Why Room362?

(This post got lost in the intertubes and it took a bit to get back, Archive.org nor Google cache had it)

I get this question all the time: “Why room362.com?” I have answered that question in a lot of ways, depending on the perceived amount of time I had to tell the story. But, on a blog you have tons of time, right? Not if you are studying the Twitter boom. Anyways, this is the semi-brief-long version that won’t bore you to death like this intro is:

It all started with a desk of multiplying pizzas…

In 29 Palms, California, there is a Marine base. I was stationed there for a couple of months during some training and one night a group of us decided to stage a LANPARTY. Easier said than done when most of the Marines in the area were only there for a short while as well and didn’t want to bring desktops or chance laptops in the sandy dessert. But we pulled it off. We had about 8-10 players at any given time and people were playing everything from Quake3, to Lightbikes 2.

And that was that, there really isn’t much excitement to be had in a dessert. However, there was one thing that the LAN party caused, an increased interest in how ‘domains’ worked in my room mate. He asked how to register a domain and I took him through the whole process, set up my dinky 1.4ghz Celeron laptop as a Windows 2003 server as a Domain Controller with Exchange 2003 installed on it (yes I know..). But he was stuck on choosing a name for the domain.

Being the impatient person that I am, I got fed up and just named it the room number that we were staying in. And so Room362.com was born. 24 hours later, Room362.com was on every single RBL list for spammers on the planet. Why? Because there was at the time a default switch that made Exchange 2003 an open relay. Learned a lot that summer. Going forward it’s just been “my domain”, my room mate sure didn’t want it since it was “totally blocked from everything”. Been here ever since. Welcome to my room.

Room362.com Logo in 2005: