Italian Fish was born one evening when I was trying to create a domain name to unify a whole conglomeration of websites I’ve accumulated over the years. They really have very little in common, but I don’t want to just delete them, and rather than paying domain fees and hosting fees for each, I wanted to centralize everything.

Most are WordPress sites, so I decided to just build one site and start moving things over, and categorize each site to its own unique category.

Now, I just needed a name.

There are a lot of names possible for a collection of random works, but I also wanted to be able to expand into the rest of my universe – I’m a computer consultant, small business mentor, a poet (sometimes), a travel consultant, a wedding officiant and other titles I’m probably forgetting.

Xriva Enterprises was one attempt, but “Xriva” is just “Kevin” Rot-13’d, so any other Kevin with a CompSci degree (or who had read the original C manual) could figure that out.

FEBBS was a good attempt, but it never really went anywhere, so it died slowly at WordPress, just a single page. (It still makes a good email address and it has grown by a page or so over the years.)

Some cynics will realize my wife’s name is Pesce, and I have pretty much been accepted by her family, which makes me an honorary Pesce.

You can’t register Pesce because it’s a popular name in Italy, so squatters have all the sites (I really wanted pesce.net, which is a fish net.) However, a Pesce is an Italian Fish, and nobody would think to claim that. Until now.

I didn’t have the issue with Gilhooly, although gilhooly.com has been taken for years – it’s just not used. I have gilhooly.org for my local family – my dream was to have email for all my disparate relatives, but none of them seemed that interested, and my close family probably thinks I would spy on them, since I’m the administrator, as if I had the time. (I do have planetgilhooly to do a family tree / map but I have to find the original Lotus Notes databases and recreate it. Same with Planet Xriva.)

I really wanted gmail because it would be shorter, but somebody claimed it. The nerve.

I would have then claimed pmail for my wife’s family, but pmail is what dogs leave around the neighborhood, so I just registered peemail.net. (It actually has customers, because it’s free. For now.)

Eventually, somebody in her family will find this site, but I figure I’m safe for a while – at least until I post something that my wife wants them to see and I have to send out a URL.