Atlanta Domainers - Party at my office Thursday the 25th of this month

If you are in the Atlanta area, we are throwing a party at our office on Thursday the 25th of February and we would love for you to come. In fact, if you aren’t in the Atlanta area and want to come, you are welcome too!

The food and drinks are on us of course.

There’s no special occassion and this isn’t for any particular reason. We just want to hang out with you and show you our digs.

Please let us know if you can make it so we can build our guest list and know how much food and booze to buy.

Why I rode a bicycle from Atlanta to New Orleans

After eleven days of rain, wind, cold, chasing dogs, shady casino adventures, cheap hotels and endless hills, David and I arrived in New Orleans for Domainer Mardigras.

I’d love to tell you the trip was all fun and games but that wouldn’t be very truthful. More than anything, it was the weather that broke us. I suppose February wasn’t the best month for the journey.

However, we had to do it in February. We were doing it for The Water School, sort of. Well, we were doing it to train for the climb which is for The Water School.

TWS is a great organization that teaches Africans and Haitians how to clean their water using a solar disinfection technique.  It’s a wonderful and inexpensive solution that works and is easy to implement. A full 100% of donations goes straight to the cause.

Please sponsor my climb by donating to the school. Even if you don’t sponsor me, sponsor someone else. Just pull out your wallet and do it. It’s for a great cause. Small amounts are fine. We’ll take whatever you can afford.

Latona’s to start selling watches. Why that is good news for domainers.

As I’ve said before, my ambitions in the domain industry start and stop with the auction company, loans and T.R.A.F.F.I.C. I have no intention of setting up a parking company or doing 40 other things that could possibly make a buck.

All I want to do is sell things. In our offices we are constantly reminding ourselves to focus on the real mission. That mission is to grow and build the brokerage and auction company.

Growth, as I see it in my situation, should come by stepping laterally, rather than forward.

As an entity, we are expanding rapidly into other niche products. Our WeBuyWatches.com site is working and that means that any of you interested in a fine time-piece can get a super deal from us.

New divisions are in the pipeline. There will be much more than just watches added to the network.

This is good news for domainers because these luxury product divisions will drive more high net worth individuals to the site who will in turn, be aware of the domains.

For now, our watch sales are very low-tech. Eventually there will be a marketplace on Latona’s and watches amongst other things will be added to the main navigation.

In the meantime, we are getting started the same way we got started in domains. We’ve setup a simple newsletter for the watches that you can subscribe to at watches.latonas.com.

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. is now hiring German, Italian, French and Dutch salespeople

If you are a self-motivated individual with sales experience and a native speaker of German, Italian, French or Dutch, I’d like to make you an offer.

I’m currently looking to hire four sales people to help with the promotion of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. events. A small base and a VERY aggressive commission plan is available.

You can contact me directly if you are interested.

You just can’t make this stuff up. Our shinny new hotel was raided yesterday

So yesterday I blogged about finding this Oasis of a hotel actually called The Oasis. It’s a brand new and very comfortable resort outside the city of Montgomery.

The plan was to take a day off from cycling and work and rest our legs. I didn’t even leave my hotel room until after our auction ended around 1 pm. After that I was heading downstairs to Starbucks to get a coffee.

As soon as I came out of the elevator, David came running towards me saying, “Go pack, we have to get out of here. We are all being kicked out.” I look around and people are running in all different directions.

There’s a time to ask questions and this wasn’t it. I went up to my room, grabbed my camera and packed. I couldn’t have been up there more than ten minutes or so.

As soon as I got back down the place was a ghost town.

All but one of the doors had been chained and the turnstile was blocked with furniture.

We were told that anyone on the property was subject to arrest. I suppose David’s television interview can explain it the best.

LongIsland.com reserve lowered to $350,000

There has been a lot of interest and action on this name so I thought the seller lowering his reserve to $350,000 deserved its own blog post.

Please note that there are some stipulations at this price. If you are interested, contact us for details.

Good things can happen to good people. Lost in the woods, we found an Oasis

There’s an app for that. Right? Well, as a loyal iPhone fan I’ve been navigating mine and David’s journey to New Orleans with my smart phone. Between the map app and an app from mapmyride.com everything had been going smooth…. until today.

What I’ve been doing is using the map app and having it set to walking directions, figuring that it would show me the shortest route.

Problem number 1 - David and I were both so busy with work that we didn’t even get started today until noon. That was after getting up at 5 am to start working. We had 47 miles to go before dark.

Problem number 2 - I didn’t think about the fact that the walking directions might include dirt roads.

Problem number 3 - We decided to take the dirt road and go for it. Only, I didn’t think about the fact my phone might have no signal thus making the map app completely worthless. Duh!

Fortunately, we kept going in the right direction but we were making very slow progress.

We found ourselves with the sun setting and we were still 10 miles from a Holiday Inn Express which I had found on the net earlier that morning.

Get this. We turned the corner and low an behold, a brand new multi-million dollar resort complex aptly named The Oasis.

Absolutely shocking. Now I’m going to the restaurant to have a nice meal then get back to work.

See? Good things can happen to good people.

Sweet Home Alabama - Three days down

So David and I have now completed three days of the cycling trip from Atlanta to New Orleans for Domainer Mardigras.

Yesterday was so brutal that I’m just now getting this post up, and we still have to ride another 50 miles today to Montgomery.

Thankfully, the weather will be terrible tomorrow. That means we can sit in a hotel room and work and rest.

So far, things have gone smoothly. David had a flat on his front tire but he was able to fix it quickly.

It’s funny how the human body works. We are all capable of doing so much more than we think we can. It’s our minds that hold us back. Yesterday we had to go 47 miles on rolling hills and were convinced that we wouldn’t make it 30 miles in our shape. Yet, we rolled into the hotel an hour before sunset, albeit completely exhausted.

Oh, hat’s off to 5-hour energy drinks. I couldn’t have made it without those little bottles of joy. I’m sure they got me through the last 10 miles.

Extended Auction Closes Thursday at 1 pm EST - Financing available on nearly all names

Our extended auction closes at 1 pm EST on Thursday. That’s 19:00 central European time or 10:00 am on the west coast of the States.

Financing is available. If you need help buying a name, just ask. We’ll do whatever we can to help put the deal together.

The auction is located at www.proxibid.com/ricklatona.

You can download the entire inventory here.

Who knew that north Georgia to the coast was all uphill?

Either I’ve been riding a bike for two days or David snuck into my room last night. I feel like I’ve been sitting on the curved handle of an umbrella for a week straight.

Today while we surely lost altitude, regardless of my post title, it felt like an endless climb. Every time we went downhill, there was an relentless climb that followed. Next time someone tells me, “the rolling hills are beautiful”, they are going to get an talking to.

Somewhere along the line I realized that having headphones were a bad idea. I guess it is important to hear the sounds of the cars or your companion yelling, “look out!” So, I decided to invent my own handsfree system. As you can see in this photo, the iPhone fits nicely between my helmet and my face.

I know it sounds like I’m complaining but it really isn’t that bad. It’s hard while you are riding but only while you are riding. After all, this is credit card touring. At least I can take a shower at night, eat at a restaurant and sleep in a bed. On Kilimanjaro its freezing in a sleeping bag time.

I would type more but I have to get back to answering emails. I don’t think I’m going to be awake much longer. I just had to get up to get my remote control and it almost broke me.

You can read the first part of this series here.