What is msqr.us, anyway?
I thought I could bait you, the reader, into asking what in earth msqr.us is. Nobody took the bait, however, leaving me pondering the reasons. Perhaps you are not curious. Perhaps you are afraid to ask out of distrust: msqr.us could be a Newton server running foreign software for all you know. Perhaps you couldn't care less. All valid reasons, so here I'll attempt to dispel the myth of msqr.us, once and for all.
You can find out a lot of information about msqr.us just by looking up the domain. Now you can see that perhaps I own the domain, that's a good start.
But why msqr.us? Well, two main reasons: first the us part. I thought since the entire world outside of America uses country codes for their domain names (you know, like http://www.amazon.ca/) then I might as well use America's country code. Plus I didn't want .com since I'm not a business, I didn't want .net because I'm not a network service, I didn't want .org because I'm not a non-profit organization.
Second, the msqr part stems from my first ever email address from school, msqr[at]engin.umich.edu. We got to choose our own email address, but msqr was actually my 5th choice as my favorite names were all taken: matt, 2cool4school, mattrulz, etc. I think 2cool4school was disqualified for starting with a number, actually. Anyway, msqr came to me in a moment of desperation, and is simply shorthand for m * m, or m^2, or m-squared, or m(sqr). My isn't that geek-like!
I can tell you're getting warm and fuzzy feelings towards msqr.us now, so I'll keep going. Thinking about owning a domain is all fine and dandy, but why would I want such a thing? Delusions of grandeur and peace-on-earth aside, a few years ago I starting thinking about creating a web-based photo-sharing scrapbook kind of thing. The idea was to create an application that allowed people to share digital photographs, movies, and music without having to email 8 Billion Megazillabytes of attachments to everybody, eliciting curses and death threats from those recipients still using dial-up. It didn't matter to me that I didn't even have a digital camera at the time -- Someday, I dreamed! To create this application I would need a machine to develop and run it on, and this machine would be my stepping stone to world domination!
I thus did the most sensible thing I could: I stole a computer from work. I had a spare laptop sitting around collecting dust, so I installed Linux and was off to the races. About this time the dot-com bubble thing was beginning to burst, however, and I began to fear for my laptop's safety. After about 8 rounds of layoffs things were not looking bright, so I decided I better find a new machine to act as my World Domination server.
I thus did the most sensible thing I could: I stole a computer from my girlfriend. She has a grape iMac sitting around collecting dust, so I installed OS X and was off to more races. Things moved happily along for a while, but a couple of things started to hinder my World Domination plans. First, the iMac was just plain loud when it was on which made it difficult to concentrate on domination. Second, although she gave her best, the little iMac just wasn't up to the challenge of world domination: as my application took shape and began to actually process digital photographs, the poor little bugger was just too old and slow to keep up with me. The happy relationship we shared was ending fast, so I began to sneak around, looking up new machines on the internet. Finally the time came.
The company I work for (Proxicom) was for sale, and the current top bidder was no other than Compaq (now owned by HP). Even though Compaq was out-bid in the end, the special relationship between Proxicom and Compaq did not fade, and Proxicom was granted special discounts for purchasing Compaq computers. I did some investigation, and found that I could save a few hundred dollars off the Compaq laptops through this deal, so I severed all ties with the iMac and plunked down some change for a new X1000 laptop.
Wait a sec! Laptop? What the hell was I thinking? This was a server, which I never would actually type on, nor look at the screen! You might think World Domination had disrupted my basic skills of reason, but No! (insert all-knowing maniacal laughter here) The laptop was all part of my plan. As you recall, the noise from the iMac was driving me crazy (just a metaphor, I was completely lucid, I swear), so having a quiet machine was important to me. In addition, I firmly believed that World Domination and Environmental Protection were not mutually exclusive goals, and since computers chew through massive amounts of energy I hoped to minimize this cost via a laptop computer, which could use as much as 1/25 the energy (and that's without factoring in a monitor!).
Here, just to prove that I'm not lying, is a photo of msqr.us in all its glory (click for larger view):
Yes, my plans were all falling into place now. I kicked the iMac out, replaced her with the new laptop, installed a different Linux distribution, and settled in for the long haul. That photo-sharing application is still going and in fact anytime you see a link to //msqr.us/ma/ those are the fruits of that project. That just about brings the story up to the present, so before I end up wasting any more precious World Domination time, that's all for now.
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You're not worried about your laptop hard drive failing? Laptop hard drives are notorious for failing, as they don't receive enough cooling in most laptops...
My work laptop is already on its second drive... :( Of course, it could be because its a Dell... They're not the best quality, anymore...
I haven't been worried yet, but probably because I didn't think it about that much. Minette's hard drive died on her iBook a while back, but for the 4 laptops I've used over the years, I've never had a problem (2 of them were Dell). I've knocked on wood a few times while writing this...
You failed to consider another option for the lack of responses. Perhaps we had figured out what "msqr" meant on our own.
Laptop note: I love my new 12-inch Powerbook G4.