Email to L
Posted by sorabji on Sep 26, 2015
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2015 16:40:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: mark thomas <*****@sorabji.com>
To: *****@gmail.com
Subject: Last Call…
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I had half a mind just now to register the domain name you said you let expire, to see if you’d notice and get at least a chuckle. I’ll not follow through with that, though it sounds like something you might have appreciated in bygone years.
I thought of it because I recently let nocabal.com go. I’ve been letting lots of domain names go because I’m out of money and don’t feel a need for most of them any more. nocabal.com was owned by a friend who died in 2006. A year or so after she was gone I noticed something odd in the access_log of the site that used to host the Scrabble server. It turned out to be this person’s Scrabble URL, which contained her password. I didn’t know how a search engine picked up that URL but curious to find out I searched for that password. The only thing that came up was the URL of a text file on her web site, which was still online thanks to her parents paying the bills.
The text document looked like something that was not supposed to be on the public Internet. It was a bunch of notes to self, with passwords, credit card numbers, random ideas… The Scrabble password was among others, and while I felt I was looking at something I should not be seeing I nevertheless noticed that she had a set of ideas for domain names. I remember none of them now except nocabal.com, an idea which one assumes makes cheeky reference to the early Internet Usenet meme that “there is no cabal”. In her memory I bought the domain, and did a few silly things with it, somewhat grandly intending to make some reference to Usenet.
Letting the domain expire reminded me of her again, of course, but in such a way that I realized I didn’t know her *that* well that I have any business keeping a torch lit in her memory.
Just thought I’d share. Haven’t heard from you in a while, which I hope means you are doing well. Chicago? Is that still the scene? I was thinking of paying a visit to see my friend Joe there but, as I said, funds are scarce these days and I know of no one in town who would have room to put up my sorry ass for a few days.
I’ve been discovering piano music of Otterino Respighi, and other relative obscurities of the piano canon. I procured a giant Windows tablet and use it as a sheet music reader, essentially putting the complete history history of Western piano music at my fingertips. Been a lot of playing time… Photo is attached, with bonus points awarded if you can name the composer and piece of music. -mt
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