Name Space

[George_Sherston]

I don't know about you, but I'd really love to know what lies behind the choice of names people use here.

One can make a guess about some. I feel fairly sure there is a corporeal Sue behind virtualsue; Vynce might be Vynce in real life. John M. Dlugosz clearly spurns artifice. petral obligingly explains himself on his home node

On the other hand there are quite a few names where one knows what it means but would be intrigued to know why. I feel morally certain Petruchio is not a Veronese mysogynist. OeufMayo presumably isn't a bottle of French salad dressing made in the US and then re-imported. Whereas it seems plain from his home node that crazyinsomniac is a Crazy. Insomniac.

Most of these monikers, though, are delightful mysteries altogether. rchiav? demerphq? erudil? davorg? Masem? azatoth? --- gnomic or what?

In a way it would be nicer to preserve the mystery... but I wouldn't be here in the first place if my curiosity didn't usually get the better of my sense of awe. So if you feel like sharing your etymology, please don't hold back.

For myself, in case anybody else should have a reciprocal interest, I should mention that George Sherston is the protagonist in Siegfried Sassoon's three volumes of fictional autobiography, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress. I think one of the things that makes these books so great is that novelising his life freed Sassoon to write whatever the hell he wanted, without compromising his strict regard for the facts. By giving himself a see-through alias he was saying, I think, "this is basically true, but where I can tell you something more about what was really going on by tweaking some of the observable events, I shall not scruple to do so, and you need not be offended by it".

That's my idea anyway, and that's why I've borrowed his alias. Also I think Sassoon is a tip-top poet and have put an example on my home node.

§ George Sherston

---

Admins' Note: Due to the very large size of the thread anchored at this node, only the direct replies are shown here. Click on any reply to see its subthread.

[japhy]

Since Erudil's visits here are brief and few, I'll answer for the meaning behind his name. It comes from JRR Tolkien's languages in "Lord of the Rings", and is Quenya for "servant (-(n)dil) of God (Eru)".

My own nick stems from "JAPH", in lowercase. I chose it when I was 17, and since there are people greater than myself who deserve the name "japh", I chose "japhy", to convey the sense of a young'un (which is what the "y" stands for). I won't be young forever, but I think I'll stick with this nick.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

[tilly]

Going through the top dozen people in Saints in our Book, merlyn is a famous wizard, chromatic has never explained his name to me, japhy just explained his name above, footpad's name comes from a game, davorg's name is a contraction of dave.org.uk, a domain he owns and turnstep is a piece of exercise equipment. The rest are apparently based on people's real names. vroom and tilly are last names, tye is a first name, and btrott and jcwren have prepended initials to their last names.

And so on. Generally it is pretty easy to guess where names come from.

BTW the one person whose name is real that I thought would have been made up is perrin. I would have guessed that he was named after the character in Jordan's series, but I would have been wrong.

UPDATE
I should mention that I know what chromatic means. I just have no idea why that word would have any special significance to chromatic. As opposed to, say, turnstep who I know is into aerobics.

[demerphq]

The legend of 'merphq'


I'm also not entirely sure but I think the Q came from an old joke. I used to have a pair of 'Q' jeans and sometimes when my friends would introduce me they would say 'Yves, Yves with a Q' to confuse people. I come from Toronto so people sometimes dont get my name as they think they have misheard. So the Q thing became a sort of running joke amongst a group of my friends.
As for the 'merphq' part, it comes from a weekend party at a friends cottage. All of the people that used to go to the cottage got merphqnames and as we are now scattered use them to keep in touch. Which is where I get mine as I am the DE or German Merphqentitive. :-)
There is a www.merphq.com site where some of my friends do web casts of their music, but right now it isnt too active.


Yves
update:Its well accepted in the merphq community that the q is silent. :-)
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)

[ichimunki]

I got my nick the way a lot of other cyberthings got their names. Everything else was taken. :)

I needed < 9 chars for IRC, wanted some reference to itching or twitching. Liked the twist that it looks a bit like it's Asian but is phonetically plain old English.

The fact that people seem to confuse it with chipmunk (in the CB) is a source of bemusement.

[Corion]

Corion is meant to mean nothing. I played around with letters to find something name-sounding, and finally Corion fell into place - Corion has been my (online) nickname for 7 years or so.

My mother recently told me, that the corion is some part of chickens innards. D'oh - but on the other side, almost all internet searches for Corion point to me, so it's not that bad that I didn't do more research on this nick :-)

[runrig]

Besides what's on my home node, here's what I could dig up on my nick:

A rig is a strip of land associated with a croft and Run-rigs are sequences of those strips of land, many of which are still visible on Skye.

Update: ...and besides just liking the sound of the nick, I often think about going to Skye :)

[Zaxo]

I picked 'Zaxo' as an IRC handle about six years ago, made up out of thin air. I've used it there, here, and several other places since. I've even used it in copyright declarations a few times.

It has no intrinsic meaning. I chose it for its brevity, the unlikeliness of nick collisions, and for its clownish tone. I wanted to avoid boastful, self-important, pompous kinds of words.

It does seem to evoke different things to different people, which I enjoy a lot. The other day, one French monk surprised me with a new one, that it's a phonetic anagram of h4X0rZ. It's often taken to be a household product (Europeans tend to think toothpaste; Americans, drain cleaner). A zax is a combination hatchet and pick used by slaters, but I've never used one. I have played both Zaxxon and saxophone.

I'm glad you asked this. I've enjoyed reading the answers.

After Compline,
Zaxo

[shotgunefx]

Myself, shotgunefx (SHOTGUN EFX) was a company I started when I was doing special effects as a young teen. (Facial Prosthetics, Monster Suits, etc) It then somehow turned into a video game development venture, and it just kind of stuck.

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

[MrNobo1024]

When I first got Internet access, I wanted the screen name "MrNobody" but 1023 people had already taken it. My ISP limited screen names to 10 characters, so I got "MrNobo1024". I ended up using that same name everywhere else for consistancy.

-- MrNobo1024

s]]HrLfbfe|EbBibmv]e|s}w}ciZx^RYhL}e^print

[lo_tech]

Well, there are really two reasons that I selected lo_tech.

In no particular order:

• I picked up the name from the book Johnny Mnemonic by author William Gibson. While I've enjoyed Gibson's books, I do not recommend the movie. It's one of those things that was better left in print, or at least out of Hollywood.
• I wanted a nick that preserved my anonymity. Not paranoid, since they are out to get me.
lo_tech

Well, that's my $.02. No, for refunds you'll have to contact customer service department.

[agent00013]

The "Agent" part of my name I got from James Bond's code name: Agent 007. In various places I've used different endings for my screen names. Originally, I got the 00013 because 007 was already taken (on AOL IM) and so was 0013. So I added an extra zero.

On IRC (DALNet) I go by Agent_Ender. Ender is taken from Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game. The book is probably my favorite (or at least one of them) of all time. OSC's about the best author I've read.




---

Love is random; fear is inevitable. -- Orson Scott Card
PerlMonks is good for Perl, but JavaJunkies is good for Java *note, JJ is currently down...

[Masem]

All I'll say about mine is that I came up with it for online use about 10 years ago, pronouncing it as "MAS-em", instead of "MAZE-em" as most others I've talked too assume it is pronounced.

I'll let you work out the gruesome details from the rest of that. :-)

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - [e-mail] || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

[synapse0]

Synapse0 is basically braindead, which is how i felt when i needed to create a new nick for something or another after one of those 24+ hr wake stints, and after that, it's just kinda stuck...
-Syn0

[ybiC]

Wow, dunno how I missed this thread!   Neat post, George_Sherston++

My homenode lists a few meanings for "ybiC", but of course none of them are why I chose that nick.   You see, it all started when I was born a poor black child.   Anyways, on discovering the Monastery, almost the very first node I read was PSALM 23   So I chose for a nick a sig I've used in Christian correspondance for a number of years.   It stands for "your brother in Christ".

hencE thE unusuaL capitalizatioN oF mY monKnicK.   It also explains why calling me "brother ybiC" is just a wee bit redundant.
  cheers,
  Don

P.S.   props to He-With-A-Silent-Q for pointing me to this thread.

P.P.S   I don't know that he's necessarily Christian, but KM++ for that cool perl poetry.

P.P.P.S.   if you want to discuss (not debate or argue) matters o'faith, I'm always interested in hearing why others (dis)believe as they do.   Don't worry, I won't try to force my own faith on you, regardless of my own strong convictions.   8^)

[theorbtwo]

Well, I've been The Orb for ages. I wanted to reinvent myself, since the myself I had been using started becomming a looser wasting all of his time downloading things over a 2400 baud modem from local BBSes.

I wanted a name that signified some sort of mysterious power. Hell, I couldn't have been more then 12. So thus, The Orb it was. Since I'm lazy, it was theorb. But then, I lost the password of The Orb on somethingoranother. I think it might have been Yahoo!, and I needed an email account, and refused to use hotmail. Anyway, thus, I became theorbtwo. Since, I've found a number of places where theorb is a haX0R d00d. (BTW, I have a theorb2 account on the NYT web site, and I think I got that during HS, so that puts the two in theorbtwo sometime after '96.)

[cadfael]

An interesting meditation. Is the persona I have adopted reflective of the way I really am?

Cadfael is a fictional character in the Brother Cadfael Mysteries written by Edith Pargeter under the pseudomyn Ellis Peters. The mysteries are set in the first half of twelfth century England in the generation following the Norman conquest. They are historically accurate in so far as historical detail is related, but Cadfael, a Welsh Benedictine monk, is totally fictional as are most of the other monks of the Abbey at Shrewsbury.

He is a quiet monk without aspirations to power, but his talents in medicinal herbs as well as his sharp intellect honed by years of Crusading and living in the World have often been brought to bear on murder investigations.

Is this me? Well, not exactly, as I do aspire to becoming an Abbot someday. I am also not celibate. I promise not to poison anyone in my quest, though.

My real name is Denis Hancock

-----
"Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt"

[dragonchild]

When I first logged onto KitMUD in '93, "dragon" was taken. I like kids and think that baby dragons are the cutest things in the whole world, so I became Dragonchild. :)

Since then, I've been a number of other nicks (including satchboost), but I've always come home to my real name.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Vote paco for President!

[idnopheq]

I've had idnopheq for, I hate to say it, almost eleven years now. My home node has a brief explanation as to it's origins in college. But soft! As I have been asked in the past ...

As I went to college with a bunch of strict southern Baptists ( no smoking, drinking, swearing, etc. - I resumed such fine traits after I s/dropped/was kicked/ out of school ), we came up with other ways to amuse ourselves.

One such amusement was coming up with unlikely nouns. The definition I came up with at the time is in the dark mists of memory. But the unlikely noun as a name stuck, and as with so many other monks, this one is usually available in the on-line world.

HTH
--
idnopheq
Apply yourself to new problems without preparation, develop confidence in your ability to to meet situations as they arrise.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

[Hofmator]

My nick is just a mangling of my real name, it ends up nicely at 8 chars and is pronouncable so I sticked to it ;-) print map {($.--)?lc:$_} unpack 'x8A5X13A3', "Torsten Hofmann";

-- Hofmator

[mexnix]

At first I didn't think I was cool enough for this node, but I'll post anyway. I was tired of some of the nicknames that I had come up with in the past (too ashamed to tell), so I had to think of something for my entrance to Perlmonks. Well, I'm mexican, chicano really, and a [ironically] Puerto Rican friend in High School called me mex. Contract that with my operating system of choice, Unix or most *nix OS's, and you have mexnix. Suprisingly on AIM, mexnix was taken so there I'm mexnux.

<shameless_plug type="homepage">http://mexnix.perlmonk.org also has the explanation</shameless_plug>

__________________________________________________


s mmgfbs nf, nfyojy m,tr yb-zya-zy,s zfzphz,print;
- thanks japhy :)

mexnix.perlmonk.org

[Jouke]

Allright...You asked for it: here's my explanation: Jouke is my first name. It's a rather unique first name. Even in the Netherlands it's not very common. Everywhere I go and have to register myself, I seem to be the first 'Jouke', so whenever I can, I claim my first name. I'm almost certain that I'm the only Perl programmer called Jouke. Search Google for Jouke Perl and I think only things related to me come up...Maybe some guy named 'Jouke Kleerebezem', who is a graphical artist or something may come up too...

So there it is :)

Jouke Visser, Perl 'Adept'
Using Perl to help the disabled: pVoice and pStory

[jdporter]

I've been an Internaut for -- lessee... 1, 2, 3... 21 years.

Back then, it was rather unusual for someone to use anything other than their real name for their online account, I think mostly because most people had no actual say in the matter; their accounts were assigned to them by The Powers.
So I got used to people knowing me by my real name.

Now that I'm "older", I find the whole idea of being known online as something other than your Real-Life identity to be pretty stupid. No offense to the rest of you, of course.... :-)

[Zecho]

DISCLAIMER: I no longer encourage or practice any of the following activities.
I have never related this story to anyone.


For those of you with a positive opinion of me, you may want to skip this entry

Zecho (prop noun):
a derivative of zydeco. and here's how it happened.

When I was first introduced to the new internet it was with America Online. The cost of which was well over $4 US per hour.
When signing up for this new world, I happened to be listening to an early song by Buckwheat Zydeco, and decided to find a new handle (nick) for this new experience. I was somewhat known as 'radical' on a few BBSs back in the days. Zydeco was the first thing that came to my mind, but it had already been taken. So I added the "h" and became Zydecho. This was fine for a while, untill my first telephone bill came in. $700.00 Jeez!. I had already fallen into a crowd known as the "Gods of AOL" and they taught me a way around this phonebill problem (which I will not relate due to self-implication), the problem with this was it was a temporary fix. Any time we did something that stood out, the "Community Action Team" known as "CAT" would spot us, our accounts (which were borrowed) were deleted. So this meant having to change handles frequently. There were a lot of derivatives and morphisms of the original handle Zydecho to follow, and I soon ran out of alternatives. Thus Zecho was born.... and soon deleted. The group I was in had decided to mimick the "CAT" members whose names all ended in Cat ie: 'SpiderCat' so I was now ZechoGod.

