Steinbox

Juno had turned on us again. This time it was the last straw. Juno had informed us that they would no longer allow e-mail to be downloaded by their widely distributed clients. We had used them since our days in school. They were our first regular connection to the internet, but now they had turned on us and it was clear what we had to do. Get a new e-mail provider.

I decided that I could not be held in the clutches of another ISP again. I could have switched to my road runner address, but I would lose that if I ever decided to change my broadband. I decided to do something that I had dreamed of for some time: get my own domain name for e-mailing. After a number of tries of poor names that were free and good and mediocre names that were taken I tried “steininbox.com”. It was free! But that wasn’t much of a suprise since it fell under the category of poor names. It fell in the category of poor names because it looked funny with the “inin” in the middle. Then a thought hit me. I removed the middle two letters and steinbox.com was born.

After a benevolent cousin agreed to host my domain and provide e-mail services, steinbox.com had a home address in addition to myself. I like saying I have a cousin who hosts my e-mail. It makes me sound so Mafia.

Jessica and I e-mailed blissfully for a year or so before we considered putting up a blog. Was it because we had tons of pictures of our baby? Yes. Was it because we had unique thoughts to share with the world? We think so. Was it because everyone else was doing it? Yeah, that’s pretty much the main reason.

According to my high school history teacher, the idea of getting on one’s soapbox originated because soap used to be very soft, and thus the boxes they were shipped in were very hard. When the term originated in early America, soap was common enough that if someone needed something to stand on so that everyone in the near area could see them and hear what they had to say, a soapbox wasn’t very far away.

My last name, Stein, which is of German origin, means rock. It later came to mean beer mug because they were made of clay. We probably use the German name for beer mug because nobody drinks more beer than Germans. Steins were later made out of glass, but the name still stuck. So steins are fragile today (Steins too for that matter). I imagine they must use suitable boxes for keeping them from breaking, in addition to internal packing. Let’s just assume that these boxes are suitable for standing on and yelling whatever you want at the top of your lungs. Well, in that case a stein box is pretty much the same as a blog. I’m just the only person smart enough to register the domain name.