A post to start the posts.

But first – a few words about yuraa.com. There is a story here. Not too exciting though, so hope you still have some energy to hang in through it.

yuraa.com was first created (first time registered) by me back in 2005. It was “my website”. I had no purpose for it. I had no idea what to do with it. But I wanted to put a flag into the interwebz and claim a spot.

Through the years, it has changed many roles. Mostly served as a playground for “I got a great idea”… None of them worked out or proved to be actually great (I didn’t learn anything, and I still think I have lots of great ideas!).

Even the Internet Archive didn’t want to snapshot it. And snapshots it did – show my minimal effort… It’s either an empty page. Or a debug message saying “check”.
Though in 2018, I was playing a lot with ThreeJS and added a somewhat 3D effect to the page for fun. Impressively, Wayback Machine kept it precisely as it was: https://web.archive.org/web/20181106140922/https://www.yuraa.com/

One other use for yuraa.com that I had was to host my e-mail: yuraa@yuraa.com.

This was my main e-mail. It was used EVERYWHERE (this point becomes important later…). One time, I hosted the whole mail server myself on Linode. It was a great experiment. Until I got a warning e-mail that I’ll be shut down for spam. When I checked the server, of course, some amateur misconfiguration led to mail bots finding the loophole and using the server to “stream” massive amounts of spam to lots of e-mails. But I swear – it was a GREAT IDEA to host the mail server!

Eventually, I sort of gave up. I paid for it, passively, but didn’t want to do anything with it. E-mail was still on it, and I felt like I was paying for a house on the internet streets. Shabby, broken, baren – but it’s mine, and I got to pay the “tax”.

Somewhere around 2021 (maybe a bit earlier) – fresh out of COVID, being busy moving around – I slipped… I forgot to pay for the domain name, and it got snatched. yuraa.com was not mine anymore. It got snatched by the domain hunters. An auction was placed on it. And to buy it back, they asked a starting price of ±2000 USD. I was very sad that I lost my “house on the interwebz”.

Remember that e-mail thing? Well – that’s how I realised that I lost the domain name – it became very quiet on the e-mails front:) And when I realised what happened, I kept on realising how f*cked I was.

• Can’t easily recover passwords.
• Someone else can easily start receiving my e-mail if they just setup some MX records and start gathering *@yuraa.com.
• Changing e-mail on many services required confirming it via old e-mail or contacting the support = lots of work out of nowhere.

I survived… Move everything to my backup Gmail. Convinced every support person that it was really me and accepted that some accounts were just lost for good.

yuraa.com was gone.

Fast forward to 2025. After a chat with a friend and a few beers, I came home one evening and out of curiosity, checked yuraa.com again – if it’s available to buy. It was still blocked, it was still with the domain hunters, but the price had dropped. I don’t want to disclose what it became, because I don’t want to look emotional, irresponsible and “he is not really good with money” type of a person. All you need to know is that several beers, chatting to a friend about my long lost “house on interwebz” and the price change – all mixed up into a cocktail that told me to hit the button BUY. It was also a couple of days after my birthday, hence I justified it by being a present to myself.

Lo and behold: yuraa.com is MINE AGAIN!

This time, you are not going anywhere! I’m older, I’m smarter and my ideas are GREATER now! No mail servers! I now use Fastmail (recommend!) and am furiously moving my coms back to yuraa@yuraa.com and a bunch of aliases.

I’m about to prepay it for as long as I think my body can hold my spirit on this forsaken planet.

And I’m moving my scattered thoughts to here, to this “blog”.
I realised that I’m finally ready for the blog because I came to the conclusion that I really don’t care if anyone is reading it. The readiness is the state when you do it for yourself. Many times before I tried writing for “others”. Caring for others to read, engage, comment, like… But as I got progressively disappointed in the majority of the social content platforms and especially in the absolute GARBAGE BIN = LinkedIn, I realised that I need my own space for my own thoughts.

And that’s what yuraa.com is now and will be!