Welcome to my place on the Web. There are several ways for you to have gotten here. Most likely, you came to SaltyRain.com. But this site can also be referenced as Steve-Mount.Williston.VT.US and RustyRain.com. To protect my trademark, I also have SaltyRain.org and SaltyRain.net. This is my small collection of domain names.
Previously, from 1997 until early 2000, the site was best known by the domain name "Tatooine.com". Due to a domain name dispute with Lucasfilm Ltd., I had to unwillingly (though amicably) give up the domain to them. You can read more about that.
So, what exactly is "Tatooine"?
Well, if you're a Star Wars fan, you'd know that it is the planet where everything gets started in the first film. The following excerpt is from the "Official Star Wars Web Site":
A harsh desert world with twin suns, Tatooine is home to Jawas, Sand People, banthas, krayt dragons, dewbacks, rontos, human settlers, and the aliens, criminals, and smugglers who populate the Mos Eisley Spaceport. Located in the remote Outer Rim Territories, the Tatooine system is near a prime nexus of hyperspace shipping routes, which makes the planet easy to get to, yet of little Imperial interest. Many members of the galaxy's fringe society, such as smugglers, mercenaries, and bounty hunters use Tatooine as a base because of its distance from the watchful eyes of the Empire. Many human settlers, such as Luke Skywalker and his family, live in communities like Anchorhead and make a living as moisture farmers.
In other words, not a fun place to live. What are the origins of the word "Tatooine"? This, from a New York Times article:
Tatooine is the name of Luke's home planet, derived from the town of Tataouine in Tunisia, the country where the desert scenes in "Star Wars" were filmed.
So, one day I decided to get my own doman name. All the ones I wanted at first were based on my name: Mountain, Mount, Mounts. But they were all taken. So, knowing that my site would be hosting the Mos Eisley Spaceport BBS, I decided to hit on a Star Wars theme. It was just my luck that Tatooine was not taken yet. In fact, just three weeks after I got my domain name, someone in Germany snatched up Tatooine.net (the name appears to have been transferred to someone in Oregon, and is, it seems, a personal page with some poetry on it).
Tatooine.com is hosted by pair Networks, a web-presence provider. They are based in Pittsburgh. I searched far and wide for the best provider, and pair has been great. Consider them if you are looking for more Web than your local ISP can give you.
In August, 1997, this site was also linked to the address steve-mount.williston.vt.us. I got this domain because A) I thought it was pretty cool and B) because I think eventually all of us will have location-based computer addresses, and I thougt I'd get a leg up on my friends and neighbors. The williston.vt.us domain is administered by The ISI and is, as is Tatooine.com, hosted by pair.
In April 1998, the Constitution pages were given a domain name of their own: USConstitution.net. The pages are still hosted in my Web space, but are now accessed under the new domain name (links to the files in either /steve or /const on tatooine.com will still work, but are transferred to the new domain).
In February 1999, my wife decided she should have her own domain and site, so I created the VTTwins.com site. Vermont Twins is designed to be a resource for parents of twins and as a scrapbook site for our kids.
In December, 1999, I decided to get a few new domains. I thought of some cool ones, and since the price had come way down once Network Solutions no longer held a monopoly on .com domains, I did it. The first was SaltyRain.com, then came RustyRain.com. Like the Steve-Mount domain above, RustyRain.com is just an alias to the SaltyRain.com domain.
In January, 2000, Lucasfilm informed me that I was infringing on their trademark by using "Tatooine.com," and I had to move all of the pages, for good, over to SaltyRain.com. At the same time, I registered SaltyRain.org and SaltyRain.net and aliased them to SaltyRain.com, too.
I write all CGI on the site in C and Perl, and a teeny bit in shell. I'm starting to use PHP, a language developed just for web pages. See my Custom Programming Page for more details. Most programming and HTML coding is done directly on pair's server, using a text editor called vi, or on my PC using a text editor called UltraEdit.
If you have any questions about the site, send me some email.
Last update: 02 Feb 2000