blog.josephhall.com

I thought I'd take a moment to tell you about some of the other Joseph Halls. As it turns out, it's kind of a common name. When I was a kid, there were four Joseph Halls in the Salt Lake phone book. I don't know how many there are now, since I haven't even opened a phone book for years, but I can tell you that none of them are me (unlisted).

When I was a newish Perl hacker, I came across a book called Effective Perl Programming, by Joseph N Hall. It felt odd to have another one of me in my community, especially since the other one was published, and his co-author was the great Randal Schwartz. I ended up buying his book, mostly because I liked the reviews. The fact that I could keep a Perl book with my name on the cover at my desk was a bonus. As it turns out, it's a pretty good book. If you're into Perl and want to get better, I highly recommend it.

The next Joseph Hall that I would run into was Joseph Lorenzo Hall. You see, around the same time I found Joseph N Hall's book, I ended up buying josephhall.com, josephhall.net and josephhall.org. I did nothing with them for years, and eventually let the .net and .org expire. Not long after, I decided to check up on them to see if they were still available. The .org was not. But I couldn't help find the new owner of josephhall.org fascinating. He's yet another smarter me, with a PhD. I've been following his blog in my feed reader for a while, and yesterday's post was truly interesting to me. He's a Neil Gaiman fan too! I also know from his site and his blog that he's a computer geek and even a bit of a food geek. You should check out his blog just on principle.

That of course leaves josephhall.net. A few months ago I got a call from a man wanting to buy josephhall.com from me. I told him that it was not for sale. He told me that it was for his son, another Joseph Hall, and that it didn't look like I was even using www.josephhall.com. I told him that it was because I had that redirecting to blog.josephhall.com. He looked, and found that I was indeed actively using my site. He eventually realized that it was futile to try and buy my domain, and I wished him luck in finding another solution. As I spoke with him, I ran a whois on josephhall.net and found it avaialable. Figuring he might buy that, I checked an hour later and found that his name was indeed listed. Some weeks later, I visited the site and found out why this new Joseph Hall needed a site: he's apparently an up and coming Elvis impersonator. There's a part of me that thinks that's just awesome. So go check him out as well.