ZechoGod's most infamous achievement was to set up an autoresponder for his AOL inbox, and noticing how quickly it would reply to messages he sent to himself, got together with about 20 of the group members and started emailing each other with the autoresponders enabled. Soon, there were thousands and thousands of emails bouncing back and forth at amazing speed on the AOL servers. An infinate loop, and the original documented DOS attack.(AOL was offline for over 24 hours)

Needless to say, the "Gods of AOL" made the front page of AOL news rather frequently. The AOL Offer (aka Aol4free) was another infamous attribution.

The name Zecho is still to this day banned from AOL.

UPDATE: no I have not used aol in years.

[wine]

Wine is just an english translation of the dutch word "wijn". My lastname is a pural so I guess it really should be "wines", but then again, that doesn't sounds so cool.

I have had other nicks in the past, but this stuck, and is usually not in use by other people, which is a great advantadge.

oh..., btw, I like wine too ;)

-- nice question, though. Have wondered about these nicks myself so now and then.

[herveus]

Howdy!

I've been going by Herveus in my medieval recreation foo for years (SCA and Markland). It has been my online ID for as long as I've been buying access to the internet.

Herveus is how the clerks would write down Harvey in Latin. It happens to be the name of one of my ancestors, if the geneaology can be believed.

yours,
Michael

[{NULE}]

Hi,

Well, not that you asked, but here's my story. {NULE} (or nule which is just as fine by me) is a recent big change for me in online monikers for me. I used to exist as "gpf_me" (and still do) in the AIM world and a few other places.

I decided to procure for myself a domain name of my own and since http://www.antidisestablishmentarianism.com/ was already taken, I started looking for the very shortest domain name I could get (that laziness thing). I couldn't find any cool three letter ones, so I started entering random combinations of four letters at directNIC. http://www.nule.org/ was available so I took it. I figure that it sounds reasonably interesting (pronounced like "fool" or "mule", not like NULL) and not too silly.

If you want to know what it means, I have a random acronym generator on my homepage that has a grand total of 1050 of the so far. A handfull of which even make sense or are amusing.

Take care,
{NULE}

--
http://www.nule.org

[buckaduck]

I've been using buckaduck as my online name for seven years. When my niece first began talking and learned to say "Mama" and "Dada", I wanted my name to be the next one that she learned.

She didn't even come close. No matter what name I tried to teach her, everything came out as "buckaduck". In the end, I decided to let my nickname be buckaduck and be done with it.

Oddly, the name buckaduck seems very catchy with kids in general. The only downside is that people will try to turn it into something rude in the darker corners of the internet...

buckaduck

[TheoPetersen]

You can probably guess where my nick comes from :)

Interesting to hear other people comment about hanging onto a nick for years and years. I carried a nick from CompuServe through Usenet and various online communities, and finally dropped it as part of a Life Purging Experience four or five years ago. I've been using my real name when signing up for new sites since.

[toadi]

Most people think my nick comes from a neighbours character named toad-fish. But it's not, see my homenode for the bio of toadi :)

I was addicted to that game when I was younger :)

--
My opinions may have changed,
but not the fact that I am right

[rozallin]

It's just occured to me how unusual it is for someone to be unsure of their own name, or to be considered two different people, for that matter.

My parents forenames are Rosina and Lindsay so I was christened with the name Roselyn, which somehow morphed to Roselynne over the years. But no one ever seemed to be able to pronounce or spell my name correctly, so I changed it to rozallin, because people call me Roz anyway and there are only two ways of saying it as opposed to many.

I'm planning on changing my name to my name by deedpoll when I turn 18 because some of my official documents are under R. Thompson, and some are under my father's surname (because my parents weren't married at the time I was born, so I took my mother's ex-husband's surname, and then unofficially changed my name to my father's surname when I went to school to stop me from being teased).

--
Rozallin J. Thompson (I think)
The Webmistress who doesn't hesitate to use strict;

[Guildenstern]

Contrary to what most people think, my name is not taken (directly) from Hamlet. I had the joy of reading Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" in high school, and chose the name Guildenstern because he seemed to be the less stupid of the two. (Although that's really quite a SWAG, as people who've read the play or seen the movie know.) I used to engage in word tennis, and I really used to drive people nuts in chat rooms by simply saying "Heads..." over and over. I seem to have stopped doing those things, as it was always a pain in the butt to explain what I was doing.

Guildenstern
Negaterd character class uber alles!

[Limbic~Region]

No - I didn't get the idea from the bad movie.

I got the idea after reading the essays at the back of The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic, MD. (read circa 1994) A lot of new ground-breaking research has been done into the brain. Some scientist now think it is our limbic region, and not the cortex, that makes humans different than other animals. The ability to have concepts such as love, money, and language where symbols stand for other things - some concrete and some abstratct. So without further ado...

The limbic region is the area of the brain where creative thought is spawned.

Cheers - L~R

[suaveant]

Alright... I actually have a story, so I might as well tell it... Back in my high school days (about '93) I was introduced to the BBS world by a school friend, and at his house connected to the ever popular local BBS... which had one phone line, about 20 current users and was run by a Land Surveyor/Bassist in Pemaquid Maine (real populous area :). That first time logging on JP (the sysadmin) happened to be on, and we were chatting with him... Well, whenever he would type my name (Anthony) the o kept turning into u or i... and so, to save some typos, I told him he could just call me 'Ant'. So, through buying my 2400 baud modem for my 8088 at a screaming 10Mhz to finding the internet at college, I have been Ant. Which, if you've ever been to a techie college you tend to get called by your online name more than your real name... so subsequently my friends, wife, and even my parents at times call me Ant... but I am Suaveant here.. and on CPAN... so where does all this come in?

It's all ant's fault! That poop logged into the PM before I did and stole my name!!! (Oh well, at least he actually logs in from time to time...) So, I needed a name, so I used Suaveant, a play on my nick and the domain I own for email and whatnot. Also, since CPAN requires at least 4 letters for a PAUSE username, I figured I would stick to my PM name and use SUAVEANT....and there it is... the whole exciting story... :)

                - Ant
                - Some of my best work - (1 2 3)

[dga]

I have seen a some names that look like initials on here, which is the derivation of my name for here and a common *NIX thing to have as an id.

The most famous of these I know of is of course rms, founder of the Free Software Foundation

[Aristotle]

For a long time I didn't post here, because, well, there's not much to say: Aristotle is my real first name. Not much of a story, is it? That was my reply to ybiC's idle request in the chatterbox whether everyone present had posted, too. But then it occured to me that it's not exactly a common first name, so the fact might be worth pointing out.

And here I am. So now you know.

[ Update: you may wonder how that happened to become my first name. First of all, it is not that improbable, being that I am Greek. (I was born and live in Germany, myself; my parents immigrated here from Greece. I speak both languages fluently.) Still, the name is still uncommon, even among Greeks. I happen to be called that because in Greek tradition, there is a strict system for naming children. The firstborn male gets the father's father's name; the second gets the mother's father's name. Same goes for the females named after the respective grandmothers. (If there are more children, as was often the case in older times, the chain went on to the include the grand uncles and grand aunts.) All that said, I'm the younger of two brothers and the name of my grandfather on my mother's side is, for whatever reason, Aristotle. And therefore, that is my name also. ]

To spice things up a little, I'll mention the name that I used to go by, here and at many other places: Screamer. I uniformly dropped that nick for personal reasons a while ago. In order to avoid another similar situation should it ever arise again for whichever reason, I requested to have my account name changed to my real first name here although I assumed another pseudonym elsewhere. My real name is obviously not subject to change.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[Daruma]

Greetings, Monks!

I have been using Daruma as a net nick and handle for many years. I typically attempt to register with Daruma before any alternates.

Daruma is a Japanese name for "Dharma" or more specifically, "Bodhidharma". There are many legends regarding the monk named Bodhidharma. He is sometimes said to be the bringer of Mahayana (Zen) Buddhism from India to China in the 5th Century C.E. According to some stories, he was a meditator in the most extreme sense of the word. He once sat facing a wall for nine years in a meditative state. He was very strict with his students, and would force them to spend long, long hours, (days? weeks?) out in the cold snowstorms in the mountains of China. He is the reputed author of "The Bloodstream Sutra/Sermon" (my favorite) among others.

Stories of his devotion to meditation include cutting off his own eyelids to stay awake during meditation! In addition to his credits regarding Buddhism, he is thought of by many as the founder of Kung Fu. Many modern martial arts systems trace their origins back to Bodhidharma. It is also legend that he brought tea to China.

My study and interest in Daruma/Bodhidharma stems from my penchant for religious studies and my ongoing practice of martial arts. More modern references to Daruma in Japan and throughout the world are usually focused around "Daruma Dolls" and using them for goal achievement.

-Daruma

[chip]

Sometimes a chip is just a Chip.

In a surreal moment sometime in the 80s, Time magazine named the computer as their Man Of the Year. The cover showed a generic CRT display reading something like this:

HELLO.
MY NAME IS CHIP.
I WILL CHANGE YOUR FUTURE.


I sometimes wonder at how significant my name was in my finding this excellently relevant career.

    -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos

[Arguile]

My name is actually a play upon a few terms.

Let's just say I was involved in some schemes of dubious origin in my younger years (Zecho easily beats me though ;). A change of names was.. erm.. appropriate. I tried out various aliases but couldn't come up with anything that I liked. Then something just *clicked*.

1. I had recently been reading some Chaucer and stumbled upon a term I hadn't heard before "argoile". Which is Potter's clay.
2. Deas and Tuath of Argyle are two brothers in 8th century Scotland in a very humourous allegory. It's much more subtle than Swift, filled with half references and hinting at double meanings. In short I like it quite a bit.
3. The pattern Argyle comes from the clan tartan of the that area.
4. Guile, as I'm sure you all know, is cunning manipulation, skillful deception.

Well this time I was choosing a nick for 'offical' fora so I wanted something that related (at least in my own mind) to what I was doing. At the time I was doing a lot of data modelling and database work.

So Arguile is to 'cunningly₄ mold₁ data into a pattern₃'. A little pretentious when put like that, but I was pleased with it.

In addition to what's stated above, it also carried a few other connotation for me. I was concealing myself and reworking my persona, which seemed to fit. As well 3kBC-1.4kAD British Isles interests me greatly, and it sort of sounds like it came from within that period and area. It also fits into SCA/RPGs pretty well ;).

Probably way more than you wanted to know; as most of the meaning is lost to anyone but myself.

[FoxtrotUniform]

Like most adolescent Internet geeks, I started out using "cool" Fantasy nicknames, usually my favourite character from whatever series I'd read most recently. Of course, changing one's handle every month or so isn't precisely consistent. For a while, when I was just posting to course newsgroups at university, I was just using my real name. I'm not sure why I decided to change back to a handle for PerlMonks.

That said, "Foxtrot" and "Uniform" are military, aviation, or civilian radio words to represent the letters "F" and "U" over noisy radio connections (try distinguishing "dee" and "tee", or "em" and "en", over a staticy radio link sometime...). Predictably, they stand for "f*cked up" (hey, I have to grow old; I don't have to grow up!). While that describes me distressingly often, it's really taken from the title of a computer game I've been developing in my spare time, and I thought it would make a good moniker.

--
:wq

[s173451000]

s173451000? Can anyone guess? Probably not. It is the serial number to the very first trumpet i ever had way back in 6th grade band.

[mr_mischief]

I'm quite certain everyone understands the _meaning_ of the moniker 'mr_mischief'.

I was once a DOS user (locally, of course), and a VMS and *nix user remotely. This started in earnest when I was sixteen. My friends and I ran old-school dial-up BBSes on DOS and one guy did it on SCO with his own custom BBS code.

We were also lucky enough to have stumbled across the Net in 1992 via tax-supported toll-free number for rural net access for Missouri residents. We dialed dumbterm into a Vax with lynx as a shell, and from there everything was a URL away, whether it was web, gopher, WAIS, archie, or telnet. We decided we needed a *nix shell, so we bought remote shell access for $10 a month, and it had FTP and zmodem. So, we'd dial into the free number, telnet to the shell, FTP stuff to there, and use zmodem through the telnet session and the dumbterm session to our own systems. Quite a thrill at 2400 and later 9600 bps.

We did lots of crazy things, like trying many types of drugs, many types of computer and non-computer games, and lots of grey area computer usage. I was a bit of a hothead and a brawler in my teen years, and my friends noticed I liked to do things like put Scorched Earth on the highschool network, put Stunts on the programming class computers, show the teachers why they shouldn't store their test questions on the school's inadequately secured network, and create save-game cheats for computer games. I even broke the password protection scheme of a popular set of PC maintenance tools, Norton Utilities 6.0, but that was more due to the poor design thereof than any great skill on my part.

Around the time my friends and I were dsicovering the possibilities of the BSDs, Minix, and this new thing called Linux (yes, we were some of the ones who looked forward to version 1.0.0), I was teaching people in the computer user's group my friends and I founded how to do some things which alarmed their teachers, parents, spouses, and others but which weren't really that big a deal. Around that time, my friends were all taking on lofty nicknames like Lord Stryfe, Lord Viper, etc. They'd all been calling me Lord Pyro, because my most notable MUD character was Pyro X and my BBS was called Pyro's Funhouse, with all the requisite red, orange, and yellow ANSI graphics schemes. They decided, though, that I was best known for having a mischievous streak to my personality, and dubbed my Lord Mischief. Not feeling particularly noble nor pretentious one day, I logged into a BBS as Mr Mischief, where I became fairly well known in the world of Citadel variant telnet-able BBSes (I was also 'God of the Night' on a few BBSes, which is not an evil name but one of duality, balance and such, but that name got me a rather strange group of friends and ...ummm, followers). I'm still Mr Mischief on a couple of those, I'm mrm on some systems, mischief is my work login and email username as well as my login and username many other places, and I'm mr_mischief1 or mrmischief more places than I care to count. Most of my friends from the original group have now followed my example by either dropping the title altogether, or softening it to 'Mr.' instead of 'Lord'.

