At some point around when I was six years old, I received a small plush toy monkey. I no longer remember who gave me the monkey or for what reason, but despite having a pretty basic approach to naming most of my other stuffed animals (there was, for example, an "Owlie", and a "Bear", and a few other some such), this particular new friend was instantly named "Japanese New-Girl Monkey".
Why, I don't know.
In May of 2000, I had moved out on my own after receiving my BS in Computer Science and began putting to commercial use all the hours I'd spent mucking around with HTML tables and viewing the source of websites I thought were interesting. I lived in a fairly remote town in western Washington, on Whidbey Island, and there wasn't a whole lot going on in my social life - which was kind of the way I liked it anyway.
Wouldn't it be cool, I thought, to set up my very own website. Not like one of those GeoCities or MySpace things. A real website where I registered my own domain name, and everything. But what domain name? I plucked the most random but still self-representative thing I could think of, and the weblog hosted at http://www.jngm.net/arjlog was shortly thereafter up and running, on a beige box PC sitting in my living room, running Debian.
The blogging experiments continued a good number of years afterwards, with new iterations, and even an additional domain. They petered out once my career got lively, and then pretty much died altogether after the birth of my twins, which was a long, dark tunnel of sleep deprivation and overwhelm from which I am only just emerging, blinking and staggering, some eleven years later.
I kept the domains the whole time, though.
And now I'm ready to play on the web again. At least until the next major life change wallops me.