FAQ

Who are we?

Just in case you wandered to this site by accident. We are Mike and Kathy Smith. We live in Frisco, TX. I grew up in Texas and Kathy grew up in Indiana. We met in the DFW metroplex and were married in September of 2000. 

How did you choose Iodid.com/Go499.com as your domain name?

When I learned that my old ISP Excite@Home was about to declare bankruptcy, I realized that I was about to lose my email address again, through no fault of my own. I decided that it was time to register a domain that I would control. With my plan to use it for family use, I looked for something with smith and family in it. Smith being a common name, none of the combinations were available except in the most obscure of top level domains.

My next thought was I wanted something short. After a little research that I learned that no combination of letters and numbers shorter than 5 characters was available and no English language words shorter than 12 or 13 characters were available.  The website of the guy who had done this research listed 5 character domains that were still available. I scanned that list looking for something that although not an actual word would still be spelled correctly by most people who I told it to. Thus I ended up with iodid. I am sure you can guess how to spell it if said, "Iodid" out loud.

Later for similarly boring reasons, I acquired the go499.com domain.

Is there a philosophy behind this web site? (Or why is the site such a jumble of seemingly unrelated information?)

The short answer is that this site is here for experimentation purposes as much as anything. While parts are designed with a specific purpose. Many of the choices are just whatever appealed to the designer (usually Mike) at the time. By the way if any of this looks familiar its because I am using a lot of the stock capabilities of Google Sites. The original used stock capabilities of MS FrontPage. I do feel like I am betraying my programming background by using these, but ended up going for the best combination of cheap and convenient. Plus I am an occasional shareholder of them.

If you want the details of how this has site has come to pass look at this boring list of activities.

Why did I get a 404 error page instead of the one I came here for?

Iodid.com has had a weblog for quite some time, at least since May of 2002. At the end of August 2003, Mike decided to redesign and restructure the site. The largest single effect of the restructuring was moving the weblog and splitting it into several different logs. Many search engines had indexed the sight before the redesign. As a result, until those search engines update their indexes, they will continue to direct visitors to missing pages. I apologize for this problem, but can say that all of the entries survived the move to the new locations. So  feel free to search the site for the entry you are looking for. With a Fall 2019 transition to sites this probably will reoccur.

Why do you use Google to search your site?

Originally, I wrote:

But with the evolution of search, I suspect in the post-2019 version of the site there either won't be embedded search or it will be google based since the site is google based.

Weblogs

If you want to read my old writing about Weblogs go to the Outdated Weblogs FAQ.