I originally tried to come here as mischief (and Slashdot, too), and when I found the name alreayd in use wonderd if I'd already logge din and forgotten, so good monk mischief and I got to know one another quickly when i apologized to him for emailing him his passwords. I created a new user, and here we are today.

Sorry for being so long-winded, but it's the best way I have to explain clearly how I got the name.

MrM

[gregor42]

I humbly submit that my name is indeed my name but concatenated with the output for the ultimate obfuscation of Life the Universe & Everything, written by one of the great software authors of the 20th Century, and one hoopy frood who always knew where his towel was, the Late Sir Douglas Adams.

And always remember, if you're lost, get behind someone who looks like they know where they're going.



Wait! This isn't a Parachute, this is a Backpack!

[g0n]

Why "g0n"

It never occured to me that it could look like leetspeak (I wonder if it gets through spam filters). Quite simply, g0n.net was the nicest of the 3 letter domain names I found, and I wanted a really short domain name to refer to my home server. After that I figured it was an easily remembered username. Boring really. Sorry.

[shmem]

My nick? Share your memory whilst you have it!

Ever since I was a toddler my life was linked to memory and death; my mother I can't remember, was too young when she passed; the memory of gone loved ones is lost forever for the living; there's suppressed memory in many families which leads to outbursts of calamities generations later. Life is memory.

In one of my favourite books - "Cién ańos de soledad" - the last moments of Aureliano Buendía are described:

"Entonces fue al castańo, pensando en el circo, y mientras orinaba trató de seguir pensando en el circo, pero ya no encontró el recuerdo."

"Then he went to the chestnut, and whilst urinating he tried to think about the circus, but he couldn't find the remembrance any more."

and then he dies.

"Beneath each grave-stone lies a whole world's history." (H.Heine)

--shmem

[maverick]

Once upon a long time ago, I went to school with 7 other people who share my first name (including one with the same last name). So we were all eventually picking up nick names.

Mine came about from..shall we say a combination of youthfulness and profanity. In the sixth grade, I was in a bunch of advanced classes at a local community college. The chemisty professor, was this goofy sort of guy and at some point came to the discussion of the alkaline metals and their reactivity with water. I thought the guy was yanking our chains. So during break me and two classmates decided to test this out. So we placed a chunk of sodium metal on the professor's desk and started taking turns throwing a beaker of water at it. A couple of beakers, one loud boom, and a smoking crater later, the professor rushes in to see me standing there slack jawed with an empty beaker. "What the *bleep* do you think you're doing! What the *bleep* do you think you are some kind of *bleep* *bleep* maverick! I ought to have you arrest you *bleep* *bleep* *bleep*"

It wasn't until college that it turned into a full blown replacement for my real name...I introduce myself as Maverick now. Most people don't know my real name, and I rather prefer that....I don't like it anyways.

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"

[sifukurt]

I've gone by SifuKurt online for many years. I used to go by Beowulf (when I wrote my Master's thesis, I spent more time with that particular Old English poem than I spent with my family). At any rate, in addition to being a programmer, I'm a martial artist and have been since I was six years old. (Just had a birthday, doing math in head....26 years.) "Sifu," pronounced "See Foo," is the title in Chinese martial systems, collectively known as Kung Fu, that is given to the teacher. Sifu literally means "teacher father." I teach three Chinese systems, Taiji Quan (aka Tai Chi Chuan), Chung-I Quan, and Wu Dan Snake System. I was awarded the title "Sifu" by my instructor shortly before he passed away. When I teach, I like to keep my classes somewhat informal, hence I prefer to go by first name, Sifu Kurt, rather than last name, Sifu Kincaid. Also Sifu Kurt is easier to say.
___________________
Kurt

[talexb]

With 86 monks already on the list, and me probably stuck at level 1 forever .. don't know if anyone's ever gonna read this .. oh well ..

I'm "one of those people" who parts their name on the left. Alex really is my middle name, and that's the one I started out life with. It turned out that my Dad's younger brother Tim was killed in a car accident on the same day (in 1946) that I was born (in 1958); my Grandmother's older sister Meg suggested I be called Tim to commemorate him.

After trying out the various names (I have a third name that no one's going to hear) my parents finally decided that 'Timothy' sounded best at the front, hence T. Alex Beamish. The reorganized "Alex T. Beamish" is, of course, wrong.

About the accident: Tim was 12, my Dad was 14. Dad's parents were out shopping or something, and Tim was coasting down a hill on his bicycle in Hampstead (part of London, England) near the house where the family lived. Going out of control, he hit an off-duty ambulance, flew over the vehicle and landed on his head. The crew bundled him into the ambulance and roared off to the nearest hospital. My Dad, paralyzed with grief, didn't know what to do, and had to wait till his parents returned to tell them about the accident. They went off to the hospital as soon as they could, and returned a few hours later with the news that Tim had died of his head injuries.

Dad lost a close, dear friend on that day. So I continue to wear the "T." with pride.

And please, don't get me started on motorcycle riders who insist on their right to ride without a helmet.

"Excellent. Release the hounds." -- Monty Burns.

[CubicSpline]

I'm definitely late in hopping onto this node, but thanks demerphq for reminding us in the CB that it existed. GeorgeSherston++ for the cool node! =)

I used to use names of my favorite characters from fantasy books. I've used Drizzt (R.A. Salvatore), Pol (Melanie Rawn), Perrin, (Robert Jordan), and Seldon (The Great Asimov). But, these names are often taken, so I wanted to get a nick that likely wasn't used.

My junior year of college I took a math class called Numerical Analysis, which was an utter snore-fest (there were only 4 people in the class for gods sake!!). But I started hearing all these crazy mathematicians names and theorems and numerical methods. So I used nicks like Poincare, Legrange, but my favorite was CubicSpline. Cubic splines are a numerical method for approximating a curve (that's all I can remember three years later =).

[zakzebrowski]

Well, my name is zak zebrowski... :) I have nothing to hide...
Update Also: Found my old zebroz account which I logged on to when the site was young (node 6715 was my first question). I forgot my password, and then I lost access to that email account, so I created my 'new' zakzebrowski account. zebroz was my uid for when I attended college @ wpi.

----
Zak

[Nevtlathiel]

Nevtlathiel is actually a mis-spelling of a nick I've used elsewhere (Nevtalathiel) and I normally use that as my sign-in name for things. I guess the day I signed up to perlmonks my fingers were just being rebelious! ;) It is apparently my elven name according to one of the many Lord of the Rings name generators out there and I believe it means something like "One who is near shade" but might be completely mistaken, I just like the way it sounds!

Shorten it to Nev to make it easier to say/type :)

[BooK]

Back in 1994, I didn't have a nickname, like the others in my engineering school. I felt I had to have one, to sign my articles in the school paper. Plus it was cool to have one.

Since I loved books, and had grown a rather long goatee beard, I chose "BooK" (capital "B", capital "K"), whith the following explanation: "En anglais ça se prononce 'bouc', et en français ça veut dire livre.". Which you could translate as: "In English it pronounces 'bouc' (goatee in English), and in French, it means 'book'".

Naturally, the goatee didn't last, since several girlfriends had me cut it and not grow it back. But most of my friends know me by this name, and I am quite used to it.

I just have to be quick when a new online service opens, to be the first one to registrer my nick. This is the reason why I wish I had chosen a less common word for a handle!

[moxliukas]

"My username is..." poll has reminded me that I have to explain my nickname.

As you might already know, I am Lithuanian (which you could have found out through my home node). Moxliukas is not Lithuanian word strictly speaking, because there is no letter 'x' in Lithuanian language, however it is just a weird way of spelling the word moksliukas. You might ask why am I spelling it like that. The answer is not related to the usual scenario where moksliukas would be taken on every single website. The problem that I had with the nick "moksliukas" (which I have used for quite a while... probably for 4 years) is that it was too long for IRC (back in those days Lithuanian IRC servers only accepted nicknames up to 9 letters long), so I shortened 'ks' into 'x'.

What does the word moxliukas mean, anyway? The closest translation to a single english word would be a geek, however the roots of the word are quite different in Lithuanian and the meaning is also subtly different. My nickname has it's roots in the word 'mokslas', which means science. 'Moksliukas' is a person who studies a lot (usually at school) compared to his peers. It has a slightly negative meaning (slightly nerdy). The nickname stuck because, well... I probably was a bit geeky/nerdy at school. A lot of people get surprised to find out that my nick is 'moxliukas' because I am 20 now, ant usually this word is reffered to schoolchildren, but I've had it for 6 years now, so I got used to it

[sauoq]

Yes, sauoq is bones upside down. If it isn't, you aren't using a proper font.

Once upon a time I used "bones" but found myself fighting for it on IRC. Then I noticed I could turn it upside down and... voila! A nick no one else wanted.

Oh, "bones," in this case, is a shortening of "J-Bones" which is a nickname I've had since I was about 2 years old. I never used "J-Bones" as a username because I wanted something short and all lowercase with no punctuation. Somehow, "jbones" didn't look right to me.

So, where did "J-Bones" come from in the first place? Well, a friend of the family was an excellent amateur guitarist and folk singer. I used to love it when he sang Mr. Bojangles but I somehow thought it was Mr. Bonejangles instead. That and the fact that my real name begins with a "J" led to the nickname "J-Bones." My parents still call me by that affectionate sobriquet on occasion even now, 30 or so years later.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

[Hero Zzyzzx]

Here's my little bit on my name:

When I was a kid, I loved the "books of lists" that you could pick up cheap, I'd read them and re-read them, among many, many other books when I was younger. I also have a strange memory, I don't remember poo in the short term, but I'll remember nearly verbatim something I read years and years ago.

Anyway, Hero Zzyzzx was supposedly the least common name in the United States, according to one book of lists, so I figured I'd be pretty safe adopting it for my online handles. I rather like it, though it's kind of a pain to spell.

The irony here is that my real name is probably as rare as Hero Zzyzzx, given that my wife has a rare last name, and my (ahem) maiden name is rare too.

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.

[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 camcorderš and i, well, recorded all kinds of stuff. At the end of the school year, i cut˛ 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 baudł), 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.

---

š Camcorder = Handheld video camera that recorded onto magnetic tape, 720x576 pixel at 25fps in my case
˛ 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...
ł 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...

[shenme]

'shenme' just means "what?" in Chinese. I thought it appropriately humble for a monk that knows he doesn't know, and will be saying that a lot. (Oh, and my hearing is getting bad, too.)

And why am I learning (well, trying to) Mandarin Chinese? I needed to stretch myself in other directions, and I figure if I'm daily/weekly reminded of my weaknesses in this area, I won't possibly ever think myself superior in any. It's working...

谢 谢 朋 友 门 (xie4 xie peng1 you men = thank you friends)

[Jazz]

It's sometimes such a shame that you can only vote once on a node. This was one of the most entertaining nodes that I've seen here :) Excellent idea, George_Sherston++!

jazz (jŕz) noun

1. Music. a. A style of music, native to America, characterized by a strong but flexible rhythmic understructure with solo and ensemble improvisations on basic tunes and chord patterns and, more recently, a highly sophisticated harmonic idiom. b. Big band dance music.
2. Slang. a. Animation; enthusiasm. b. Nonsense. c. Miscellaneous, unspecified things

Actually, my middle name is Jasmine, and of course, that was already registered. Everyone calls me Jazz anyway, so it suited.

The slang definition suits me better, but it's probably novel to have just bought a bass to see if Jazz can learn to play jazz :)

[nefertari]

nefertari is my third name. My real name is Judith Maria Nefertari Dohmann.
I took it as a nickname because it is easy to remember for me. On some pages it was taken, so at "TheSims" I had to take nefertari-merit-en-mut which was the name of the spouse of Ramses II. I was named after her, because my mother liked her looks and the sound of the name. It's meaning is something like: "The beautiest (of them)". And merit en mut, means something like "loved by Mut" (a goddess of ancient Egypt).

[Anonymous Monk]

Before joining the monastery I turned state's witness against the evil empire. For my own protection, I entered into the witness protection and relocation program, leaving my previous identity behind. Now as a champion of all things Perl, I must never look back, remaining forever nameless, lest the forces of evil find me and silence me forever.

[earthboundmisfit]

I've gone through my entire life with a monosyllabic name -> Al
I figured it was about time I had one that wouldn't fit on those annoying name tag pins.

How did I settle on earthboundmisfit? My home node goes into it a little bit. Basically, I was listening to the radio on the Web one day when I stumbled across PM. Just as I was considering my login name I heard a certain lyric and just went with that.

I've been considering changing to just ebm. That way I could make up all sorts of meanings for the acronym based on how I feel that day.

Today it would be: entirely banal monk.

[phydeauxarff]

Phydeaux came originally as a alternative username for me to use when I worked for an ISP years ago and management insisted that we use aliases when we wanted to do 'personal things' on the Internet so that customers would not attribute what we said or did as an act of the company.

The name is actually a tribute to Larry Norman, one of my favorite artists

the arf part came years later when I found that so many were using Phydeaux as their moniker.

[kwoff]

'qu@f.f' was a somewhat minimal thing to put in a From line to an NNTP server, and it's derived from 'quaff', though I don't drink much so it's not really descriptive. Sometimes I would tell people that quaff, as a noun, stands for "a deep drink", so I'm "deep" :) plus it has a "still waters run deep" overtone. Maybe not.

