On September 1, 2000, I launched Ashes, an FTP site that featured downloadable recordings of Ben Harper concerts. Thousands of people used the site. What FTP address did the thousands use to connect? insete.student.umd.edu (port 21) On February 7, 2002, I purchased the domain name insete.com. In search of the Ashes Virtual FTP, what address did people remember? http://www.insete.com/ Nearly two years later, on February 2, 2004, my email address changed. I had been using GregoRaya@aol.com for a decade, but there was a different way to reach me. What was my new address? greg@insete.com

Who Is Insete?

I lived in Kinshasa, Zaire from 1989 to 1991. At the time, it was customary for Americans stationed abroad to have servants. After being recommended by a departing American, my family hired Insete to work for us. Being employed by an American was a fairly desired position for people in a nation with extraordinarily high unemployment rates. Insete cleaned the house and occasionally cooked African food. He was always so nice to me. In a 1989 letter my dad introduced Insete to his parents:

When I was young, I liked to think up different names for various purposes. Dylan, a neighbor, and I once came up with a lengthy list of band names, deriving our favorite one, Twitten, from the backwards pronunciation of "Net Wt.," which we spotted on a Kozy Shack pudding container. And so it went with Insete's name.

Some encryption software that I had written in 1996 as an eighth grader was published in a national magazine. The name of the software was Insode, a combination of encode/decode and Insete's name. For a long time I envisioned Insetco as the name of any future company I might own. Also as an eighth grader, I created a logo for the company. I even used it on a cross-stitch for my teen living course.

I had always liked Insete, and I guess by using his name I am paying homage to the man. He was similarly nice: he named one child Raymond, after my father. And he later named a daughter Annette, the name of my sister. My family was evacuated from Zaire in 1991 along with the rest of the American missions. My father visited the country several times after we left and sometimes met Insete. Jobless, he had fallen in tough times, but at a later date we learned that he was employed. I hope that he is doing well now, and maybe sometime I can tell him about how thousands of people knew his name.