I am the Official Kanwei of the World

Not to brag or anything, but venerable Google ranks me as the #1 Kanwei on the Internet. So does Yahoo. And Ask.com. AND EVEN MSN.COM!

I feel a great achievement in being the #1 Kanwei. It means that anyone who knows my name (and can spell it properly, however unlikely) can instantly find me on the net. It gives me a huge ego boost. How many people can say, “Just google my name, and feel pretty lucky.” Boom.

It reminds me about how I got this domain in the first place. Back in the day, when I was a young lad, domain names were monopolized by Network Solutions, and cost $70/year. Then one day they let other companies sell domains, and prices dropped to about $8/year. That’s when I got on the bandwagon and staked my flag in the fertile ground of the Internet. Kanwei.com. However, that would only be the beginning of my cyberland adventures.

It was sophomore year of my high school career. I had put up an anagram game of the 42 presidents, as well a bunch of mindmaps that I made for Honors Chemistry class, on my website. Things were good. Then one day, I forgot to renew my domain. The next day, it was owned by Commies!

You see, my name may be unique in the Western world (I’ll give you my firstborn if you find some non-asian guy called Kanwei), but in Asia, with its near endless number of people, impossible probabilities become very possible (I am told this is now called Chinese arithmetic). In fact, a Chinese company had backordered the domain, almost as if they knew I would forget to renew. Their mind-reading machine must finally be operational. For a full year, I had to live in shame as my domain belonged to a company that made, among other things, USB cables. How embarrassing.

Never one to take defeat, I planned my revenge. I used the same tactic that they had used on me. In a year, precisely on March 5, 2004, I had the name back. Wrestled back from the clutches of the enemy. They sent me an email (in Chinese too, ha!) asking me if they could buy it from me. Yeah right. They ended up with kanwei.cn, which is what they should have used in the first place. People have to realize that Americans are better than everyone else (no longer correct as of 2009), and thus should have the privilege of being the only ones allowed to use .com’s. In a small way, I have done my part.