Anyway, I came across the word quaff in a poem by Longfellow called "The Skeleton in Armor", part of which I used as a .sig for a while:

While the brown ale he quaffed,
Loud then the champion laughed,
And as the wind-gusts waft
The sea-foam brightly,
So the loud laugh of scorn,
Out of those lips unshorn,
From the deep drinking-horn
Blew the foam lightly.

I like that poem a lot for some reason, especially that stanza where the sea foam is wafted by the wind while the beer foam is wafted by the viking's breath. Also, in "The Raven" by Poe, there is a famous line that goes "Quaff, O quaff this fine nepenthe". Maybe you can tell that I was somewhat into poetry at that time. :)

Finally, both quaff and kwoff are similar (five letters, 3rd character a vowel, last two characters the same) to my real name, Scott.

[jackdied]

so many aliases ...

jackdied is a mnemonic for finding my name in a directory. 'died' is the first four letters of my last name. When sysadmins balk I use 'jackd' on unix systems. If it is killing you trying to figure out the whole last name, try whois

John Smallberries is one I used from time to time, until I found out there was another guy using it as well. It is from the "Buckaroo Banzai" movie.

Then there are a bunch of others only used for particular projects (Nezarb, KRad (no kidding))and a flurry for muds and bbs (redman, brazen, stilgar, etc).

[poqui]

My story is similar to Suaveant's, to a point...
I started online in about '92; I was already out of school a few years and had a job in D.C. where I had a loaner laptop with a modem and decided to try it out.
I got into the fido net and a couple of local BBS's (TIDMADT, CrunchLand, Bubbles) and I was poking at things Pagan and such and didnt want to be identified IRL (I worked for the Guv'mint).
So, when asked for a username, I casted about for a bit, and finally settled on the long version of my name:
h.poquitou hydjnw
the short form of which is spanish for 'a little bit' and is also the name of my miniature dachshund, Murphy's Poquito.

IRL my name is Dean Murphy, and you can see one of the other connections to my online name by rotating the long version above 180 deg.

BBS'ing and now Internetting is a kind of 'telepresence' experience for me, and I only expect it to get more and more that way (Esp when Geek Code C++++). And thats the rest of the name.

"That that is, is... for what is that but that? and is but is?" Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act IV, Scene 2

"Yet THAT which is not neither is nor is not That which is!" Frater Perdurabo (pseud. Aleister Crowley), Liber CCCXXXIII, The Book of Lies

[davis]

I've not got a sound reason for choosing davis, other than I just like it. Unlike most people, it's got nothing to do with my real name or any literary characters. Some of the time (notably Yahoo!), i'll be davis65536, 'cos I needed a memorable number. Sorry to disappoint :)

[Discipulus]

I remember me reading Create A New User

> Likewise, choosing "PerlNewbie" as your username is also ill advised, unless you plan on remaining a newbie forever.

I was wondering what name to choose for my first online community: I've already decided that online communities were not for me but I made an exception for perlmonks. The exception is valid after many years.

I never considered to use my real name or part of it: as above stated this comes from a puerile sentiment: I had this exactly! The alter ego on the Net was more appealing than show myself. This is puerile but it's also part of the game: mimicry is a fundamental part of games: let's pretend..

So what name to choose for myself, a middle age history student, a (sometimes international) volunteer worker, bricklayer and painter landed on the IT field for hazard? in a monastery too..

discĭpŭlus discĭpŭli noun 2nd declension masculine:

• follower, disciple
• student, pupil, trainee
The name is a forecast (nomen omen): Discipulus will never be a master. I'm here to learn, and possibly help younger than me students.

I was called Disciplus and even Disci+ but please note that -ulus is a diminutive form, in this case of discens past participle of disco (if you read Eatalian..).

L*

[PotPieMan]

PotPieMan is a name I came up with back in middle school (about 6 years ago, I think). I really like chicken pot pie (no turkey, thanks!), so PotPieMan naturally came to mind.

--PotPieMan

[djantzen]

Update: thanks to a benevolent god, I've changed from "fever" to my for real username. But for old times' sake...

The Monastery was the first place I ever used this moniker strictly speaking, although there is a history to it. It began in a discussion when I was an editor at the IU Knowledge Base regarding the examples we used on our search tips page to describe improper searches. Being a technical database, searches for course listings and basketball scores were common examples of what not to look for. We needed a change though, and our chief requested submissions for new examples. Mine were: "How much are tickets to see Def Leppard playing at Deer Creek on July 19?", and "What if I've been diagnosed with hemorrhagic fever?"

About a year later I discovered Quake 3 Arena and after becoming agitated with the atrocious spelling during chat (yes I'm a bastard like that) I changed my nick to 'Hemorrhagic Fever'. Subsequently I was referred to most often as 'Hemm' (which reminded me of a Samuel Beckett character, but not in a good way (as if there even is a good way to feel like a Beckett character!)), 'Hemurageck' (and variations), and just plain old 'fever'.

Now previous to joining the Monastery I'd tried various nicknames that meaned something important about me, but upon reflection they all seemed, well, retarded. Therefore, I chose to utilize fever here for its simplicity and nonsignificance. I wonder why I never considered 'Hemurageck' tho? :^p

Updated to correct spelling -- d'oh!

[idsfa]

It doesn't stand for anything.

[injunjoel]

injunjoel is a play on Twain's villain injun joe from
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and the Looney Tunes cartoon
"Injun Trouble" (Clampett; 1938) with Porky Pig.
I chose it since I am half "injun" so to speak (Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux for those interested) and my first name is Joel... a logical fit.

[mojotoad]

Great node, George, and thanks for the reference, demerphq.

My name is the result of a confluence of events. I was quitting a long term job and in the process of setting up a corporation-independent identity on the Net. Up until that point I mostly used my initials, 'mps', usually associated with my job (other than some BBS-era adventures as Wang Dang Doodle, etc). As a part of this process I decided to grab my own domain name.

I'd always been an avid mountain biker, but for nigh ten years I had been slogging along on the frankenstein remnants of a Schwinn High Sierra -- a bike that was okay in its day, back when the sport was still defining itself. I didn't know much about the "sport" at the time, as off-road biking was simply a natural extension of my days as a kid tooling around the Alabama trails and streets with the other neighborhood hooligans on my Mongoose BMX. Well, part mud & creek, part D&D excursions, transport was transport. Within those creeks and crannies, though, I was always on the lookout for any sort of creature I could find...snakes, salamanders, crawfish, frogs, lizards, toads, you name it. In particular I was fairly enthralled with the whole toad thing.

So, later in life, I rode the living hell out of that Schwinn High Sierra; over time, the only original part left was the frame and one sprocket. During this same time I belatedly gathered a heavy appreciation for blues and roots music with stints in Nashville and Houston, not to mention an appreciation most other sorts of music. Hence I had songs about mojo's running in my head (yes, Doors too).

About the time I was going through this migration to independence on the net, I rewarded myself with a treat. A wonderful steel-framed Ibis Mojo painted in an alarming, but gorgeous toad-green color. (picture circa 1997)

When casting around for domain names, five years ago or so (pre Austin Powers II and it's shameful abuse of the word mojo), all of it -- the toads, the blues, the need for a name -- swirled around the catalyst of my new green bike. Up from the subconscious it hopped: Mojotoad.

So after establishing the domain name, it was only a matter of time before it was adopted as my online moniker as well.

Glad to be here, fellow monks. After more than a year of travel hiatus, it's good to be back.

Matt

P.S. For the morbidly curious, if you are into mountain bikes and want to learn more about how much of a dog the Schwinn High Sierra was, there is a compulsive mountain bike catalogue collector out there. 1987 model. That should tell you why it was so heavily modified over the years, in the quest for hacked improvement of design.

[chaoticset]

I've always tried in my life to understand a little bit of everything; be as fluent as I can in many subjects; and understand as much of the things around me as possible.

At the same time, however, my memory has hindered me. My episodic memory (that of events in my life) is particularly poor, to the point that I frequently forget what month something happened. Easy things become hard this way ("I paid the phone bill...didn't I?") and as a result I sometimes learn things and forget when I learned them.

Things are moving in and out; I am a chaotic set.

The reason I came up with it is because I needed a fairly clean, fairly short, and fairly understandable name for my workplace at the time (wretched tech support farm!) and this was what came to mind.

I've used lancelot, larkspur, and seirakkha as nicks before, in chronological order, and abandoned each when the persona it projected no longer reflected who I was.

It probably won't happen with chaoticset.

-----------------------
You are what you think.

[McDarren]

Being extremely paranoid, I needed a nick that would adequately disguise my true identity. So I came up with the rather cunning plan of prefixing my real name with the letters "Mc" :)

And the real story is that Darren is a pretty boring and common name, so I'm forever running into nick collisons whenever I try to choose it as a nick|handle. So I usually fall back on McDarren or MrDarren or something similar.

The odd thing is that Darren is not (yet) taken on PM. I have no idea why I didn't use it - perhaps I just assumed that it would have already been taken. *shrug*

[&nbsp;&nbsp;]

Ahem... I'm just a little shy. That's why.

The white hole.

[Xiong]

I'm not Chinese.

When I planned to go live in China, I studied up ahead of time... for years, yes. I realized that if I did not have a Chinese name I would be given one... and I might not like it: a transliteration of my English name or a rude joke. English speakers all call me 'Bear' in meatspace. 熊 means "bear"; also, it is a common Chinese family name.

However, we are not all in the Unicode world yet, so you may not even be able to render that character properly, let alone type it. Pinyin is a system of romanization(1) in which 熊 is represented as xiong. This tells nothing about what the character means but only indicates how a putonghua speaker might pronounce it. x indicates a sound midway between s and sh and the whole is pronounced in the rising tone, as a Westerner asks a question.

In China, 熊 really is my real name. Chinese consider it so. For three years I signed contracts with my name and opened bank accounts with it. xiong means nothing but is short and unique.

(1) 北京 is the capital of China and means, logically enough, "northern capital". In the Wade-Giles system of romanization this is rendered as Peking, in the pinyin system, Beijing. It may surprise you to know that these are pronounced exactly alike.

[Maestro_007]

I was into music as a kid, and all I saw when I was a kid was Bugs Bunny cartoons where everyone was in awe over the appearance of "LEOPOLD"... he was the Maestro.

I think I had a dream when I was about 10 that "they will call me Maestro". I think I had seen Dune about 200 too many times ("They will call me Muad'Dib").

It started there. I had the first Maestro on AOL in the early 90s (maybe earlier?) up until my parents cancelled the account.

After going through all the iterations of Maestro093n4k2, I finally settled on 007 as an affix because, well, you know why I chose it...

The trouble came with Seinfeld. "He wants to be called the Maestro", "Elaine, call me Maestro!", "Oh sure, Leonard Bernstein gets to be called Maestro!".

No, wait, back up. The problem started with international chat rooms. People assumed I was an Italian teacher. I didn't know the first thing about the origins of the word Maestro. I went with it. "Sure, grazi, I am the Maestro!!" Crazy, pretentious youth that I was...

I was on a hockey team where people called me Zorro. I think it was because I was some sort of swashbuckling, elitist jerk. It didn't help when I said "you guys, could y'all just call me Maestro?" Painful, painful memories, resulting in my eventual demotion to goalie* (w/o padding).

Long story short, the name Maestro has fallen out of favor in the past few years. Tack on the ultimate delusion of grandeur (007), and we're talking an uphill battle to gain respect anywhere on the Internet.

"Why Maestro_007, why wouldn't you change your handle of ill repute, and call yourself something else? Even your middle name fer goodness sake!" My middle name is Ralph! Stigmatized by Happy Days forever! I can just hear the Breakfast Club now: "Your middle name is Ralph, as in puke!"

MM

* Goalie is fine for some people, but not when you're short, ungraceful, and your eyesight is less than optimal.

[ysth]

ysth are my initials (actually yst, but cpan won't let you use just three letters so I added another and then used the same four here). My full name is Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes; the Thoennes was mine from birth, and the Scott from my wife. Hyphenating was a last resort after we failed to pick a completely new name to share; she just wouldn't go for "Baggins". Amusingly, just a few generations back, my paternal ancestor was named Brown but adopted into a Thoennes family, while my wife's paternal ancestors were named Shwartz or some such but changed to sound more English after immigrating to England. I often get entered in brain-dead hyphenless software programs as SCOTTTHOENNES and the clerk finds the three T's in a row hard to believe.

[mildside]

A friend of mine said I looked a bit like Lou Reed. (I've never seen Lou Reed and don't know if this is true, but others have said that this is definitely not the case, so who knows?) Then he added however, that instead of 'Take a walk on the wild side', for me it would be more like 'Take a walk on the mild side'. (I guess he thinks I'm not that wild.)

Cheers!

Update: I've now looked at a few Lou Reed pics and chosen one that I think looks most like me for my home node. However, I don't think he looks very like me.

[Sweeper]

When I have first read the Perl Monks web site, I was under the impression that it was modelled like a Tibetan monks monastery. Just like Terry Pratchett's novel The Thief of Time that I had read a couple of months before that. So I adopted the name, or rather the nickname of a character of this book, the Sweeper. Actually, although he usually appears with a broom in his hands, this character is a wise man, but with a very unconventional wisdom.

By the way, I am not Jarkko in disguise. I am another Pratchett fan who happens to be also a Perl fan.

Update

I just found that there is another monk coming from Discworld: gaspodethewonderdog

[Happy-the-monk]

I've tied to use unique nicknames for over a decade, and failed. Two years ago a switched to using different nick names for almost every site. Happy The Man is a song (title and line from that song) which I like, so that was a natural one which I use elsewhere. I felt happy joining the monastery, so

Happy the monk
With the face that smiles

felt just right.

[etcshadow]

etcshadow - /et-see shadd-ow/

Name from the encrypted password file on linux "/etc/shadow". I dropped the punctuation, though.

It's Shadow, for short (not etc). If you want to think of it as a common-name / sur-name under the asian tradition, then go ahead, although that's not what it comes from. It's that it started out as Shadow, and then I later changed it to /etc/shadow... so I still think of myself as Shadow.

