New Domain Name for the Blog

JP's wonderful blog sub-domain (and clever joke sub-domain) got me to thinking about what to do for a blog name again. Especially in the event that I ever leave blogger. For a year I tried using tau.tologo.us, but I think that was far too obscure a play on words. I gave up for a few years after that, and just stuck with the original username.blogspot.com setup.

After revisiting the possibilities again, looking at everything from rephrasing Maxwell's equations as sub-domains to using a play on Hindi words (I almost went with blog.bija.li, doing the electric thing as well as going for the esoteric seed syllable/mantra reference). Also too obscure.

After too many hours on Google Translate (trying something out, getting it translated, back-translating it; that often provides humorous – if not enlightening – results), I managed to stumble across one I really liked. Immediately, in fact: cogitat.io.

How is it that this hasn't been taken? I was dumb-founded. And delighted :-) Check out the possible translations of the Latin goodness:

• thought
• cogitation
• thinking
considering
• deliberating
• reflection
• meditation
< li>reflexion
• thought
• design
• plan
• reasoning pow er

Splitting words at the tld, we get the aptly wonderful cogitat i/o: "he thinks I/O." As a programmer who specializes in side effects (don't most of us?), I'm surrounded by I/O. I view it as software's analog to the ever-important physics (and life) concept of "cause and effect." Needless to say, I do love the tld.

With the domain all set up, I was off to Blogspot... only to find that Google doesn't let you use "naked" domains as your blog name.

sigh

So then it was back to the drawing board (Google Translate). Fortunately, after just a few minutes of playing around, technicae popped up, and I thought this might be it. technicae cogitat io can almost be translated as "meditating on technology" or "the design of technology."

But there's more: I saw that if io was typed with a capital I, it would render the translation as "John." Which has led to the ultimate, most profound, inner-most secret essence of this blog:

Technicae cogitat Io.
Videre Io currunt.
Currere, Io! Currere!

Probably not something something Cicero would have recognized, nor even something parsable in Vulgar Latin. Most of you have probably already got it, though. Regardless, here it is in naked English:

"John thinks about technology.
See John run.
Run, John! Run!"