Ah, it must be a new year, and a time for a new beginning.

The story is somewhat long how I got here, but I will shorten it up to begin with. In 1993 I got a Mastiff puppy. I wasn’t sure what to name him, but knowing he was going to be a BIG boy, it had to be memorable. Then one morning he did a huge alley-oop off the back steps, and I thought “Astro” from The Jetsons. The name fit, and it stuck.

Naturally, I went on a binge, collecting Astro memorabilia, and still have a fairly impressive collection. (I also have a lot of Simpsons kitsch as well)

In 1998 or so, I was getting into the internet, and as part of my ISDN package from Best Communications, came the perk of a custom domain name to use for my email. Wanting something unique, I thought to name it after my dog. Of course “Astro” was taken, but a bit of Jetsons trivia was that Astro was adopted, and prior to being adopted by the family, his name was “Tralfaz.” Sensing a winner, I tried to get tralfaz.com as a domain.

Bzzt thank you for playing, that domain was already gobbled up. But Tralfaz.org wasn’t, and that became my main domain. Of course, it galled me that I couldn’t have the .com suffix. I periodically checked the registrar, and it was renewed diligently.

Of course, the squatter who held it never did anything with the domain. It was redirected to one of those lame parking pages. Shame.

Then, in 2013, I was contacted. The original owner put it up for auction. I guess he got tired of the annual maintenance fee (or perhaps the wanker died, and his estate let it expire). Regardless, it was going up for auction. As it wasn’t a premium name, it was modestly priced to bid. Of course, I wanted it, and didn’t want to get into a bidding war for it, so the auctioneer let me just buy it for a princely sum (it was in the 3 figures range).

But what to do with the new “tralfaz.com” domain?

My email has been gander@tralfaz.org forever so I really can’t just change that. Of course I did add an alias, so that email sent to the .com would also get to me.

I did setup a play area on my VPS (A Small Orange at the time), and fiddled around with some web programming. But, it is clear I am not going to write the next great web application. Then ASO went shitty on me, and I moved. I never really updated the DNS, so for the last calendar year, tralfaz.com has been idle, pointing to one of those lame parking pages.

Today, December 31, 2016, I decided to resurrect it, and put up a WordPress site around it. Trivial to do with one of my Digital Ocean droplets (the one I let Serverpilot manage), and here I am.

I said goodbye to Astro in 2003 about 2 months before he turned 10 (a great age for such a large dog), and now we have Greyhound(s) (well, one now, but when Garrett passes over the bridge, we will adopt again).