So why did I pick "No Recess" to name my website?
Grunge Music in the Early 1990s
I fell in love with grunge rock my senior year in college when I bought Nirvana's Nevermind more or less on a whim. I quickly ended up buying up albums by Mudhoney and Soundgarden as well as earlier albums from Nirvana.
In particular, I picked up a copy of Bleach.
School
Track #4 on Bleach is called "School".
Won't you believe it
It's just my luck [4 times]
No recess [3 times]
Won't you believe it It's just my luck [4 times]
No recess [3 times]
You're in high school again [8 times]
No recess [7 times]
On a personal (even childish) level, I found the lyrics amusing since I was always curious how "recess" turned into "breaks" when I got to high school.
The real appeal to the song, though, was how passionate Kurt Cobain seemed to be as he was singing it, especially the "no recess" refrains.
No Recess Software
My last semester as an undergraduate, I took a compilers course, and for some reason I felt like I really needed to "release" my compiler as part of a "software company" (where "release" really meant "hand in to my professor for a grade"). So that stinky compiler was "released" by "No Recess Software Systems".
Later on, in graduate school, I wrote a library for my students
in a Java-programming course. At the time, input into a Java
program was really difficult to handle, and my
NRTokenStream
made it just a little bit easier. Of
course, the "NR
" in that name meant "No Recess', but
for some reason I refused to tell the students that.
Fast forward a decade and I finally put a more permanent claim
on the phrase by buying the norecess.org
domain. The
main reason for buying a domain (despite whatever
rationalization I might give) is that it's just really cool
having your own domain.
Sure, I use it for my Java packages (like for my No Latte interpreter). Sure, I put up websites (like this one and The Website of Pete and Pete). But, in the end, the domain is just for the street cred.