mcgees.org

I did not intend to write this post.  I sat down to compose a post on the Richard Dawkins book I just finished reading.  As I began to compose it I had need to add a hyperlink.  This is a bit of a pain in the neck (in terms of unnecessary typing) in Notepad++, a third-party replacement for Microsoft’s Notepad.  Since mid 1995 I have used one or the other to compose web pages.  It should be trivial to add a link in a web editing program: highlight the text, hit Ctrl-something, and type in the URL, preferably having the program fill in the “http://” for you if you leave it off (only if you leave it off; it should be smart enough not to turn your FTP URLs, for instance, into “http://ftp://ftp.microsoft.com”.)

In six-plus years I have not found a program to help me compose HTML that does not infuriate me through feature creep.  I want something bare-bones, at code level, that helps me with syntactic constructs.  I can handle the semantic stuff myself.  Prompted by this I went to Download.com to see what programs were ranked well.  The program I tried to download required me to supply a name and email address that they cross-their-heart-and-hope-to-die will not use for any purpose.  Right.  So I did what I usually do: I went to Mailexpire.com, typed in my real address, and it provided me with a Mailexpire.com email alias that will expire in twelve hours.  Take a moment and try it for yourself.

One does not really want to put a valid name down, either.  One can use something off the top of the head (I find this is frequently drawn from something in my field of view, what could be called the “Mrs. Doubtfire” approach) or use a random name generator such as the excellent one at kleimo.com.  Playing with it just now, with the “obscurity factor” set to 50 and gender set to “male”, I was offered Hal Tutas, Marlin Couser, Kendrick Guderjahn, Elwood Alessandro, and Jackson Sheild.  None of these names shows up in Google, by the way.  (The obscurity factor is fun to play with.  A setting of 1 ["common"] gave Martin Haviland [shows up in Google 5 times], Gary Verret [in Google 6 times], Lawrence Easter [26 times], Charles Flint [659 times], and Luis Grimaldo [58 times].  A setting of 99 yielded Wes Fosso, Cedrick Baresi, Jeromy Easlick, Rueben Alesse, and Alonso Egidio of which, predictably, none shows up in Google.)

But we already have a string literal to work with: the part of the Mailexpire address before “@mailexpire.com”.  One could try to make a name out of this; this has the arguable advantage of convincing a human screener, at least one who does not know how Mailexpire works.  Better yet, Mailexpire should buy, for instance, npqo.com, ncqn.com, and ofpi.com and randomly assign these domains to the email addresses, which would further convince a human screener.  The domain names I chose for this example, in case you are interested, are the result of hitting the keyboard randomly to generate a four-letter string and checking to see if the domain was reserved.  It took me twelve tries before I found a total of three unreserved four-letter .com domain names.  My sample is very small, so we cannot say with any confidence that 75% of four-letter domain names are already taken (maybe it was a fluke, or maybe my finger motions, for any of a number of reasons, preferred common sequences of letters when hitting “randomly”.)  But keep in mind that there are just under half a million four-letter domain names alone.  Have people really registered three quarters of these?

But back to making a name out of a Mailexpire address.  I just generated fifteen Mailexpire aliases, as follows: aroubtfuln, cliffectat, dravarrors, enroachink, hopelonalt, mumiosinev, myrtlyauei, neiteousic, peerledgeo, synodsuuoo, taphyseleo, turbidelpi, volishelty, welkindrew, wirelloned.  The intriguing thing to me about these is that they are clearly not random strings.  They are far to English-like, embedding words, parts of words, and (which may be the same as the last one) likely combinations of letters.  It belongs to the class of what Hofstadter describes as “English-sounding nonsense”.

Some of the names split easily into a first and last name.  Some present difficult juxtapositions of consonants.  I have a way that I deal with this (this sounds like a ton of work but it all happens very quickly in one’s head.)  In descending frequency, the order of vowels in English is much as you might expect: e-a-o-i-u-y.  What I do for a difficult name is to take the first consonant juxtaposition and insert an ‘e’ in between, take the next pair and insert an ‘a’, and so on; this makes it just believable that the email address could have been formed by removing letters from a too-long name.  Sometimes once the name is split it appears much better if the “first” and “last” names are swapped.

As if I were not spending too much time on an obscure topic already, here are my results on the fifteen names above:

Anyway, it may be fun to play with.  Alternatively, you could use Mailexpire.com to generate fictitious names for characters in stories and novels, for RPG NPCs, etc.

Sun, 21 Oct 2001 02:14:04 -0500
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