{"id":66,"date":"2009-05-07T02:31:17","date_gmt":"2009-05-07T06:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bitquill.net\/blog\/?p=66"},"modified":"2009-05-07T02:31:17","modified_gmt":"2009-05-07T06:31:17","slug":"my-godfather-is-a-markov-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/my-godfather-is-a-markov-model\/","title":{"rendered":"My godfather is a Markov model"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before the memory is completely lost in the dust of time, I’d like to document how I ended up with this domain name. It all started last summer, when I decided to start a personal site. Of course, both my first and last names were already taken, even in TLDs I’d never heard of before. \u00c2\u00a0But using my name would have been too<\/em> easy anyway. \u00c2\u00a0Challenge is good.<\/p>\n

Politically-correct and totally un-sarcastic as I am, I originally wanted to go with some combination of “principled anarchy”. \u00c2\u00a0Now, that<\/em> was available! Apparently, nobody wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole, not even cybersquatters; which kind of gave me a hint. \u00c2\u00a0Wouldn’t want to, say, end up in a three-letter-agency watchlist, at least not while in the US on H1B. \u00c2\u00a0They might not share my sense of humor.<\/p>\n

So, armed with online thesauri, dictionaries, the\u00c2\u00a0internet anagram server<\/a>, and things like that, I set out on a name quest. \u00c2\u00a0I don’t remember anymore what I tried; “coredump” (which, in case you didn’t know, has “code rump” as an anagram\u00e2\u20ac\u201dstill available, if you’re interested), “segfault”, “brainfart”, “farout”, and pretty much anything else I could think of: all taken. \u00c2\u00a0 Even\u00c2\u00a0these names<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0as well as these<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0are taken (thank god!).<\/p>\n

At some point I was na\u00c3\u00afve enough to hope that a Tolkien name would be free. \u00c2\u00a0No luck of course, anything semi-pronnounceable was taken. \u00c2\u00a0You’d have to go as far as, say, \u00c2\u00a0“gulduin” (which, by the way, means “magic river” in Elvish) to find something available. Good luck getting people to remember that<\/em>! \u00c2\u00a0Oh well, at least I had a reason to actually read some of the Silmarillion; if you’ve tried this and you’re not a religiously devoted Tolkien fan, you know what I’m talking about.<\/p>\n

After the first week of searching, I think I even got temporarily banned from Yahoo! whois search. In desperation, I finally turned to one of many domain name generators. \u00c2\u00a0I asked omniscient Google to give me one and, as always,\u00c2\u00a0it obliged<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0By now I had decided that I wanted a name as free of any connotations as possible (say, like Google or Slashdot, not like Facebook or YouTube). \u00c2\u00a0I went through things like “fractors”, “naphead”, “magnarchy”, “aniarchy”, “mallock”, “hexndex”, “squilt”, “terable”, and so on.\u00c2\u00a0It’s amazing how several weeks of searching in frustration temper one’s standards of quality.\u00c2\u00a0Anyway, one day “bitquill” popped up: neutral, inoffensive, bland, unusual, and a composite which is short and almost pronnounceable! \u00c2\u00a0I couldn’t ask for much more, so I registered it. \u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

That, and “clusterhack”. \u00c2\u00a0Sorry. \u00c2\u00a0I couldn’t resist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before the memory is completely lost in the dust of time, I’d like to document how I ended up with this domain name. It all started last summer, when I decided to start a personal site. Of course, both my first and last names were already taken, even in TLDs I’d never heard of before. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[52,4],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifebits","tag-life-bits","tag-web"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7x9xm-14","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100,"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}