Origin of the name: Back in spring of '96 when Quake deathmatch alpha first came out, I played under the name "Shadow" on my dorm net. Once quake became big on the actual internet, my quake addiction became enough of a problem that I had to quit (although, the route that I took to quit was via netrek, which was actually a far worse addiction... but it was so intense that after basically dropping off the planet for two months... I had to unplug myself hard). After starting my first "real" post-graduate job in '99, my co-workers eventually wore me down and got me started on half-life (it's like waving a bottle of Jack under the nose of an alcoholic... it was just cruel). Anyway, by this point in time, the net is littered with people named "Shadow", and, instead of just being belligerent about it ("I've been playing on the net as 'Shadow' since there were only about 100 people playing on the net, you jackass!"), I decided to change the name to "/etc/shadow". It seemed a good way to go, since I'm a linux lover. This led to the lamest on-line taunt of all time: "you don't even know what the /etc/shadow file is!" Wow. All I can say is... wow.

Why Shadow, to begin with? Well, for one, it's a decent sounding moniker for gaming. Specifically, though, it's because I'm somewhat nocturnal, and used to write a lot of poetry with heavy night/shadow imagery. I know it's silly, but in highschool everyone thinks they're a poet.

Anyway, it's a lame history... but what is really in a name? Would not a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

[kutsu]

kutsu can mean pain or anguish, and was given to me by my friends because: a) I'm in a martial art which bases it techniques on pain b) I like to cause pain c) I have a constant head ache. I'm off to find some asprin.

Update: Since someone meantioned it, I go by kutsu and not kutsuu because many older video games only allowed 5 characters and kutsu is technically correct.

"Pain is weakness leaving the body, I find myself in pain everyday" -me

[amelinda]

I've (finally) discovered this nod, so I suppose I should answer (since I'm not one of the 'uses my real name' folks). So that this does not become a novel, I'll try to stick to the origins of amelinda.

When I was very very young, my parents were AD&D gamers. My dad is an amazing DM. So, by the time I was 6 or so, I was playing along with them (and their group of mostly Ph.D. candidate players). I continued to play with this group throughout my childhood and adolescence. Fairly late on (just before we moved away and my dad stopped having time to play), we did a "let's play 1st level characters again for a change" campaign. Thus was born the character with the unlikely moniker 'Amelinda the Apostrophical.'¹

I use my real name², just about anywhere I can, but my next choice is amelinda. I suspect I ended up using it here because I crossed over from Everything³.

These days, I might have a hard time listing all the aliases and nicknames and handles I've used.

---

¹ Can you tell that, as an adolescent, I had a large vocabulary but didn't exactly know what they all meant?
² "real" I should say. I wasn't exactly born with this name. That is another story, however, and one that doesn't belong here.
³ Yes, Everything. I started there back in the day, before it migrated to E2.

[mikeB]

Nothing special here. First name, last initial.

Don't bother trying to find me with one of those "internet yellow pages", though. Even with my full name there are several hits, only one of them me and none of the others related :)

[seanbo]

Pretty simple. My name is Sean. My dad had a tendency to add 'bo' to mine and all my friend's names and call us by that. Mine just stuck. So, I use it pretty much everywhere...PM, ICQ, etc... It's open *MOST* places, but sometimes it's taken....annoys me when that happens, but I guess somebody else's dad is weird too.

seanbo

[Beatnik]

According to Merriam-Webster the word Beatnik means :

a person who rejects the mores of established society (as by dressing and behaving unconventionally) and indulges in exotic philosophizing and self-expression.

I believe code is my form of self-expression (I never said my self-expression was any good tho). Those that met me know I'm no hippy, altho I do have my fair collection of flashy shirts and hawaii boxer shorts.

I actually heard the word Beatnik in an episode of the Simpsons, back when I was a kid (must've been about 8 years ago). It sounded cool and I never heard of the beat-generation or Jack Kerouac before. The name stuck.
Before that I had a few silly aliasses on bulletin boards that probably died when Fido did :)

Greetz
Beatnik
... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.

[mifflin]

Mifflin, because:
In 7th grade (too many years ago) I had a History teacher that liked to do historical simulations. One of these was the Constitutional Convention of 1789 where each student played one of the delegates. I played the delegate "Coatsworth Mifflin". My friends seemed to think it was funny so they started calling me Mifflin, and it stuck. I've since used it as my 'handle' on many message boards over the years.

[Wassercrats]

I was referred to this thread twice this week, so I guess I'll add myself to it. A few years ago, had to think of a name for myself for a video game I was playing. Wasser came from my HS math teacher, Mr. Wasserman, and I might have spliced it with "democrats" for the end...or maybe I thought up "crats" on my own. It just sounds right. I'm still waiting for the name to catch on. Please consider naming your baby Wassercrats.

[jeffa]

Wow - how did i miss this thread until now?

jeffa simply stands for Jeff Anderson. However, some time ago someone asked me if it was Mexican - 'hehfey' - i guess that's what i get for associating myself with eduardo, who is of Spaniard descent. (and speaks better English than i do!)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
F--F--F--F--F--F--F--F--
(the triplet paradiddle)

[Chmrr]

I recently got wind of this node, probably for the second time or more, though I forgot most of the fun anecdotes from previous readings. Anyways, I should fill in my name space.

The "Chmmr" are a race from the Star Control series, which, excluding the third in the series, was a rather neat game. Forced to come up with a name on short notice at one point, I spelled it "Chmrr" -- and the (incorrect) spelling has persisted. Of course, pronouncing a name lacking vowels is always hard, so people seldom notice the incorrect spelling..

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^+*`^ ve^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'

[BrentDax]

Mine's pretty easy. 'Brent' is my RL first name, and 'Dax' is the name of my favorite Star Trek character. I picked it up after warnings from my parents (I started using Prodigy sometime in elementary school) that there were Scary Bad Men on the 'Net, and that I should be careful and not use my real name anywhere. It also has the added bonus of sounding like a real name. (I've actually had mail and packages and stuff sent to me addressed 'Brent Dax'--I use the name almost religiously. Of course, I've also had stuff addressed 'Don Hessel' sent to me--I have no idea how that name got associated with my address.) Somewhat unfortunately I've started using it in serious programming efforts at a time where I'm getting close to job-getting age and would probably find a bit of...prestige isn't the right word, but is the right idea...useful, so I'm considering dropping the nick on p5p and p6*.

=cut
--Brent Dax
There is no sig.

[PodMaster]

One day I was really really really really bored, have been up all night, hanging around here, writing some code, when a derek3000 came in needing some help with HTML::TokeParser, a module I've never used before (seen it, it was on my list). Having the need to parse HTML ( a part of what i was working on ), I decided I might as well learn to parse HTML.

So I took at look at derek's code, took at look at HTML::TokeParser, then read HTML::TokeParser, learned to love HTML::TokeParser and messed around with the code.

After about a half hour to an hour of intense pod reading and coding, I came up with something that solved his dilemma.

Here is the respective code that was born that night (some mine, some not, i can't remember the order it was created in)

http://crazyinsomniac.perlmonk.org/perl/misc/dereks.stuff.txt
http://crazyinsomniac.perlmonk.org/perl/misc/dereks.stuff.modified.txt
http://crazyinsomniac.perlmonk.org/perl/misc/derek.simple.txt
http://crazyinsomniac.perlmonk.org/perl/misc/derek300.txt
http://crazyinsomniac.perlmonk.org/perl/misc/derek3000.txt
http://crazyinsomniac.perlmonk.org/perl/misc/damiancpan.txt

In the midst of my reading, damian1301 stopped in and asked how one'd go about duplicating the CPAN nodelet (or something like that), and so I whipped up that while I was at it. That's how the HTML::TokeParser Tutorial was born ( a few hours later ).

I had always liked pod, even though my views on usage changed a little (__END__ versus inline, i'm an inline man now), but it's been a while since I read anything so intensly and passionately in such a short period of time.

When properly motivated, I can grok =pod with the best of them, hence podmaster. I always got a ActivePerl HTML Docs frame window open for easy reference. I use perldoc mostly for function lookups and applications. It's cause the html versions don't scroll nasty and always give me a nice overview of everything (and i love that _to_top link, yeah!)

Realizing that my new powers didn't merely enhance my old self, but transformed me into a whole new person, I created my alterego, podmaster.

Lately though, it has become my ego (and my cpanid), even though I still don't sleep some nights ;)

update: Forget ActivePerl::DocTools, Pod::Master for ever (hey, Randy Kobes loves it)

____________________________________________________
** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

[basicdez]

Wanted to jump in and explain my name as well. My first name is Desiree, which thankfully due to the gods of my world has over the course of time been shortened to dez. I am known to many by dez and only people who do not know me to well still use the name Desiree. The basic comes in with a simple explanation of the fact that I am nothing more than a WYSIWIG person. I have no hidden agendas nothing fancy and wysiwigdez never really seemed proper, plus I have a deep and personal attachment to a special piece of literature titled the "Basic Text", thus basicdez has been my logon for years (6 anyhow). Thanks for listening. Now back to researching perl.

[Louis_Wu]

Louis_Wu


I first had to think up a screen name while I was in the dorms at university. I had just connected my new computer to the network, and I had to pick a name for the PC. I decided to pick a memorable character from the recently completed Ringworld trilogy, by Larry Niven.

Then I found Slashdot, and Kuro5hin, and started to spend quite a lot of time online. I used my computer's name just for fun. To make my life easier, and because it seemed honest, I use the same nick at every site I join.

Find me elsewhere:
• Slashdot
• use.Perl
• Kuro5hin, thought I'm not there much anymore.

[ww]

ww is the monk formerly known as (pre April 05) as schodckwm which was objected to as "an invitation to typos" by several Monasterians... and which, in fact, was a result of mine own "fat fingers"....

I built and maintain schodack.org for my town (well, ya' gotta give back something besides taxes).. and concluded (wrongly, but that's another story) that schodackwm -- where "wm" was an idea of how to id "the webmaster" -- would be a fine monkly appelation.

Sad to say, my fingers betrayed me...

At least some monks who felt impelled to reference or msg me clearly wished I'd picked the TLD... but in light of further comments, I msg'ed the gods to change to something even easier to type... (and which happens to be the abbrev for my fname lname (in fact, you can pick the order that suits you) a petition which they graciously granted.
;>}

[riffraff]

Okay, here is me: I used to run a bbs for 4 years, 90-94. I went through several handles (The White Horseman, P.Opus) before I got to Riffraff. I always used to sign my messages:

Just some other...
Riffraff

It was original with me (I hadn't yet seen Rocky Horror). Then I got The Pre-History of The Far Side, when he was talking about his riffraff in the zoo sketch. I thought it was funny.

Anyway, usually I'm pretty lucky if I can get plain riffraff. I used to be [e-mail], and [e-mail] (which is still active, amazingly enough). If I can't get it, I either go for /riffraff0+/, or riffraff169 (169 is the opcode for LDA in 6502 assembly), or riffraff234 (234 is the opcode for NOP), or even riffraff0xea (0xea is 234 hex).

[extremely]

My nick "extremely" came about because my domain name is "hostile.org". :) Plus, I have a history of picking adverbs for nicknames since they are much less likely to be picked than nouns, verbs, or adjectives. In the entire list to date per the index the only other nick ending in -ly is tily... so unless there is something "ti" that you can perform something else in the manner of I think I should be safe in asserting that adverbs are rare. :)

These days I mostly use "furtively" or "furt1v3ly". I used furtively as a nick when playing first-person shooters and other online games. That one was picked because my play style is anything but furtive in manner.

[diotalevi]

diotalevi is a mispelling of Diotallevi, a character in one of Umberto Eco's books. I don't know Italian and didn't realize my mistake until months later. I kept the mispelling because it wasn't clear from google whether one 'l' was wrong or not.

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

My head is hurting, my right eye feels like it's going to pop like a mosquito drinking from an expresso addict with high blood pressure, I want to crawl somewhere damp and dark and quiet and I consider never to touch a keyboard again.

-- `/anick, after hacking all night in TPR02 Perl Golf tournament - cited in The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part I)

Leaving things to the last minute as usual, like `/anick, I golfed all night to meet the damned game deadline ... then headed off to work the next morning with zero sleep. Insanity! When I got home that night, I felt exactly as described by `/anick above!

Though we'd never met in person, `/anick and I had become friendly rivals during these crazy all night golfing duels. I remember trying to capture the essence of `/anick's quote in twenty characters, to meet the user name length limit. Sometimes typing the long name is a pest, but it's worth it because I almost never get a false positive when searching for eyepopslikeamosquito!

2023 Update: provoked by the inimitable kcott, I now use a pure emoji sig: 👁️🍾👍🦟

2024 Update: Re^2: super slow reveals the origin of the PM name harangzsolt33 (but LanX remains a mystery)

[apotheon]

apotheon (n.): 1. one who is exalted or elevated to a state of godhood. 2. an individual element of a greater, transcendent whole. 3. a scholar of the apotheonic. 4. an enlightened being.

In my case, it's a pursuit — not hubris. I think I'm the first person ever to individually use apotheon as his online alias, though, believe it or not. I rule, y'see.

Heh.

[atopolc]

I got mine from listening to the radio!

I had just finished listening to one of my favorite CDs and thought I would listen to the radio for a while. The first Song I heard on the radio was from a band that had the same lead singer as the CD I just finished listening to. I thought it would be neat to intermix the two band names and it provided an interesting nickname.

Spoiler:
'A Perfect Circle' > APC
Tool + APC ~ A + to + P + ol + C = Atopolc

[stefan k]

How could I miss this thread? Thanks to demerphq for mentioning that in this sig.
stefan k is pretty obvious: first name SPC abbrev last name (kamphausen, as you can pretty well gues from my Location and signature).

Still there is somewhat of a story.

