Nobody really knows, but our alphabet and numerical system are painfully finite, so it's going to happen, and by my calculations, at the rate e-properties are being gobbled up by a frantic public rushing to get itself "wired" to the internet, it won't be long.

Just a few years ago, you'd have had trouble convincing the average businessperson, even an executive of a major corporation, even one in the computer or communications business, that the Internet was going to be the backbone of their information traffic flow.

Had the public really known that, the NasDaq would be about four times as high as it was at its dizziest height.

Well, the fact is that sooner or later we are going to run out of sensible easy to read Domain Names and they'll be a mixture of numbers, letters and even limited symbols in foot-long strings.

Actually, with search engines getting better and better at site penetration and scanning, it won't matter, and in fact the name of a website is and always has been totally irrelevant.

But don't try to tell the average Joe or Jane that; they won't believe you, because they came from a generation that typed stuff into the Address Bar--they are known as Bar-Navigators.

By the end of this year or next, hardly anyone will do that; there's no need, what with search engines getting so good at getting you where you want to go and giving you a choice.

In addition, anyone with any experience on the Internet is going to have an Address Book or several dozen of them in their browser's BookMarks Section.

The whole reason for a site name is Brand Identification. Soon the only way someone will know which site their on is through the graphics on the webpage, and that's the way it is now for most folks--they haven't a clue as to how a computer works, they just want to buy things and get cool stuff free.

So what do us Web Designers do for cool names once all the letters and numbers have been used up, at least for any name under 13 characters, which isn't that long from now.

Simple--we slip into GeekSpeak, spelled "G33kSp34k", in which we substitute certain very specific numbers for letters they happen to somewhat resemble.

The rules of substituton are, as in all anagram and acrostic solutions, absolute and specific. They are, to wit:

3=E

4=A, For

5=S

1=L, Won

0=o

Z=s

X=cks

H=silent unless with c, t, s, etc.

U=You

C=See

B=Be

R=Are

G=Gee

There are a few other tricks, such as using hyphens between words. Dashes don't register as anything when a Search Engine goes through them, so the string, at least in theory, will read as if there were no dashes in the word.

Plurals and other variants are used by the Crypto Domain Sleuth to get access to keywords for clients.

Typically the Domain Name buyer--except for the speculators-- have been Web Designers such as ourselves buying names for use on clients' websites.

We always have some on hand, just in case, and have bought up some that we think won't be around at all soon, such as our recent purchases of Arms-And-Armor.com, Guns-4-Fun.com, WildWildWestern.com, m--n.com, PrincessDolls.com, Loans-4-Me and MostFamousWebsite.com along with alternates to protect the client who does end up with it, Famous-Website.com and Most-Famous.com.