Goodbye Al Mansell

Al Mansell

Al Mansell is retiring from the Utah Senate. He was president of the Senate when I was CIO. My most memorable experience of Sen. Mansell is when I was moving all domains from state.ut.us to utah.gov. Al was very upset about the move, so I went to talk to him about it.

I asked why he didn’t want to use utah.gov and he replied that .gov meant governor and he wanted to use utah.le for legislature. As techies we may laugh, but to someone outside the voodoo of DNS, that seems like a perfectly reasonable request. Why can’t he use utah.le?

I explained that in fact .gov meant government and had been in use by the Feds for a few decades. I also mentioned that the legislature was free to do whatever they wanted with their domain names, within the technical restrictions of DNS, since the CIO had no authority over the legislature. I don’t think it made him very happy even so.

Posted by windley on July 13, 2006 9:50 PM