I've been nicked 'kampi' for many years (my memory goes back to my 5th year in school; it must have been invented by whoknows in those days) and I am known by that name to several communities (like e.g. freshmeat, wer-weiss-was.de). It was just a few days before I came across PM that I met some australian person and was told that 'campy' (which is the obvious english pronounciation of kampi) or 'camp' is slang for homosexual or at least behaving that way. Disclaimer: I am not in any way against homosexuals ... it's just that I ain't one ;-)
Then I thought about it and said: well, just pronounce it correctly: cum-pee ... uhm ... yeah ... That wasn't a hit, too ;-)

So I was just in the process of generatin a new nick when I came here first and thus took a simple adaption of my real name. Now I use 'ska' (which takes the real name, too, but makes something better from it) as my username on my home machine but I need one or two more syllables before I got a good nick.

Thanks for listening :)

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion

[robsv]

$nick = lc(substr($first,0,3) . substr($last,0,2));

"Rob Svirskas" (my real name) was transformed to "robsv" to make a username on the first multi-user computer I had an account on - the mighty VAX 11/750 (which ran at a smokin' 6 MHz). I've stuck with that name ever since.

- robsv

[Molt]

I really wish I could give a good and sensible reason of why I chose this name, but unfortunately like so many of the things I do it's doomed to spiral into silliness.

There was a system I was becoming a member of, and it naturally requested I entered a name. I tried a couple, based on previous real-life nicknames (Those I quite liked, anyway) and corruptions of my surname.. all were already taken, or clashed too much with those which already existed.

Thinking "Well, it's not something I'll have to live with too long" I decided that it didn't really matter too much, so I closed my eyes and began typing with my nose for a while. After a few repetitions of this the name 'tlom' appeared on the screen, I just thought it looked better the other way round so reversed it.

This was something like seven years ago now, and it's now become very much my default username and something I have that odd fondness you get for names after a while.

I am now thankful to my nose and it's naming potential.

[beretboy]

I figured I would have to explain my username eventually. You see when I was first logging on to IRC I had a habit of wearing berets. I used the nick for a while and it stuck even after I lost my beret. I have since bought a new one and have lost it to. I am currently seeking to obtain yet another beret, which I hopefully will not lose :-( UPDATE: I found my hat! w00t!

"Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative" -Unknown

[Veachian64]

Well, the Veachian part comes from turning my last name (Veach) into an adjective. Whenever I'd write a program or something and I'd go to name it, a name like "The Veach Thingie" didn't sound right to me, but "The Veachian Thingie" did.

As for the 64, I chose it because a lot of the titles of Nintendo 64 games (and the console's name itself) seemed to just be a normal title with 64 stuck on the end for the heck of it (Super Mario 64, Pilotwings 64, Wave Race 64, etc). So I decided just to stick the 64 on the end of my nick for the heck of it too. Now that the GameCube's out though, I don't think we have to worry about that anymore.

It's important to note though that there's no space between 'Veachian' and '64'. It's a pet peeve of mine when people refer to me as Veachian 64, heh.

[sulfericacid]

Sulfericacid kind of has a history... About 9 years ago when I made my first screen name I was Acid. Eventually everyone started using that name making it hard to get it registered as an email address and as a chatroom login. That eventually changed into AcidRain which didn't take too long to discover that was just as bad as Acid was *sigh*. So I changed it to sulfericacid (intentionally spelling it wrong so no one else would have it), had this name for around 7 years now.

"Age is nothing more than an inaccurate number bestowed upon us at birth as just another means for others to judge and classify us"

sulfericacid

[blakem]

Since I'm mentioned at the top of this thread as "having shared my etymology" I suppose I probably should... (My first comment involved a long lost trumpet, not etymology)

My full name is 'Blake David Mills IV' so most of the handles I've had are some variation on: 'blakem', 'bmills', 'bdm', or 'biv' ("Blake IV" => 'biv').

I tend to associate bmills with work, since its been the login assigned to me at my past three jobs. 'blakem' is my favorite though. It was my login in college and lots of peers called me blakem both online and off. 'biv' is a short prefix I use sometimes when naming programs and such (e.g. bivnn.cgi) but is too common to use as a defining login name. I also use a scrawled biv when legal documents ask me to initialize something.

-Blake

[Aighearach]

It all started when I met an amazing geek girl. After a couple weeks, she got me to go to her internet chess server of choice, and I figured I needed a good handle, and fast. I'd been doing net chat of one sort or another for a decade, but I never had a handle I felt at home with. So, I looked around the room... her waiting for me, and asking on ICQ what was taking me so long... I grabbed a Gaelic dictionary, closed my eyes, and fingered Aighearach. And, I liked it.
--
Snazzy tagline here

[brianarn]

To be honest, I don't like the name I use, but like MrNobo1024, I use it to be consistant.

My oldest nickname at one point was Bucknut due to very odd circumstances (don't ask unless you really want to know) and I got tired of people changing the B to an F or assuming I was some perv.

Then I started working for an ISP and had to pick a 'business' ID, and they just took the first eight characters of my name. No biggie.

Then, as I went to other sites and tried to register, it kept saying that the stuff I wanted was taken, except for these eight letters.

There's only been one site where they didn't work - really wish I remembered which. heh.

=================
Brian Arnold

[premchai21]

My user name is based on "premchai", with the 21 added to (almost) guarantee uniqueness. Premchai is my middle name, which I chose to use as a name here mostly because it was uncommon. premchai21 was (and is) even less common. :-) The only disadvantage to Premchai is that it, being a Thai name, is almost always pronounced incorrectly outside of Thailand...

[submersible_toaster]

I once wrote a basic program. Literally! <boom> </boom>
Update: ..take my wife. Please.

Sorry , ... in locomotive rom BASIC on an amstrad128K , it was for generating 'random band names' using lists of nouns and verbs/pronouns - spitting out random combinations like

• running stump
• polished cabbage
etc, submersible toaster I remembered for some reason, and the hour I connected my first modem it found a use. often abrv. to sbtoaster.

[choroba]

Choroba means "disease" in Czech. When I was 14, I got glandular fever from a friend because she was infected and shared her bubble gum with me. I had to stay at home for a month, and when I returned to school, someone said, "Look, Mr. Disease is back!" And the monicker has stayed with me since.

[schumi]

Well, us people from Berne, Switzerland, are generally known to be slow, so no wonder I only just now stumbled over this node...

My last name is Schumacher, and sometime back in school (way back really...) someone started calling me Schumi. To think that the nickname that stuck to me for the rest of my school career and beyond that was created by someone I didn't even like very much. Oh well...

For all those who are either living in Europe or know otherwise about a rather famous Formula One driver called Michael Schumacher, let me make two points:


• My nickname "Schumi" was created long before he even got to drive F1-cars...
• No, I'm not related to him in any way.
With a famous namesake like this, try to find a domain name still available... :-/

So this is the rather boring history of my nick. Thanks to George Sherston for this node. As I don't have the time to read all the replies right now, this is going to be a place to come back to for some time... :-)

--cs

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. - George Carlin

[robot_tourist]

While revising for my A-Levels, I listened to Steve Lamacq a lot on BBC Radio 1 and discovered several amazing songs, like "Dogmanaut 2000" by Frigid Vinegar (the anthem of Radio 1 alternative in 1999, but not in 2000 for some reason) and of course "Robot Tourist" by a band called Ten Benson. However, I don't smoke and would never encourage it.

How can you feel/when you're made of steel/I am made of steel/I am the Robot Tourist.

[penguinfuz]

I chose the moniker "penguinfuz" shortly after getting into computers about 5 years ago. The 'penguin' part is linked to the mascot of a certain OS, while the 'fuz' part has double meaning:
1. My perception of all new things... fuzzy.
2. My favourite image of wet penguins, they just look fuzzy IMO!

[antirice]

I got my name from my neighbor, actually. He's one of those creative people who likes to make his car as ugly and obnoxious as possible, a term known as "ricing" his car. He owns what used to be a '01 Honda Accord. That was until he added a wing to the rear of his vehicle, added some euro lights, put a can on the exhaust, and added some japanese characters large enough to be seen from space and which he has no idea what they mean to both sides of his vehicle (a friend of mine who was stationed in Okinawa says it means "dog outside". ???). A note on the "can". We can all tell when he's driving somewhere within 10 miles of my house...I promise, it is that loud. Last week, he added a 200 shot of NOS. This with a slightly altered engine is not a Good Thing™. He will blow up his car...if I don't do it first.

antirice    
The first rule of Perl club is - use Perl
The ith rule of Perl club is - follow rule i - 1 for i > 1

[wazoox]

OK, my turn now, because we want this thread to last forever, right? :)
I choose wazoox because... because... someday I needed a nickname when my old email (1996) became too heavily spammed, and I thought of The Great Wazoo by Frank Zappa. Wazoo being somewhat common, I enhanced it with a terminal X :)

[count0]

I thought I'd chime in and give the (brief, probably obvious ;) background to my nick.

As I'm sure a lot of you can guess, I basically adopted it from Count Zero by W. Gibson. I started using it on dialup BBSs after I first read it, in 1990 when I was 10. Not the most creative, or original nick.. but it just kind of stuck, and is the name by which people know me =)

My less frequently used nicks (on various IRC networks) are 'strat' and 'mstrat', both abrieviations of my real name (Mark Stratman)... and usually my shell logins.

[allolex]

Mine's a Linguistics in-joke. Actually, not many linguists will get it, either, but I thought "allolex" sounded cool.

allolex < allo- 'other', lex 'word'

Actually not much of an in-joke, really. But I still think it sounds cool. Oh, and no one else could have possibly come up with it.

--
Allolex

[pernod]

My nick was generated automatically on the universtiy unix system as I started my CS degree. It is a contraction of my first first-name and an asciification of the start of my last last-name. (I think my parents thought giving me two first- and last-names was some kind of bonus...)

The contraction is entirely logical, but pernod is also the brand name of a rather well-known french aperitif of the pastis type. I had never made the connection myself, so I've hung on to this nick ever since.

The fact that I don't really like Pernod (or any type of pastis) at all is of no importance, though. I much prefer dry vermouths ;)

pernod
--
Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.

[dthacker]

It's my name. I'm also known in many circles as bluestrain. I'm actually registered here as bluestrain, but the account is apparently pointed to an email address I no longer have.

Dave

[Errto]

Meant to post here and never got around to it.

Errto isn't a real word in any language that I'm aware of. It's something that my brother and I made up when we were little and decided to invent our own little dialect of English to speak in. Errto (also spelled err-to) is kind of a generic particle. You can use it by itself or append it to some other word as a suffix. It doesn't mean anything in particular but adds emphasis to whatever comes before it.

[rattusillegitimus]

In my case, my usual pseudonym was already taken when I stumbled upon the Monastery, so I settled on my favorite fallback.

Quite a while back, in response to people making typos in my name on an online chatroom, I made the unfortunate claim that I would answer to pretty much anything. Several people immediately decided, due to my penchant for being rather blunt in my interactions, to call me the "rat bastard." The name stuck, though one person for reasons known only to herself, kept trying to change my name to "paco."

I decided to pseudo-latinize it to make it slightly less offensive, and the rest is history. When I'm feeling truly full of myself, I append "rex" to indiciate I am truly the Lord of the Illegitimate Rodents. ;)

-rattus illegitimus rex

[samizdat]

holli says that a wildesel is a wild donkey. 'Fraid my pseu is not so colorful.

Wilde is my familial, 'will-dee', from old German pronounced 'vildeh', or 'of the wilderness'. My family roots are from the old North Woods of Germany until 1838.

I work at Sandia National Labs in the US of A, which is why the extension.

and unshift 'd' for my first name, Don.

UPDATE: {tnx 4 tickle, g0n!}

Changed to 'samizdat' with meaning as linked to on home page, inasmuch as I no longer work at the Labs. Now working quite happily on a redundant embedded Linux PowerPC that manages a big blade chassis for a major computer company in Round Rock, TX.

[ilcylic]

My MonkHandle, "ilcylic" was born of an attempt to come up with a unique identifier that I'd be able to use on IRC, ICB, various 'net BBS's, and other such places requiring one, that I'd never have to worry about not being able to get, because it doesn't mean anything. I just started typing out random "username length" strings, and seeing which ones looked interesting and were vaguely pronounceable. I came up with ilcylic, though sometimes I use 'il cylic' if I'm actually signing it somewhere.

-il cylic

Section 66: Cruel, unjust, and dedicated to death.

[thunders]

i'm quite late in posting here. thunders is the last name of Johnny Thunders, my favorite punk rock guitarist of all time. I use my stage name FrankyPelvis on some forums, cause often thunders is taken.

[kwaping]

Great thread! Anyway, "kwaping" is just a made-up word. I wanted a domain right at the height of the internet silliness (1999), and all the good stuff was taken. I define it on my website as the sound a cartoon bullet makes when bouncing off a super-hero. If not taken directly from Calvin & Hobbes, the word was at least heavily inspired by it.

[giulienk]

My real name is Giulio and one of my sister's schoolmates used to make fun calling me after "American Gigolo" main character: Julian Kay. So giulienk is just an Italic way to spell it ;)

[belg4mit]

Well I suppose I should post mine here, I'd been putting it off:

I got online spring of '96. This was my senior year in high school. I had just returned from a year as an exchange student in Belgium, and had been accepted to MIT for the fall. So I chose

belge4mit.
belge (Fr. belgian), MIT (En. Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I honestly don't know why I chose 4 to join the two.

Anyways I kept the name when I arrived at MIT to make it easier for others to email me (that was the plan) but MIT restricts you to 8 chars so I lost the 2nd e. I use it now because it's more unique than 'bob'.

--
perl -p -e "s/(?:\w);([st])/'\$1/mg"

[ehdonhon]

Ehdonhon actually means "Fire" in the language of the Deleware Indians.

