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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

Back in the late 90's before it was Verisign (I can't recall the name), my domain registration could only be changed with an email from my domain. Of course I didn't have my domain up since I switched ISP and had to move my DNS and mail server. Catch 22; what a cluster fuck. Weeks of phone calls with no resolutions.

I was going to Virginia anyway, so I physically showed up at Verisign (I wanted to bring a baseball bat), and explained it to the lady at the front desk. She came back with an engineer who fixed it in 5 minutes.

As a side note, had to do something similar with Garmin. They kept sending me GPS units with horizontal LCD polarization, when vertical is the standard for sun glasses. Showed up and told the clerk to put on my sunglasses and turn her head sideways to her LCD monitor. "Oh yeah, I see". She fetched an engineer, and 1 week later had a GPS with correct polarization.

Sometimes it takes a physical presence; baseball bat optional.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/

Exactly. One of my favorite movies.

With that advertisement for Spider Man, that's the last time I ever click an IMDB link.

I'm so happy for OLED phones so I can use GPS in either orientation without severe distortion/dimming.

> before it was Verisign (I can't recall the name)

NetworkSolutions.com

> so I physically showed up at Verisign (I wanted to bring a baseball bat)

Did you think to write a simple postal letter to them (say a VP or the CEO) rather than get angry enough to show up with a bat? Or send Fedex? Sure you shouldn't have to do that but from a practical angle it may have paid to do that.

Did I say I showed up with a bat? Yes, I did send mail.

Can you explain the LCD thing a bit more? I've not seen a physical separate GPS unit before.

If you hold up two polarized sheets and rotate them, they'll get progressively darker until no light passes through when they are perpendicularly aligned. YouTube should have some videos, it was a pretty entertaining physics lab experiment.

Also more generally, once upon a time a GPS (Formally GPS Receiver) was a device the size of say, a multimeter, with a big battery pack, a simple monochrome unlit LCD panel display, and a radio (later, more expensive units had several radios). The device is doing fancy mathematics, and just receiving GPS signals, even the metadata about where to look for GPS satellites in the sky is available, very slowly, over GPS. It has no other source of data.

So you'd buy one or turn it on after uncrating it in a foreign country, and it'd literally spend ten or fifteen minutes calibrating, figuring out what the time is, what satellites are on what frequencies and which are above the horizon before it could at last discern your position. This was amazing if you genuinely didn't know where you were e.g. "Hmm, a desert". But you'd never have used one to go shopping - it took far too long.

Today your phone has a GPS with lots of radios (so it can listen to every satellite at the same time) it always knows the rough time,and it uses the Internet to get public shared data rather than wait to receive it slowly from GPS.

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