Though redowl is now a proper dedicated server running in a datacenter run by iWeb (no, it has nothing to do with Apple), for several years it was the machine living in my closet, connected to the internet via a DSL connection. Running large php scripts on a slow pentium wasn’t so fun… Some of the photo gallery functions that I now use would have taken several minutes to run on that poor thing.

So… why redowl, I hear you asking? It is a long and sordid tale. Well. Somewhat.

In Spring, 1997 sometime, in the midst of a lengthy storm accompanied by an unrelated power failure (some silly people decided to dig up the road without paying attention to what was under it, and cut off power to the whole university for a weekend) a story was told. Not just any story! No, this was a Sang-hoon story. My eccentric roomate at the time regaled us that night with a tale, which built in suspense, leaving us jumping at every flash of lightning and crash of thunder, and which ended with the fateful phrase:

“It Was Red”.

No, it didn’t make any sense to us at the time either, and still doesn’t, to this very day. But the night didn’t end there! After we woke from the stupor brought on by not-quite-comprehensible stories, my friend Jen and I wandered off to play piano in the dark. This was what we always did at 3AM. Yeah.

Things look funny in the dark.

Sometimes even like owls.

A jacket tossed carelessly by the piano, from the point of view of two rather goofy and very tired people in a darkened room can miraculously take on the appearance of a nocturnal bird. And both of us were just about convinced than an owl had flown in and was listening to us miss the right notes entirely. Kinda spooky, really.

As the night wore on after this little incident, the two curiosities blended together, and became a Redowl. Nothing more to it than that really. Just a red owl. And ever since, my computer has been named Redowl. I startedwith redowl.penguinpowered.com and redowl.dyndns.org before getting a real domain at redowl.ca!