A while back, when I was in the boy scouts, I was a member of something called the "Order of the Arrow" which models a lot of its customs after the Deleware Indians. If there are any other fellow OA members here, they will understand what I mean when I say that Ehdonhon is one of the words in my Vigil Name.

Regards,
Ahoo Ehdonhon Edeh Hdahne

[jkva]

They're my initials... plain and simple.

[dws]

"dws" are my initials. Back when I did my serious teething (on PDP-10 assembly language), the practice was to use initials when signing code. The practice stuck. I have been, at various times and in various contexts,

DWS
/dws
dws:   (anyone remember TOPS-10 ersatz devices?)
-- dws
~dws/

I tried for dws.org, but the Dallas Wind Symphony beat me to it. Better them than me, I suppose.

[strat]

Somewhen in 1995, I needed a nickname for IRC. As I liked to play with my E-guitar (a Fender Stratocaster) very much, my nick became Strat, first on IRC, and then in RL, too, when I got to know more and more people from IRC.

A short explanation is also on my homenode...

Best regards,
perl -le "s==*F=e=>y~\*martinF~stronat~=>s~[^\w]~~g=>chop,print"

[Anomynous Monk]

I'm Anomynous Monk because someone beat me to the more clever Anonyrnous Monk. And then never even logged in!

[Elderian]

So many names, so many stories...

So you might want to read another: mine!

Once i needed a name for an Pen&Paper-RPG character*. It ought to be elven and a knight, and i hated names taken from books/films/games, i tried to figure out a new one. At those days i played Fallout, a great computer RPG, where there were some characters called "The Elders". I tried to make a male name out of it, and, viola: Elderian (which sounded quite elven to me and my friends).

Later on i discovered, that elderian was an english word... but it seems to bee very uncommon, as well as my nick.

Due to bad jokes and a little spelling mistake of mine, a female version is also available: Elderina :/

Elderian

* for those who want to know: The RPG-System is Earthdawn, and Elderian is right now a cavalier in the 7th circle, lightbearer and member of the "children of the passions" ("kinder der passionen" for german speaking folks, try googling! ;)

[liverpole]

Mine is simply an anagram, as I state on my home node.

If you need a hint, it's this: its meaning applies to virtually everyone who comes to Perl Monks.

And congratulations to George_Sherston for having started this fascinating node.  It has been around since long before I joined, but is still going strong...

[snapdragon]

I'd love to be able to say that my alias is significant and says something meaningful about me... something like "in my past life I was a dragon" or "I really like playing snap".

Unfortunately the nick came about when I was eating a sesame snap whilst think of a nick to use. And as 'sesame' is a bit difficult to spell (well for me anyway) I kept the 'snap' part and tagged a 'dragon' on (cos it sounded better than just plain snap).

Kinda boring really.

[cacharbe]

cacharbe

Charles A Charbeneau

It was my first login handle while in college, and it
stuck. I still have friends that call me "Ka-Shar-Bee"
*shrug*. I've gone by others, but they just didn't "feel"
right.

C-.

[Putzfrau]

The story of my name is usually a long one told over a few pints of beer. So i'll keep it short and sober this time. Roughly 3 years ago, when i first started college, I moved in with some frineds of mine from high school. One was a slob, the other attended a German class, and the last one(me) tried to maintain somewhat hygenic conditions. Being the one with the highest standard of orderliness... I ended up doing most of the cleaning.

Half way through that year my friend who attended German class started calling me "PutzFrau". Which to my suprises, is supposed to mean "Cleaning Lady" in German. Woe is me. At first it was an insult, but later i adopted it as my gaming name, as a symbol of the shit I had to clean up, for our friendly games of CS. And since then i wear the title with pride.

I've been told that this meaning is incorrect. But I dont care. In my mind those times will ever be known as the age of....
"Das Eisen Putzfrau"
"The Iron Cleaning Lady"

"The way of the Hacker, the Way of the Sword and the way of Zen are identical, for they have the same purpose - that of killing the ego." -- Adapted from Yamada Jirokichi

[jynx]

i've debated signing on as jynx_d_mouse for the purposes of this post, but have eventually decided against it. i will still explain the mouse bit though (since that's where you'll find me in most other places)...

First of all, jynx comes from way back when i was first starting junior high. The person i was carpooling with and i got along great for the first few weeks, and then things exploded. We started calling each other names. Eventually he realized that a bastardization of one of my names (not mentioned here to support anonymity) was the word 'jinx'.

The following year he left, but my nickname stuck. Except that instead of being dirty it was used as a pseudonym, and my friends used it frequently in good sport. When i went to highschool i tried to keep it, but to no avail. So it got shoved in the background. Then when i got to college i started getting into computers and my online moniker became 'jynx'. The explicit typographical error was to display that the name has become my own instead of the insult that it was originally intended. When making usernames for new accounts i always try jynx first, and if that's taken i use jynx_d_mouse.

Mouse came later during college, when i discovered that my favorite author is Dostoyevsky. The man is genius (but i'm biased). In particular in Notes From Underground he states what defines a man as a mouse. At the time i fit the description perfectly. i would like to say i still do, but things have been changing, so i don't know at the moment. i'll have to reread it and rethink it and find out soon...

nuf evah,
jynx

PS A fairly complete listing of those who have registered their name space can be found here on my perlmonk.org account (thank you, jcwren!)...

[shadox]

For me, my nick was the result of a lot of your username is already taken! in a lot of sites ( including this :), with the username shadow, so i wanted to add something to shadow or change something, so after a few coffee cups i did decide to change the w for a nice X, and the result was my actual PM and some other sites username.

---

Dreams they just disapear into the shadows,
then they become true....

---

[QM]

[wil]

Very boring and unimaginative here - Wil is my real first name.

Of course this is short for Wiliam. I only have one L in my name, however, as this is the Welsh spelling. It's actually a pretty unique name as most people have already nabbed the William' and the Will' but I often find that I'm the only Wil (with one L) on many sites, and systems. Although this is not my CPAN name as CPAN quibbles if you try and register a PAUSE userid that is less than 4 characters :-\

- wil

[schweini]

mine is relatively simple:
when i got hooked up to the internet the first time (back in greece...awww..i owe a lot of knowledge to the guys at magnet.gr), the admins decided to use the first 8 chars of my last name as a login. my last name is "von Schweinitz", and since the "von" is considered a title (sometimes - it's rather complicated!), they took the "schweini", and it kind stuck.
if you ever see a german speaking monk or cybernaut snickering at my handle, then you maybe interested in the fact that "schwein" is german for "pig".
just imagine how bored i am of stupid jokes about my last name.
every freakin' day.
but, actually, "schweini" could be read as "piggy", which makes the whole thing at least a bit cute (especially since i'm 2.05m tall).
what bugs me a lot is that there's this other "schweini" lurking around in the 'net somewhere...but some research turned out that his real last name is "schweinichen", which sounds even more ridiculous in german, so he's excused. :-)

[nimdokk]

I've used the screen name 'nimdokk' for since about 1996 or so (things have gotten a bit hazy after all this time). It originated with the character "Nimdok" from Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream." For some reason when I went to sign up with that name, it wasn't accepted so I added an extra 'k' to the end of it and that was that.

[Diakoneo]

Sorry to toss a three year old thread back up on top, but this was a really great read at 4:30 AM CST.

I am starting to give up on the banal practice of nicknames and am going back to the historically banal naming scheme and using my real name in my e-mail usernames. However, Diakoneo has some meaning to me.

I play an on-line WWII massive-multiplayer game. When I first started, I was slogging through the usual nicks trying to find a decent one, when I saw that 'Pippin' hadn't been taken. Tired of searching for more, I grabbed it. I worked my way up through the ranks (RAF Commander then BEF Theater Chief of Staff) but eventually an opportunity at my church ate up all my time. So I dropped out of the High Command entirely and decided I needed a clean break.

Thinking on my real life position, I came across the Greek word "Diakoneo", which (at least in Biblical New Testament terms) means 'One who serves'. It's never taken on any of the boards I frequent, so I'm going to hold onto it until I completely give in the the 'first initial/first name - full last name' method of signing in.

Diakoneo
Programming n00b
Even n00b-ier to Perl

[DrHyde]

DrHyde comes from illiteracy. <mumble> years ago I needed a nick for the high score table of a video game. I chose DrHyde. I meant DrJekyll. Oops.

[Chainsaw]

In my case, my nick name become after a trip that I make with some buddies to the beach. Where for a certain reason it says that I evolve of a hand saw to one Chain saw. So I just join the words and BINGO my nick name has been born.



---

God help me always to see the other face of the coin. And prevent me from accusing of betrayal those who don't think just as I do.

[feloniousMonk]

feloniousMonk is my homage to Thelonious Monk. He was one of the creators of BeBop
a new breed of jazz.

And why not just use his name? Well, when I was a child and heard his name I thought people
were calling him Felonious. So it stuck with me,

My second choice was GregorMendel but tho I like genetics I'm not that fond
of peas :-)

-felonious--

[xmath]

hmm, in my case 'math' (both an interest and more-or-less the first syllable of my first name, "Matthijs") was in use when I first went on IRC, so I prefixed an 'x'.. and it stuck :-)

[zetetes]

Zetetes is taken from a philosophical book which deals with trivial questions such as
- is there faith in life?
- what is time?
- what is space?

as far as i remember 'zetetes' is greek and means something like 'the seeker'. even if i'm not that much seeking than i once was, i'm fine with it...

[ciderpunx]

cider cos i like good cider
punk cos i like punk rock music
It also sounds a bit like cyberpunk which made me smile
punx - I used to be ciderpunk, but I thought the x was more rock'n'roll ;-P

[Necos]

Well, after careful discussion (read: butt-kicking from demerphq), I've decided to explain what madness the name Necos came from.

When I was in high school (Los Angeles High), I was on the school's Academic Decathlon team (1998). While studying for the events, our coach would read some of the literature with us. Since he has a wierd accent, sometimes words come out wrong. One day, he was reading the word "second" (sek-und) and said secon-d (se-kun-d). The whole team laughed, and we went on with the group study session. Sometime later, I found myself making a similar pronunciation blunder: saying secon (see-kon) instead of second. As a result, when I first signed up for a Hotmail account, I used secon (in the end, secon_kun) as my account name. However, when I went on IRC for the first time, Secon was already in use. Thinking quickly, I switched the S and the n, making the name Necos. Since then, the name has stuck with me (including names for characters in Diablo/Diablo2).

Other names that I go by are:

Tessai, Secon, [RnK]Tessai, [CSUN]Tessai.

The last two names being the name Tessai with [RnK] (the name of a group of long-time friends (read: extended family)) and [CSUN] (the university I attend, www.csun.edu) stuck in front.

Just in case anyone was wondering where the name "Tessai" came from, it's a character in an anime (YES!!! I love anime!) called Ninja Scroll. Some friends and I, during high school, were watching it one day, when someone commented: "Hey, Tessai reminds me of Theo!" This, was, of course, stemming from the fact that I was the only 5'11" person they knew at the time. I always thought that the name suited me (ogre-ish looking black guy), so, like Necos, it has stuck with me.

Theodore Charles III
Network Administrator
Los Angeles Senior High
4650 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019
323-937-3210 ext. 224
email->[e-mail]
perl -e "map{print++$_}split//,Mdbnr;"

[zeno]

I learned about the philosopher Zeno of Elea from Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. He was famous for coming up with several paradoxes. Here's a neat one:




"In a race in which the tortoise has a head start, the swifter-running Achilles can never overtake the tortoise. Before he comes up to the point at which the tortoise started, the tortoise will have got a little way, and so on ad infinitum. -- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy"

He had a related paradox which stated that motion was inherently impossible. I like using this one when my wife wants me to empty the trash or something else which requires movement.

--
Zeno - Barcelona Perl Mongers http://barcelona.pm.org
http://www.javamonks.org

[roho]

Mine is a nickname from from my teen years, when I drove my older brother around (after he lost his license for racing) and hung out with his friends. They apparently thought my real name was too bland, so they called me "roho". I spell it phonetically, knowing that the proper spelling is "rojo", but I've always had trouble transliterating the "j" sound to the "h" sound.

On a personal note, much later when my brother's wife was in an assisted care facility with advanced dementia, I went to visit her. My brother and his children said she no longer recognized anyone, not even them. I sat down beside her and said, "Hi Linda, it's roho." She immediately perked up and said, "Oh, hi roho!" *** The power of nicknames ***

[abaxaba]

Cool Thread!
I'm what some might term a deadhead, and one of the early studio albums of the Grateful Dead was titled "AOXOMOXOA". It's kinda a two-way palindrome (VOXOWOXOV being its vertical mirror image), so I thought it was pretty cool.

Abaxaba is just a derivative of that.


ÅßÅ×ÅßÅ "It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead." -- Kurt Vonnegut

[CountZero]

Well, CountZero comes from the second novel in the William Gibson "cyberpunk" trilogy (Neuromancer; Count Zero; Mona Lisa Overdrive). So many years ago I started using it, but on most message boards it is already taken. I was most surpised that it was still available on Perlmonks.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

[Rex(Wrecks)]

Hmm, in my early net days I could get on anywhere as Rex, at the time it was cuz I liked to Wrecks things :)

Rex also happened to be the name of my favorite sci-fi assassin character as well as my favorite fantasy assassin character, so it worked out well.

As the net became populated it got very hard to use Rex, and I got really sick of using #'s behind it, so I type my name like a dictionary now :)

"Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!

[t'mo]

tha' mighty one

[Basilides]

Oh, well, when I first came across the monastery, I didn't know how seriously people would take this whole monk thing. And I'd been reading a lot about Basilides, a gnostic heresiarch from Alexandria in the first century--Borges mentions him a little, as does Jung. Anyway, imagining that I ought to call myself something religious-sounding (how wrong that assumption turned out to be), but being personally a bit squeamish about giving myself an actual biblical name, I settled on Basilides.

