It seems that www.richard.com is not properly configured and doesn't resolve. The $ua->timeout() probably doesn't take account for DNS timeouts and AFAIR, doesn't have any options specifically for this.
It seems to me that you'll have to live with the long timeout or perform a lookup seperately before the actual HTTP request. I'm pretty sure that there's a DNS module on CPAN that provides more control over the DNS query than LWP does.