SVEOTI.NET started out as a life style blog known as selil.com. Both domains still work to get here. For a variety of reasons I decided to retire the branding of selil.com and start out with something fresh. Selil.Com has a long history. The name was first registered back in 1997. Prior to that it existed on a variety of ISP servers usually as ~selil. The website has always been about the adventures, interests, things I was reading or writing about. There was never any particular focus to the website other than what I was currently up to or writing about.
The original Selil was a boat (30′ Revel Craft) my parents bought in 1970 in Edmonds Washington. In 1996 that boat went to the bottom of Puget Sound in a horrific snowstorm that crushed the boat houses in Port Orchard Washington.
I decided when I bought a boat in March 2018 that having my user name, blog, and variety of other things including long term email address named after a boat that sank was pushing the bounds of karma with me living on my new boat.
I started using the word selil as a user name in 1986 for email communications (you were not allowed back then to use your real name). In 1991 I registered “selil” and “Goldwing” on the AOL servers as my handles. I dropped the use of “Goldwing” soon after. Since “selil” is my last name backwards, and I’m kind of backwards, it has always kind of made sense.
SVEOTI stands for sailing vessel Eoti. There is long discussions about whether we have a Sailing Yacht (SY) or Sailing Vessel (SV). Sydney and I just liked the word vessel slightly better than yacht as the latter seemed kind of pretentious. Eoti is an acronym for End Of the Internet. The URL then of www.sveoti.net (the world wide web end of the internet network) would be a pretty geeky pun. in Ionic Greek the verb eoti means the “essence of” or “be something”.
In 1989 I created a mock-up what we would call web page and put a couple of stories on it. After that there were many iterations and changes. The website has been free-form HTML, Microsoft FrontPage, Drupal, PHPNuke, and now is WordPress. The website has followed me through a divorce, marriage, four children, several jobs, multiple threads of research, and a couple of tragedies.
I’ve lost several years of postings and stories, and some aren’t put up when I look at them and figure nobody cares. If you notice a hole in the archives likely it is either because a back up was lost, I lost interest in that topic, or I simply haven’t put it up for the world this time around.
What you will find here is my continuing adventures through life. Let me be specific with what this website is not about; 1) This is not my “faculty” or “job” website; 2) This is not a cyber warfare website; 3) This is not a “anything” website. This is my BLOG, I put up what I am interested in and what I am working on. I share it with my wife and friends, students, co-workers, compatriots, comrades, and others as I see or have interest. I write about automotive, sailing gardening, politics, life, death, friends, travel, my research, and much more. No content is guaranteed and I have and will walk away from it from time to time.
On average the blog will see slightly north of 10K unique visitors a month. In the past it has seen sustained months with over 100K unique visitors. Currently the top countries reading the blog are Russia, Norway, United States, China and France.
This website has and always has been about me sharing. Writing has been a way for me to overcome my pathetic public school education. Sharing a little of my life, a little of the good stuff, a little of the bad stuff, and once in a while letting people I know drub me for the good of my sanity. You don’t have to visit. You don’t have to read or interact. Comments are turned off. I post links on various social media platforms to the blog rather than provide content free to them.
Currently the website is linked to by several universities and educational institutions. Several intelligence organizations index the website and evaluate the content. As long as you don’t copy the content and repost it as your own feel free to link to it. I reserve the right to kill content at a whim. I don’t require you to care or like me. I don’t really care if you read it. Rather than narcissism this is about trying to create a world that people want to engage willingly in evaluating ideas and telling stories. If you enjoy or find utility that is awesome.
If you like the more technical topics I hope you can withstand the less technical topics. More than anything this is my online journal of my ideas and thoughts. This is a place where I can scratch out what I think is going on and engage in one of the purest forms of scholarship possible. I’m standing in front of you in the town square willing to share without compunction and accept the criticism of my peers. So be patient with my students posting here, the vacation pictures, running or biking stories, the gardening blog, and pictures of cars and trucks. Life is more than a single thread and should be lived fully.