Once upon a time, I had a simple, very easy to understand, name. My given name had three letters, as well as my family name. It was clear to anyone hearing my name how to spell it, and to anyone seeing my name written how to pronounce it.
Without anything actually happening to me, this all changed, suddenly and ruthlessly, one day towards the end of 1991. The trigger of the change was a (now almost dead) utility called "Internet Relay Chat" - IRC. The cause of the change was most of the world's inability to speak Hebrew. All of a sudden I found that both my given and my family name were seven letters long, and no-one knew how to spell either one, let alone pronounce them.
Trying to find acceptable alternatives, I turned to the fact that most names given in Hebrew have a meaning. In my case, "Shachar" means "dawn", "Shemesh" means "sun". Since Dawn is a female name, I went with "sun".
When the domain buying craze started, I found out that sun.com was already taken. While I had the fleeting idea of suing the sneaky bastards, I decided to let the case drop.
The picture you see in the background is a picture of Sol, our sun, taken from NASAs Skylab space station on December 19, 1973. The arch you see to the right is a solar flare spanning over 588 thousand kilometers.
My apologies to Internet Explorer users who see a brown rectangle hiding most of the picture. Your fine browser does not support partial transparent PNG files (also known as "Alpha Channel"), which is required for the "sun glasses" effect achieved here. Every attempt has been made to make sure you can enjoy this site without diminishing it's appearance on conforming browsers. If you are curious to see how this site should look, feel free to download one of the other browsers. In particular, both Mozilla and Opera have a Windows version that fully supports PNGs.