This blog is driven by CommonPlace—a piece of blogging software written originally written in Ruby on Rails and then migrated to the Chicken dialect of Scheme that I decided started writing in late 2005. If you've kept up with Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, then the name CommonPlace should seem both familiar and somewhat appropriate. The theme doesn't have a title yet, but is also of my own design.

The title Semeiotike comes from John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke divides science into three parts. Physica concerns “the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation” and practica, including “that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness”. That leaves us with semeiotike, the “doctrine of signs” which provides “the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated”.

The subtitle, on the other hand, comes from a cult classic that ran on MTV in the late nineties called Sifl-n-Olly during a skit on diaries and journals.