beinguseless

I’ll start with the basics here and if something comes to mind to add more in the future, or if I get an interesting question that I think belongs here, then I’ll add it when the time comes.

This domain name, beinguseless.com, was registered back in January ’03 during a period that a friend and I were wallowing in the remnants the dot come bust brought. During the months prior to the New Year we were working together on some software what we hoped to be a nice chunk of change to get us going in our careers. In the end it didn’t quite work out how we intended but it was good experience on numerous levels including (no particular order) programming, project management, client management, sales, and documentation. Once we realized the project was headed down hill we began looking to established companies that needed some fresh blood.

While we looked around on the web, job fairs, and in the paper we spent some time doing various odd jobs and also spend a lot of time, in the words of Roger Waters – “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”. We found ourselves spending quite a bit of time online either browsing the web or playing a game. Since we were also in driving distance of a casino numerous trips were made there. We also needed to be frugal at the time so not much money was spent, however the tips there were always fun.

While online we began to joke around in various ways and stumbled upon the answer to (in some such phrasing) “what are you up to” with “eh, you know, just being useless”, and it became a kind of one of our running gags. While trying not to completely waste time I was testing with a different domain I own on a bsd mail server with qmail setup, just because it was there and sounded interesting. I recall very clearly how much of a pain in the ass Comcast was on blocking port 25 too and never was able to get it working correctly. At any rate, it was late one night, maybe around 11-12 when I thought of registering another domain to test with and decided on what you see now, beinguseless.com.

Its original incarnation was for testing servers on my home network but since I no longer have time to manage one this is now piggy-backed in a real server environment but still considering this something of a test domain since it is the first blog I’ve started. I can’t but to wonder where this site will go over the upcoming months.