I was browsing the Namecheap domain auctions when I saw this cool four character domain at a bid price of only $6! What a steal.

Looking at the Wayback Machine archives, this site used to be some kind of Japanese site. The first snapshot is on July 27th, 2004 and is just says "New Account Temporary Page".

On December 13th of the same year, there is some japanese text on the website.

When I ran some of these phrases through Google Translate I got "Erotic hike", "18 prohibited link", "Iraq War", and "Hwaseong Incident", for example. I can't make much sense of it, maybe an old forum or just a spam site.

The site contains a HTML <marquee> element, a real blast from the past.

After this there is a long period of no snapshots. On June 16th, the site appears to have redirected to phil.tv, an old wordpress blog:

This site is still up today at the same URL, although it looks quite a bit more modern:

It's a blog of Phillip Zacharias, who apparently enjoys vintage synthesizers, among other things.

I'm not sure why the domain was pointing to his blog. Namecheap said that the domain was previously registered in 2009 (12 years ago), so it's possible that Phillip had it but never used it for anything, and just had it pointing to his blog.

Anyways, I'm excited to have the domain! I might host a Matrix homeserver here at some point.