Varrqnuht.net

In the seven years since I started using email regularly, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in my writing. I seem to be almost unable to write anything without using emoticons (smilies, whatever you want to call them).

Like every newbie internet user I started using these when I first heard of them, because all true netizens used them. I was albe to write without them before I knew about them, obviously - but at what point did they stop being merely an affectation?

I can recall incidents in which an email I’ve sent was misinterpreted, and incidents such as these have encouraged my smiley fetish. Now whenever I write something I tend to read back through it looking for possible misinterpretations, and either rewriting the ambiguous portion or simply adding a smiley.

The problem is that it is much easier to add a smiley than to disambiguate a sentence. After taking the easy path for so long, I now find it difficult to write something that I feel is clear.

I’m not sure if my ability to write clearly has diminished, or if I’m simply more aware of ambiguities than before. I’m also not certain of whether I think emoticons in general are a bad thing. They’ve certainly been very helpful in online communication where you miss the visual and aural cues as to interpretation. Perhaps they should be adopted in all forms of written communication?

Deep down, however, I feel that my dependence on emoticons is a failing in my writing. Perhaps the only cure is to practise writing without them more often.

A friend of mine just ICQ’d me a link to an interesting website:

http://www.10k4awife.com/

This is a site put up by a guy who’s offering a US$10,000 reward
to the person who puts him in touch with the women he marries. The
site is basically just a huge personal ad - he outlines why he’s doing
it, what he’s looking for, and what he believes in.

It’s an interesting read, and it inspired me to write to him and
offer him my best wishes. Here’s the letter I sent.

Hi Rod,

As a young guy who’s getting married in six months, I thought it
was great to read your site and see how determined you are to find
the right person for you.

I’ve never believed in love at first sight, or that one fated perfect
match, but I believe I’ve been lucky enough to find a women I can
gladly spend the rest of my life with right here in my home town.
I know that not everyone is so lucky.

It’s refreshing to see that I’m not the only person who believes
that you need to work to maintain a healthy relationship. So many
people feel that if you have to work then something must be wrong;
I think that if you have something good, working will only improve
it.

My analogy - a marriage is like a house. First of all, there’s no
point buying a house you don’t like to begin with. In order to
change it you’d first have to tear it to pieces. Likewise, why
marry someone if you feel you’d have to change aspects of your
relationship? Secondly, even the best house will become rundown
if you neglect it. Even if it was perfect to begin with, there’s
no excuse for leaving it untouched. You need to work to maintain
it, and later on you may even need to build new extensions as your
needs change (children, home office, etc). So why do people feel
that a marriage can last as long as a house without any maintenance?

I think that the two main causes of divorce and failed relationships
are:

1) People don’t stop to really think about want they want out of life,
and whether they can see themselves spending the rest of their lives
with this person.

2) People don’t communicate with each other. Honesty is tremendously
important. It doesn’t matter as much if you have different interests,
but if you have different beliefs and opinions on matters that you
consider vital or are passionate about, then you have a problem. If
you don’t discover these differences until it’s too late, who can you
blame but yourself?

I wish you the best of luck in finding someone you can spend the
rest of your life with.

Yours,

John Dalton
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Well, I was so in love with my perfect domain (and Louise actually liked it too - important point) that I registered it.

This site is now accessible at http://varrqnuht.net - yay!!

Unfortunately I’m having trouble with mail to that domain at the moment. Because I have an A record for the domain itself (so I can leave the redundant www off the front of the address) I’m having trouble with mail servers that send mail to the address in the A record instead of the MX record. I wouldn’t care much about this if Hotmal wasn’t one of the places that do this, and Louise still uses hotmail for her mail.

Oh well, I’ll sort it out eventually.

I’ll write up an explanation of what the domain name means sometime soon.. I’ll need it for the new homepage anyway.

It’s a long time since I posted.

I just found my perfect domain!!

varrqnuht.net