Part of the reason I started this blog was to get into the whole web thing again. I have played with PHP and MySQL a lot, but my last website was made more than a decade ago. Back when frames were all the craze and few sites had even started chopping up tables to create layouts. Thankfully I skipped that era of web history. I have been spared the eternal misery and suffering of designing a webpage with tables or worse, having to use Frontpage or a similar program written by Satan to create pain and misery on earth.

Now we have CSS and Ajax and other items I am not familiar with. A lot of applications at my work seem like they would have a lot of potential in the Web 2.0 world surrounded by a ton of buzz words and acronyms - that may or may not mean anything.

Thus was born the desire to create this site. I wanted to learn CSS and see what all this AJAX talk was about. I also needed a place to share my projects, write about random crap, etc. Since this has been a long project I figure it should be the first project I write about here, assuming I can keep myself from being distracted by Wii e-mail hacks, running homebrew on my DS and the other little projects I have been working on.

What is in a name?

One of the hardest parts was choosing a name. I wanted one that represented both the randomness that one would expect in a blog written by me as well as some hidden meaning, somehow programming related. After struggling for a while with choosing a domain name I went to the Text to Speech engine in Windows XP. I had been working on some text to speech items and thought it would be fun to hear a robotic voice say special characters. The default text to speech engine reads symbols inconsistently. The ‘&’ symbol is read as ‘and’ rather than ampersand. Yet the ^ symbol is read as its unicode name, ‘circumflex accent’ rather than its common name, ‘caret.’

After listening to a couple symbols I wanted to see if I could type in an ampersand based escape character and get it to read the symbol it represents (i.e. copyright or registered). The first one I tossed in was & and it read it, “and amp.” As soon as I heard it I knew I had my name. It stuck. It was short, sweet and to the point. It hit three very nice spots:

1. And Amp is the escape character to create the ampersand sign in the *ML languages, a nice little geeky allusion that wouldn’t be obvious to everyone.
2. & - and – the extender, used to combine things. I tend to combine things a lot (History and Programming, History and Politics, Gaming and History, Gaming and History and Programming). Its what I do. And I tend to run on and on about a certain idea making the same point over and over again in different ways without actually saying anything new or interesting in my long run on sentences that should be split up and broken into multiple paragraphs and they talk about different ideas, but I tend to not even break up the sentence into multiple points, but I will work on that to try and provide an easier reading enviorment that people may be able to understand and comment on instead of being completely lost in my long winded ramblings.
3. Finally, perhaps the most important reason, its redundant and random. Andamp simply boils down to and. I basically named by site ‘and’ (which is lame) in a completely round about way. That conveys this site though, redundant and random. Hopefully there will also be some content which is amusing, mildly insightful, and creative as well.

As a side note any time I want to type & I actually have to type & so actually writing the name of the site like this is a bit annoying. (To type & I had to type &amp and to type &amp I had to type….).

More later, thats enough ramblings for today.