Dec 31, 2004 2:27 pm
New Things
So in about 12 hours a new year starts, and I’ve got a new site and a new weblog to go with it. As the new weblog starts, there are some questions to be answered:
- What happened to the old site? Old site go bye-bye. My old host, bloghosts.com, went under because of what looks like a malicious hacker, and attempting to gain ownership of my old domain name (glossopoesis.org) I somehow lost the whole thing. Despite my best attempts, I was able to regain neither the domain name nor the contents of the old site, leaving me with pretty much nothing. So I have to start over. Ironically, I have on my hard drive a backup from the pre-bloghosts blog, which I’ll put up here again at some point, but the better stuff from the year at bloghosts is all gone, including all of my Romania stuff. Alas.
- Why the new domain name? I’ve been using the moniker jaspax for my e-mail addresses and screennames since 1996, when I got my very first e-mail address: jaspax@aol.com. (Don’t bother mailing to that address, since it’s long dead. Unless you’re a spambot, in which case I welcome the opportunity to pollute your address lists.) Since then I’ve been jaspax at yahoo.com, u.washington.edu, glossopoesis.org, and the current address at gmail.com. After nearly a decade of using the same name in e-mail addresses, it was the obvious choice for a new domain. Plus, the old one was obscure and too long. Jaspax at least is shorter. It has absolutely no meaning, aside from a vague play on my initials (JSB).
- Why the blog name? Hapax legomena is Greek, and it means “Things said once.” It is a technical term referring to words that occur only once in the corpus of a classical language or a certain author. As a blog title it means roughly “pretentious geek shows off Greek knowledge.” There seems to be another Hapax Legomenon on the net I’ve found on the internet, and it has something to do with porn. Since my site is almost never about porn, I think I’ll avoid confusing readerships too much.
Hope to see you all soon.