Re: Name Space

[cavac]

Here's is the tale of my username "cavac". It was long ago, at the beginning of the third age of this world. The first 32 bit homecomputers became available and strange tales of something new called "the internet" were being told in some magazines...

I was going to vocational school (de:Berufsschule). The last year, i had a camcorder¹ and i, well, recorded all kinds of stuff. At the end of the school year, i cut² the material down to a 60 minute movie on VHS tape. Since movies usually have an intro and outro, i made something up on my Amiga 500. One of the problems was, i needed something cool and exotic to go before "... presents".

After much thinking and coming up blank, i decided to feature the cool new computer technology and decided on "Computer Aided Video and Cutting". Not good english, and half a lie (video editing was entirely done manual). Had to scale down the font because it was too long, and put the abreviation CAVAC in big letters on the top.

After a few years, the internet finally arrived (using pay-per-minute dialup at 9600 baud³), and i needed a username and internet handle. I decided then that i like the sound of "cavac", but also decided that there would be no deeper meaning.

On some sites, the username "cavac" is already taken. Usually prepending a "the" to make it "thecavac" (as in "the real one") solves this problem.

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¹ Camcorder = Handheld video camera that recorded onto magnetic tape, 720x576 pixel at 25fps in my case
² Technically, i copied the stuff by winding the tapes in the camera to the correct moment, the releasing pause on both the camera and the VHS recorder at the same time, then pausing the recording at the end of the scene. Then doing it all over again hundreds of times...
³ Baud ~ "bits per second". Due to start- and stopbits and some other timing stuff, this roughly translates to 960 Bytes per second. When everything worked at top speed, which it seldomly did. Loading this very thread would have probably taken 30 minutes at the cost of more than a sixpack of beer...