Two main reasons: I want to write more, and I want a place to put longer notes to myself. When I was finishing school – after many, many years – I remember how good I felt about my writing. At that point, I had just finished writing a dissertation, and I was in the habit of reading and writing all day, nearly every day. Flash forward, and I don’t write nearly so often, and I think it shows. My writing feels flabby and repetitive and bland. I would like to fix that. Also, I like having a place where I can ramble, post up observations or simply drop notes to my future self (“Here’s how I figured out how to use remote branches in Git”). Hence, this site.
Vim + nanoc + Git + Github + various Macs = this site. FontSquirrel provides the fonts. The source of the site is available at Github, if you’re curious: http://github.com/telemachus/ithaca. Geekisp does the hosting.
My name is Peter Aronoff, and online I tend to go by Telemachus (hence the name of this site – partly). If you have something you must say to me, you can reach me at telemachus /at/ arpinum /dot/ org. It shouldn’t really matter, but if you’re curious, I’m a teacher and amateur hacker in New York City. In addition to the occasional post here, I’m online regularly or semi-regularly in some other places. I used to visit Debian User Forums and LinuxQuestions regularly. I sometimes post questions or answers on StackOverflow and SuperUser, and I sometimes post comments on Hacker News. I keep many, many bookmarks on Pinboard, and you can often find me blathering as @telemachus on Twitter. For more geek fun, I’ve signed up for coderwall. Wherever I hang out regularly, my name will be some variation of Telemachus, but of course not every online Telemachus is me. Consider yourself warned.
There’s a longer story here, but in a nutshell I’m a geek for ancient Greek and Roman literature. Arpinum (modern Arpino), about 60 miles south of Rome, is where Marcus Tullius Cicero was born. Ithaca is the home of Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, as well as his son (and my namesake) Telemachus. A few years ago when my wife and I were trying to pick a domain name to buy, we went through various Greco-Roman options, and arpinum.org was the first available choice. Ithaca made sense as a name for this space: the home of Telemachus.