attorney, who did point out the violation of copyright, which saved us a heck of a lot of money instead of buying it from them for their higher price.