Why “No Recess”?

So why did I pick “No Recess” to name my website?

Grunge music in the early 1990s

I fell in love with grunge rock my senior year in college when I bought Nirvana’s Nevermind more or less on a whim. I quickly bought albums by Mudhoney and Soundgarden, as well as earlier albums from Nirvana.

In particular, I picked up a copy of Bleach.

“School”

Track 4 on Bleach is called “School”. The lyrics are short and repetitive, and the refrain is the title of this website: no recess.

On a personal (even childish) level, I found it amusing, since I’d always wondered how “recess” turned into “breaks” once I got to high school.

The real appeal of the song, though, was how passionate Kurt Cobain sounded when he sang it, especially on the “no recess” refrains.

No Recess Software

My last semester as an undergraduate, I took a compilers course, and for some reason I felt I really needed to “release” my compiler as part of a “software company” (where “release” really meant “hand in to my professor for a grade”). So that stinky compiler was “released” by No Recess Software Systems.

Later, in graduate school in the mid-1990s, I wrote a library for my students in a Java programming course. At the time, reading input in Java was really difficult, and my NRTokenStream made it just a little bit easier. The “NR” in that name meant “No Recess”, but for some reason I refused to tell the students.