Otala

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  • Matti Otala, in memoriam

    Matti Otala, 1939 – 2015 🕇

    Matti Otala (at Nokia)

    Origin of the name Otala

    According to Matti:
    1) in the army, at the same time he was serving, there was another Matti Niilo Tapani Lehto, who needed some serious medications for heart problems, and one time accidentallly my father accidentally got those medications (and to date the doctors still haven’t quite figured out his blood group). So, Matti was a bit annoyed with his name…
    2) after the army, sometime in 1963, he was so fed up with the last name Lehto, that he set up to find a new last name. Using a (university) computer (quite rare those days), it needed to be simple/easy to pronounce, follow a pattern vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel, sound Finnish, and there had to have been no-one using it currently.

    I can’t vouch for veracity of #1, though #2 does sound more believable.

    Thus Otala was established in 1963, and I was born in 1964.

  • Purpose

    This site/domain allows you to send email to most of Otala Family, the format is firstname@otala.com

    There may also be blog updates of family members.

    More to come later — the reason why this looks new, is because the California heatwave completely blew up the original servers (srv2, srv3)and the raid array managing the storage. This will NOT HAPPEN again (I swear) — I have a “FAN CLUB” now. Check https://pointyhair.com for my personal blog on how I intend to keep that promise.

    For family members: If you are part of the Otala family, please let me know and I will setup your mail account.
    Your options are:

    1) mailbox/sending+receiving, where you would use either Thunderbird (computer or tablet/phone),
    2) Webmail access for sending & receiving,
    3) forwarding to another mailbox, where you would receive incoming mail… though sending through same domain would be quite complicated.

    Otala Coat-of-Arms
    Otala Coat-of-Arms