Domain Names is an anagram of...

"Do me ma, sanni" which is Norf London for "Fuck my mother".

And that's what I said on Monday morning when I found the email from domain name company 1&1.

All the internet domains ending in .eu went up for registration on Friday and I bought nowplaying.eu; gameguru.eu; and justonemorego.eu. At least that's what I thought I'd done.

Those twonks at 1&1 accepted my order, took my credit card details and I went off all happy. I picked a few names because one of them was going to be used for the game blog I'm going to write on Vnunet and I wanted a choice before we settled on one.

So the email on Sunday (which I didn't pick up until Monday because of poker commitments) telling me "Your domain(s) nowplaying.eu etc. could not be registered" was a kick in the swingers.

I had been blasé about looking into any more domains, thinking those ones were in the bag. And while I'd been sitting on my hands everyone else had been piling in on the .eu landrush.

The consequences were that I had to come up with some alternatives pretty quickly on Monday morning - one of the busiest times on a newsdesk that doesn't employ weekend staff. That wasn't helped by the fact our news editor's daughter had wandered into the plague pit again and picked up chicken pox, so he was out of action.

However, I still made time to fire off an inquisitive email to 1&1 asking what the problem had been. The company's email had been extremely vague about why I hadn't got my domains.

"Sorry, but this is a bit vague?

'Regrettably, the domains you have requested were not
available or could not be registered due to policies
of the specific registration authority (NIC)'

Which is it? Were they already pre-registered? Or have
I broken some NIC policy? I need to know if I'm going
to try and register some other domains instead.

Since you've taken two days to let me know (two days
when everyone else has been buying up popular
addresses, I might add), can you get back to me ASAP.
That's if you'd still like my business.

Also, I just wanted to clarify. There's no charge at
all for the above aborted domain registrations?

Thanks,
Matt Chapman"

I got the standard automated response back immediately, followed by, well, nothing.

1&1's expectations to answer my email "within the next 12 to 24 working hours" were wide of the mark. That's just one more sign of its sterling service and another big "Phew!" that I didn't manage to use them in the end.

Clowns to the left of me, Joker to the right

In the end I went with Joker.com.

Joker has an annoying site, with poor navigation and the occasional business-focused mentleness like demanding a fax number (do even proper businesses bother with faxes these days?).

But it checked the name and sent me confirmation that it was registered within the hour. And that's all I really wanted.