Thu, December 9, 2004
"There's your answer, fishbulb."—1:22 PM
For those who don't know, a brief history of onebee.
In college, my buddy Andy (a frequent, and anonymous, reader of this site) taught me how to code HTML, and I started making silly little web pages. At some point, these started to have a purpose beyond just Photoshopping crazy things together and putting them on a page: I decided to have an archive of information about the films I'd made, and store things I'd written. Those things are still around, in some shape or form, starting with the very earliest: a Metamucil commercial and an evaluation of the death of Princess Diana.
The summer after my sophomore year, I worked for a wonderful but now-defunct web design firm in Florida called Millennium, TSI. They helped me secure my first domain name (up to then, everything had been hosted at my free USC student account). jameson.com wasn't available, but Ascension Island, a tiny South Atlantic nation, had just started selling .ac domains and for some reason jameson.ac seemed like a very cool idea. Not too many months later, I wised up and moved everything to ph7media.com, which was an easier URL to remember, but not by much.
It was around that time, toward the end of college, that my friend Michael Rush started besieging me with Jack Handey quotes, and the one printed at the bottom of this site's home page sparked an idea in my mind.
Unfortunately, at that time, onebee.com was not available. It was owned by a man in the UK named Martin Farmer. But he wasn't using it, so I contacted him by e-mail and asked if he might sell. He asked for an offer and I (insane with desire) offered $400 US. He said he was looking for something more like £2000. Too bad. ph7media.com would stay.
A couple of years later, the dot-com bubble had burst, and I had moved on. On rare occasions, the whim would strike me and I'd check and see if onebee.com had become available again. And one day – it had! I paid $15 for it, a considerable savings for just a couple of years spent biding my time. Too bad Mr. Farmer didn't want to negotiate. Then, in May of this year, onebee was born. (It's hard to believe it's only been seven months or so!)
Also, during the ph7media.com years, another pair of possible domain names had sparked my interest, based on the Mr. Sparkle commercial on The Simpsons. (As most readers are aware, Mr. Sparkle is a joint venture of Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern.) Neither matsumura.com nor tamaribuchi.com were available. But today – one is!
So, unable to restrain myself, I snatched up tamaribuchi.com for some possible future use. Maybe I'll come up with something brilliant, maybe I'll just let it expire in a year, but I couldn't resist the chance to secure it, just in case.
For now, it points to onebee, so if you really want to confuse your bookmarks head on over to tamaribuchi.com.
Brandon — Thu, 12/9/04 5:16pm
And what of mrsparkle.com?
(Realizes he can check himself, and does)
Hmm. Seems to be the site of a band. A band calling itself Mr. Sparkle.
Pff. tamaribuchi.com is gonna be WAY better than that.
"kotc" — Thu, 12/9/04 6:57pm
(in the spirit of those lovely commercials...) BRILLIANT!
"Mark" — Fri, 12/10/04 12:46pm
Hey, you bring up Millennium and you can't even give me a shout out? I worked there too. :P
Bee Boy — Fri, 12/10/04 2:08pm
You've always struck me as a behind the scenes guy. So I've kept my Mark shout outs subtle, mostly links to Permanently Disco (which is, I suppose, a joint-custody shout out). In this piece, I guess I thought I was aiming for brevity, but looking back – I managed to mention Andy, Mike, Jack Handey, and even some random beekeeper from Britain by name. From that perspective, it's a pretty big oversight. :P Herewith:
Mark, with his infrequent but profane outbursts, was among the best and most memorable aspects of my time at Millennium. In many ways, he's shaped the pattern of my entire life since: introducing me to dynamic web authoring (through the then-horrific Cold Fusion language) and to They Might Be Giants, who continue to be my favorite band much to the chagrin of anyone who's ridden in my car when I've got the iPod going. He also took me to the South Park movie and one of North Florida's more depressing strip clubs.
While I'm at it, thanks also to Millennium pals George Foote (my long-suffering and always even-tempered boss there) for helping me set up jameson.ac, finagling free rock climbing, and always being supportive. And to Mike Kilgallon, Millennium designer extraordinaire, for many lessons in graphic design.