The Budget of Paradox

Sophia,
Technology has changed a lot in 25 years. When the internet first became popular, the coolest thing you could have is your own domain name. A domain, for example, is the “britney” in “www.britney.com”. Everything suddenly was a dot-com. If you’re curious, look up the history of nissan.com. Its ownership was the subject of an interesting and intense legal battle.

It’s easy to find some unregistered domain name that’s long and complex. The idea was to get a short, simple, memorable domain. But all the good domains were taken. And the coolest of the cool kids somehow managed to get one of their names as their domain name. I tried for a long time to get becker.com; a few friends of mine (with unusual names) own the dot-com version of their last name. Some companies paid millions to acquire the perfect domain name. For a long time, I owned threadfish.com. One year, I forgot to renew it and some Chinese company took it immediately.

When Morey was very young, I registered the domain morey.be and for a while, her e-mail address was morey@morey.be. This is back when domain names were exciting and e-mail was firmly established as the way to communicate online.

dreams and plans

Wow, it’s hard to predict the future. Little did anyone know that having a great dot-com would not only become irrelevant, but kids in the future wouldn’t even know what to do with one. Everything now is an “@” handle or a hashtag or a snapchat ID or a phone number. I had visions of Morey holding on to that e-mail address forever. Now, she doesn’t even use e-mail. And, of course, she’s not even Morey. Another dream set aside.

I have kept the domain name all these years. No point in renewing it now.

Dad
black.blue (no dot-com, it’s a dot-blue!)

Sophia,

I know I complain a lot about your mom. Sorry. It’s not my intention to blame her for everything. But there are very few people standing in the room. I blame the lawyers for most of it. But I am bumfuzzled (now THERE is a great word) why she thinks I’m some abusive asshole who only wants to terrorize his own children.

Believe it or not, there was a time when your mother and I were happy. Here we are dancing at our wedding. Did you know that our wedding had a soundtrack? We picked out a dozen songs and had CDs printed, with artwork and everything. The last song on the CD was called Love On A Real Train. Here is the music video. I picked it out. There’s a special meaning.

I’m sorry that all you have ever seen from your parents is conflict. It wasn’t always this way. And it certainly was never meant to be this way.

I’m sorry. You’ll never know how sorry I am.

Yours,
Dad

Sophia,
Over e-mail, your mom agreed to share some information with you. I don’t know what to believe anymore, but I seriously doubt she’s telling the truth. If you ever see this, I’m wondering: did she really tell you?

If you think this is all ridiculous drama, I agree. I don’t know why she can’t simply let me be your father. I guess she thinks you don’t deserve one.

Yours, always,
Dad

Sophia,
I get e-mails and updates from your school. I saw this morning that your school is letting out two hours early because of weather. I’d love to call you at home when you’re there. I hope you’re not home alone and bored. I’d love to talk to you.
Love,
Dad

Sophia,
Happy New Year. I hope 2024 is the year you and I reconnect. I hope so. Your mother wrote to me recently to say that you don’t want to talk to me at all anymore. But, of course, I can’t hear it directly from you. I guess I have to take her word on that. She also said that you got the birthday present that I sent. But I’m not sure I believe her.

Have you ever written any software? Total change of subject, I know. Does your high school require any technology classes? Do they even teach programming anymore? Just curious. Your dad is a software engineer. But you already knew that, right? When I was in high school, I took classes in Pascal and COBOL. Pascal was good for teaching procedural programming. It’s static, strong and safe (I’ll explain what that means if you really want to know). But COBOL was already ancient when I learned it. It’s way beyond ancient now. But you’d be shocked to know how much of the world still runs on COBOL.

I’m working on a big project now. That’s why I was thinking about it. The code I’m writing now has lots of math. In fact, I was researching some math stuff and came across the word heteroskedasticity today. No kidding. It’s when a function’s standard deviation grows without bound instead of settling down. Anyway… I learned some fancy new word today.

What did you do for New Year’s Eve? I did nothing. Stayed inside.

I hope to talk to you soon,
Love, Dad