1st Post!

If Porsche can have an SUV, I can have a blog!

While this is not technically the very post, it is the first official online rant by your's truly. Well, that's not entirely true either, since I rant on a regular basis on internals mailing list about wide variety of topics. But let's ignore the facts for a moment, they only tend to get in the way of things.
Anyhow, on with the introduction.
I finally decided to get of my lazy ass and design a site for myself. Rather amusing, given that I've been
directly and indirectly involved in the design of hundreds of websites in the past. For the moment only the blog is online, however I will add other tidbits in the near future.

The biggest difficulty was lack of a good (short) domain. Despite having a fairly rare name, that I tend to spell differently that some of my namesakes (Ilia vs Ilya) this had proven to be quite a challenge. All common domain extensions were taken with the expiry date no where in sight and when they did approach the said date they were promptly renewed . When I turned to country based domain extensions, to my great surprise I discovered that the vast majority of possible options were too reserved. In fact, ilia.ca is owned by some fella from Vanier (Ontario Canada) who is using an e-mail address name virtually identical to mine. For some strange reason, even though his last time does not begin with an 'A' his e-mail login is iliaa@sympatico, while mine is ilia@sympatico (HA! I got my account 1st). That said I tend to use iliaa quite frequntly since ilia often tends to be taken .

After a bit of research, I've come to a conclusion that to get ilia.[extension] I'd have to resort to using some strange country code like .cn (China) or (.tw) (Taiwan) or even stranger variants such as .co.nz. Fortunately, I remembered about the newly added .ws (WebSite) domain extension, which to my great surprise was not yet taken by some domain squatting bastard (See: http://ilia.com, http://ilia.net, http://ilia.org/) and grabbed it for myself. Which is what made the page you are looking at possible.