A Brief History of Random

Probably much to your surprise, the origins of “pickmy” have nothing to do with a picking-your-nose gag.

The year was 2002. I had finally gotten one of those nifty “broadband” connections whose main appeal was no longer tying up the phone line. “The internet is just there, man. It’s always…just there.” For the previous six years I was on dial-up; connecting to the internet was a process. The anticipation of waiting for the modem to dial, to do the handshake, and to initialize the connection; brought the same feeling of magic to the internet that some people get out of having to get up and flip an LP.

It would be a couple of years before I started getting nostalgic; but for the time being, having it always available was mind-blowing. But it also meant that I no longer had to find places to host a website; the particular TOS I had for my DSL provider made no mentions of server prohibition. You weren’t getting a static IP and too bad; but they totally didn’t care if you ran a personal server off your DSL connection.

So that’s what I did; I set up my first home-server in late 2001 and began self-hosting. Back then, Blogger was all the rage. I could take whatever piece of shit website I designed in a cheap editor, add the Blogger tags in the right places, upload the code to Blogger, and I didn’t have to manually edit the page anymore to add content.

Of course back then my blog served no real purpose. It was just random stuff I felt like writing…a pre-cursor to social media in some aspects. It was part journal, part..whatever. I really had no desire to classify it. Back then websites almost didn’t need a point to exist. Did anyone ever make a Geocities or Tripod site for serious usage? I mean…I have encountered that; but most of us made stupid bullshit. The difference now is I was treating it more like journal. In fact, look at this shit from 2002. I cringe. But….this is what would very briefly become what would cause me to first obtain pickmy.org a few months later. Also…holy shit. I still have dewdude.ath.cx. You can’t even get ath.cx hostnames from Dyn anymore. All it hosts is an embedded Youtube video to an orchestral version of Baby Got Back. I’m serious. It’ great. Watch it.

How Is That Not A Reference To Picking Your Nose?

Though I can’t remember the day, or the exact time; I can clearly remember where I was the moment I came up with pickmy.org. I’d decided now that I was self-hosting I wanted to get a real domain name; I just didn’t know what. I wanted something completely non-sensical/silly; similar to “jibbajabba.net” that some friends had. (I doubt they still own it.) But I was drawing a blank; I did know that since .org was no longer restricted..I wanted one because it sounded cooler. So I was making my way from my basement to the first floor, for reasons I can’t remember, thinking that I’d take suggestions from readers and let them vote. I was on about the second step from the basement landing when I thought “I’ll call it ‘Help me pick my .org”

Wait. Help…me…..pick…my….dot….org. That sounds gross and possibly sexual. Pickmy.org. I liked it. I don’t know why…but I liked it; and it sounded sexier as pickmy.org than pickmy.com or pickmy.net.

And thus it was born…for a very short period of time. Yeah; I due to the idiocy of my age; kept having problems keeping it renewed. Sometimes it was due to things like not currently having an online payment option; or just not having the money at the time. It lapsed sometime in 2003.

In 2009, I got curious as to if it’d gotten swiped up like so many other domains. But, it wasn’t; so I snatched it up again. I literally did nothing with it other than serve as a domain for hosting random files. I think I used it for my rDNS entry to look cool; but that was it.

It would lapse, again, in 2014 when I as unemployed due to a spinal injury. But I was able to pick it up again back around 2016 or 2017. Hopefully I can keep ahold of it this time.

This third incarnation has been the longest running and more active of previous attempts. But it’s also a return to it’s roots of just being a personal blog about random shit.