About neverHOOD⌗

For the past few years I’ve frequently found myself DDGing for various tech topics when I’m trying to accomplish some weird task on my laptop, desktop, or (more frequently) mystery server possibly in my basement. While I happily admit that more often than not my question is answered by some random site, the reality is that there’s usually a few tweaks necessary to make the answer work for me. And the end result is that a few months later when I need to fix or repeat a process, I find myself re-tracing steps to find a site or interpret intructions at somebody’s tech site.

So my intentions here are twofold:

  • Document steps along with links to explain technical subjects which I use for (primarily) personal projects
  • Build out documentation for personal tech projects I’m working on

We’ll see just how well this goes.

A brief history of domain registration⌗

Neverhood.net was the first domain I ever registered.

This was back in the 90s when there was only 1 company to work with (at least in the US) and payment might have even included sending in a check. I believe somewhere in my files of interesting papers that lingers in my house is confirmation from Network Solutions that the domain was registered for 2 years. There really wasn’t a need, I just wanted to make sure there was a place on the Internet that was mine. And after spitballing a number of ideas during the days of limited TLDs, I settled on neverhood.net - inspired by the groundbreaking claymation game.

Using whatever mechanics were available at the time, it eventually pointed to public_html in the home directory for my user account on my college’s Unix server (more specifically Attila ran Minix). What did I use it to host? Pictures of friends, a font made from my questionable handwriting, reviews of albums published in the colleg newspaper among other flotsam and jetsam. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2003 that I made it my official (albeit personal) blog. About 3 years later I migrated the blog to THOMnottom with the intention that the neverHOOD (with my uber cool stylization) would eventually become something… different.

In the end it became nothing and I eventually lost control of it thanks to the re-registration process over at Godaddy (my registrar at the time). At some point I contacted the squatter who claimed it (insisting that they had a real reason for grabbing it) and offered all of a hundred bucks to get it back. Not surprisingly, it stayed in various domain squatters' hands for several years.

Then one day I noticed that the registration looked like it would relapse. And so I waited for the exact right time and pounced (meaning I mean made a mental note, forgot the mental note, and was then reminded about the domain a few months later after the fact). Huzzah, my bid of whatever a .net domain would go for at the time was accept and the domain was once again mine. And that brings us back to the previous section.