PolarLava is the personal web site of Kevin L. Papendick.
It doesn't hold any great meaning in and of itself. I was looking for a domain name and it's just two words that create an interesting dichotomy: The extreme cold of the polar regions versus the intense heat of a lava flow.
That was polar lava! It was a picture of a lava flow on the floor of the caldera Chaac near the south pole of Io, moon of Jupiter. In December of 2005 the look of the PolarLava web site was updated and a new logo unveiled. As part of the update, this image was removed from the site. The image is still here if you would like to view it. Or if you want to know more about this picture and where it came from, you can read about Io: Jupiter's Volcanic Moon.
The name. I wanted a dot-com address so I had to find something rather unique. After much trial and tribulation I settled on PolarLava. I needed something to put on the main page at least until I could generate some content. So doing a quick search I found a few images, one of which you see here -a polar lava flow!
The FAQ exists to answer trival questions like this one. The web site serves several purposes, to host the SFFL and more so, my various open source software projects. Most notably my two main projects, MyClient and PolarBlog. It also serves as a development and test platform for other web experiments, thus allowing me to further my skill set.
Probably, but I'm not a graphic designer, I'm a programmer/manager. Besides, lots of graphic content just makes the pages load that much slower. This is something that I find really annoying. Thus I'm a fan of "light weight pages", those with few graphics.
I work for Synacor where I'm a Senior Architect. We build portals and back-end systems that drive single sign-on premium services for some of the largest cable internet provides in the country…things much more advanced than this site's dynamic content! But around here I'm the man behind the curtain that pulls the chains and levers that makes the magic happen.
MyClient is an open source web client interface for the MySQL database. You can learn more about this project here.
PolarBlog is an open source embedded weblog solution. You can learn how this project started by reading this blog entry or learn more about this project here.
The SFFL is the Systems Fabrication Fantasy Football League where I was the league commissioner from 1997-2004, but I've since relinquished those duties. I'm also the owner of THRAK Football Enterprises, one of the league's original members.
