-What's in a Name?

As of yesterday, this website can be reached at WWW. ESAO.COM! I've been waiting for 7 years to get that url and now I don't think it was really worth it.
Story at the bottom of this post....


Before "The Last Hour" had a name, the idea started as a doodle of a mother and mummified child portrait.


At the time I had been listening to the audio book of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and my sketch quickly became inspired by the atmosphere I imagined from this chilling father & son drama in the ash of post-apocalypse.

10"x14" pencil on rag paper.

No reference was needed to complete the painting. I like to leave it up to the viewer to interpret what they want from my images, but I guess I'll say for this one I imagined it's a sick girl being gently lead to the unknown(possibly death) in the comforting arms of her giant doll/reaper guardian. I decided to not have it carrying a sickle, but a bindle as if the girl's belongings may be in there for her journey.

"Last Hour" oil on wood 16"x24"


a bit closer.

In 2001 esao.com was taken so I ended up taking ".net" which was great. The Educational Safety Association of Ontario had owned it but never used it. It was April 2007 when they finally set it free, and the day it expired I went to purchase it.

The domain name went straight to an 'expired domain' auction site called Snapnames. I registered and waited for the three day auction to start later that week. No big deal. Minimum bid $60 so I bid $101 to see what would happen. There were dozens of bidders and I thought "Who are all of these people?" so I googled most of the screen names and found them to be domain reseller companies.

This is were legality becomes suspicious. Before the auction was over I started getting e-mails from domain resellers to buy the name from them(if they won it) for $2500. So my conspiracy theory is that Snapnames gives your e-mail to some domain resellers and if there's a particular interest in a domain name, then they can work together to bump up the bidding.

I won the auction with the oddly high amount of $925. Telegraphers from ages past would be rolling in their graves that a person would spend $132.14 per letter. Trying not to feel regretful that I could have bought a wii, or an xbox, or a life, I'd like to thank my new domain extension esao.com for keeping esao.net company.