[Notromda]

As I just found this node, I will chime in as well. My name is David Morton; in college they automatically assigned me a username of mortonda. surprisingly, this is occasionally already taken, so I decided to mangle it a bit; reverse the "morton" part, and add "da": Notromda

Actually, I think it looks pretty cool; though I may be the only one who thinks so. I'm weird that way. That's ok. :)

Move along, there's nothing to see here.

[Theo]

Adding my drop to the ocean:

Theo is short for:
Theodore: what my Mom yelled when I was in trouble.
Theophilus: the recipient of St Luke's Gospel (meaning 'one who loves God')

-ted-

[Tomte]

Quoting from pantheon.org

A tomte (tomten) usually lives at farms in Sweden. If he is treated with respect he can be very helpful. Tomten is very proud and sensitive. If you make fun of him or in any other way treat him disrespectfully, he will most certainly punish you. An "accident" can happen to you, the cows will give sour milk or the harvest will fail.

In fairly modern times people are suposed to give him a white porridge made of rice on a plate outdoors. Closely related to tomten is vätter and huldra, but they usually do not live that close to humans.

It is also the Swedish word for Santa-Claus.

A friend of mine, learning swedish and visiting sweden quite often, started calling me tomte way back ... hmmm I can't remeber, maybe 1989/90...the name somehow got stuck in my brain and I use it as monicker whereever the 'net wants a name from me...Where the name is taken, I change the spelling one way or another (tomten, tomteX, [tomte],...).

As a matter of fact, I can be very helpful if treated respectfuly, but I'm not that particular interested in eating rice outdoors :-)

[muba]

MUBA

Well, it's a long story. First of all, the name doen't mean a single thing. Once upon a day, I was about to go play Quake II online and I was in need of a new nickname. Suddenly, out of the blue, "[MUBA]Muppet" popped up. Again, it didn't mean anything, but it sounded ok to me so I adopted the name. Then I joined a clan (for the uninitiated: a group of players that operate together in clanwars, i.e. online team battles) and they forced me to get rid of the [MUBA] part. I became [QiT]Muppet but that was a rather annoying name, so I changed the Muppet part to MUBA: [QiT]MUBA and ever since, my nickname is MUBA.

Update: Replaced all occurences of [ and ] with &#91; and &#93;

[dmmiller2k]

Whenever I've needed a login somewhere, I've always preferred [what I've thought of as] the UNIX terse philosophy, in which one's initials (in my case, 'dmm') were one's login name. As a consultant, I've found, however, that nearly every potential client has their own scheme for internal email and logins, nearly none of which would accept 'dmm'. I've been 'dmiller', 'dmmiller', 'millerd', etc.

Of these, I started to prefer 'dmmiller' since 'dmm' is sort of a prefix and I can never seem to keep my fingers from typing the second 'm', and there's slightly less chance of a name clash than with 'dmiller'. In 1999 (when many of my colleagues -- other software developers -- were consumed in varying amounts with Y2K issues), I happened to try signing up for some web-based service, which wouldn't accept 'dmmiller' (already taken!). In frustration, I appended '2k' and it was accepted.

Since then, I've used 'dmmiller2k' it more or less everywhere; using anything else would be just one more new thing to remember...

dmm

[blazar]

I chose my nick quite a few years ago in an instant of auto-exaltation (as you can clearly see following the link) after having read the term in a popular science mag. It has stuck since then, so I've not had much opportunity to really regret the choice, period. But then also see the remark in my home node.

As a minor side note I prefer it to be pronounced like if it were in Italian, than as in the original English version. Also, since "blazar" is still too long, friends often abbreviate calling me "blaze", but as I said I don't like that and then I prefer to interpret it too like if it were written in Italian, i.e. "bleiz".

That's all folks!

[Juerd]

"Juerd" is a Frisian first name. It is not my official name, though. A more detailed explanation can be found on my site: http://juerd.nl/site.plp/name.

[castaway]

Like some others, my name also started out being a character in a MUD (started 1993, still playing various ones). I chose it at the time because Stings 'Message in a bottle' was going through my head.. And thats why my .plan in MUD is usually:


Just a Castaway
An island lost at sea
Another lonely day
No-one here but me
More loneliness
Than anyone could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair.

So there you go.. And nothing whatsoever to do with a certain Tom Hanks film, who should be paying me copyright ;)


- Plain old 'Jess Robinson' in RL -


C. (or 'Lady C.' or 'Castaway')

[Cowbert]

Ya. So in 1995 or so, I was introduced to the wide world of IRC and needed a nick. Now, at this time the reason why ended up on IRC was because I had started working on RC5-56 with the folks at distributed.net. At the time, I was an avid reader of Scott Adams. Because the RC5 project was also known as the Bovine RC5 project at the time, and cows were definately cool, I realized that Dilbert(tm) was missing a character. There was Dilbert, Dogbert, Catbert, Ratbert, and Bob but no ruminants, so I decided to spin off a new character called Cowbert.

[Dog and Pony]

"Dog and Pony" obviously comes from the expression "Dog and Pony show", which usually means something that doesn't really do anything, but looks really fancy, and thus is showed to customers and management so they will be impressed. And usually demand that you release this "product" next week.

The reason why I did pick it isn't because I like those shows though. :) It comes from this poem, which did, and still does, comfort me at times when salespersons and management promises stuff that they know nothing about.

Furthermore, it wasn't really my intention to use such a name, I just created an account at slashdot, and later here, and now I am starting to get used to it. It works for me. Although I probably should have made it "dogandpony" to not upset traditionalists, the everything engine seems fine with usernames with spaces in them... so I see no reason to change or start over. :)

---

You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

[webfiend]

I got mine from my resumé. Really, I did!

In a world dominated by "web masters", "web wizards", "web warriors", and "web ninjas", it seemed like a good idea at the time. "Fiend" properly illustrates the unhealthy addiction (think "crack fiend"), and isn't quite as macho as everybody else's. Plus, it provides an easy screening. The companies I don't want to work for are just going to throw away my resumé rather than talk to a fiend ;-)

"All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."-- Mark Twain

[redsquirrel]

redsquirrel is a shortened version of my web design/development company, Red Squirrel Design. So where did we get that name, you ask?

In college, I acquired the nickname 'squirrel' after telling my roommates about my recurring dreams of being a squirrel. I miss those dreams...I also have a habit of climbing trees, jumping off of rocks and I generally find it impossible to walk down the street without catching some air, although nowadays I ride to work on my Xootr.

We got 'red' from the fact that my brother and I both have red hair.

But my real name is...
--Dave

[dada]

Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.

-- Tristan Tzara, circa 1920.

cheers,
Aldo

Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is absurd. Long live Dada. -- op.cit.

[Kage]

The origins of Kage:

I orginally made this name back some 5 or 6 years ago, when I used to do text MUDing, or Role-Playing. I then moved to chat-room MUDing, where I ditched the name, used miscellaneous others, then moved back to Kage. The name was taken so I took on the name of Kage Konjou, which, in Japanese, means Shadow Spirit. I role-played randomly, then finally slowed to a stop, since I had done just about everything considerable in Role-Play, and also, around that time, left the (GOOD) hacking society, which left some notoriety to my name.

So now, here I am, Kage.

---

“A script is what you give the actors. A program is what you give the audience.” ~ Larry Wall

[Jenda]

I feel silly using my real first name as a nick after reading all those descriptions. Anyway ... it's not just a first name. My official first name is Jan, which is one of the most common names in Czech lands. But luckily my parents did not use the usual spoken form of the name "Honza" (comes from German "Hans"), but Jenda. And outside the family I was the only Jenda I knew. Felt good among all those Honzas.

When I subscribed to the Perl-Win32 mailing list we were two "Jan"s there. Me and Jan Dubois. So again I signed as Jenda. And it was natural to use it as a CPAN id. (I scaned the list of registered CPAN ids at that time for people from .cz domain and found only two more. Both were named Jan. But luckily JENDA was still free.

Being a Czech name Jenda is not often taken on US based servers so I can use it as a nick most of the times. If I can't JendaPerl is always free ;-)

Jenda

[elbie]

I've had my rationalization on my homenode since almost my first day here:

It's the end result of an evolving nick. I got tired of everyone fighting over l33t handles on irc and started using LittleBoy, back when humility was still good for something. Unfortunately, after a while, it also seemed to be taken frequently by others (although IIRC, irc truncated nicks, so maybe the other guy was LittleBodacious or something bizarre). I tried just LB for a while, which was easier to type, but even less available. So I started spelling it out phonetically. Hence El-bie.

elbieelbieelbie

[arturo]

How boring is this?

Being a member manqué of the Mystic Order of Arachnid Vigiliance, (ferventer vestite!), but also wishing to be non-obvious, I picked the name of the City's most noted defender's sidekick, and Italianized/Spanishized it.

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of integrity -- F. Nietzsche

[thraxil]

'Thraxil' is a very minor character in an obscure sci-fi book that i once randomly picked out of my dad's bookshelf and read.

the book is 'Stress Pattern' by Neal Barrett Jr. written in 1974. the basic plot is that a space traveller crash lands on a desert planet inhabited by dull, stupid little creatures whose society is based entirely on uniformity and conformity (the book is a pretty thinly veiled commentary on communism/totalitarianism). Thraxil is a sad, misshapen creature living as a hermit outside the village after being cast out for being different. while ostracized and reviled, Thraxil is clearly an enlightened being, showing greater curiousity and intelligence than his peers.

Tall. In Places. One arm short and powerful. One gaunt and bony. The left hand stubby and multi-fingered, the right long, slim, tapering to a single digit. Legs equally varied. His face was an egg crushed in the middle and hurriedly patched. A nose that began as a stub, angled off into the beginnings of a beak, then gave the whole thing up, and fell off into a snout. One eye grossly larger than the other. A mouth full-lipped on one side, a gap on the other. His head and body were covered with random patches of hair. He was dun, beige, khaki, brown, or umber--depending upon where you looked. He'd made a sorry mess of the sex problem. The less said about that the better.

Poor bastard, i thought. He was stuck together as if he'd never quite decided what he wanted to be. Nevertheless, I followed him into the hut, thinking, ironically, that he had the friendliest smile on the planet.

...

I was filled with sudden pain for this creature. He was the ugliest, most grotesque being i had ever seen. But that was on the surface. There was no ugliness inside. Phretci and the others might be too detached from the world to care. But Thraxil knew there were places to go, and questions to be answered. And that's why the eyes filled with anguish. He sensed whatever was there was beyond his reach.

[5mi11er]

Twas the search for a universally available username that resembled my very common real name.
   Scott Miller -> smiller -> 5mi11er.

-Scott

[enoch]

I am mostly a lurker here, but I figured I would respond.

Enoch is the name of the 7th son of Adam. He was mostly famous for writing two books that are not included in the King James translation of the Bible (the text of the books can be found here. He is, also, one of the few people who "walked with God" and did not die; rather, was assumed into Heaven (according to the Bible).

So, a long time ago on BBS's, I needed some kind of moniker. At that time, I was studying religion and had encountered this small facet of the Christian belief. So, as unspectacular as this story is, I chose 'Enoch.' And, I've kept it around and use it as my nick pretty much everwhere.

There you have it.

Jeremy

[DrFish]

DrFish is a 'ghost in the machine' AI in Pat Cadigan's excellent cyberpunk novel 'Synners'.

Coincidentally, (it was a coincidence - I asked) in some old unix user manuals (Sys V manuals IIRC), the supplied games are listed in alphabetical order, listing 'Doctor' and 'Fish' together.

[pjf]

Why pjf? Well, it's quite simple really. When I started studying at The University of Melbourne some seven years ago, pjf was the UNIX login name that was assigned to me, quite simply because they were my initials. Since I was so used to entering pjf when presented with a login prompt at University, it became my preferred name for just about everything -- home network, CPAN, work, games, and so on. I know that I'm not the only monk here who has the same name as their initial University of Melbourne login. :)

For those interested in history, my previous "psuedonym" up until that point was "Loony", or more often "The Loony". This was really only used on Melbourne BBSs in the late 80s and early 90s, and was due to a comment made in relation to a conversation I was having with the house-sitter of my first BBS, The Real Connection. I'm still often called "Loony" by many of my friends who I've known from that time, even though the dial-up BBS scene is pretty much dead.

All the best,

Paul Fenwick
Perl Training Australia

[pne]

My etymology isn't that exciting, either; my company gave out IDs that were usually three letters long, consisting of substr(lc $firstname, 0, 1) . substr(lc $lastname, 0, 2); hence, "Philip Newton" turned into "pne".

This was my login on all the Unix boxes as well as the Novell (later NT) network. So far, I'm generally in luck and can use that username on Internet sites as well, except when it's taken (fairly rarely) or they have a minimum length requirement, in which case I usually go by boring things such as 'pnewton' or 'philipnewton'.

My AIM screen name 'mizinamo' is more interesting, though :)

[petemar1]

petemar1 = Marc Peters The designation "petemar1" comes from the user naming system defined by the Illinois Institute of Technology. The rule was: produce a seven-letter username from the first 4 letters of the last name, and the first 3 letters of the first name. If the username already exists, then add a numeral to the end of the username, beginning with "1" for the second user with the same name, "2" for the third user with the name, "3" for the fourth, and so on. Thus, "Marc Peters" becomes "petemar1," the second user to hold the "petemar" designation. I am not the first, nor am I the last.

[Agyeya]

Agyeya comes from Sanskrit, the only scientific language.
The name means "Beyond Comprehension".
That is, all the knowledge of the world, put together is not enough to understand this person, or falls short to comprehend him.

[data64]

I have been using data64 for few years now and I tend to register at most places using this nickname.
My name is derived from the android Data in Star Trek TNG. The 64 comes from an inside joke and has to do with 64 bit processors.

[dash2]

I read all of MoaFHM and never realised it was fictionalized at all... how stupid of me! Not sure about the poetry though, I think Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg have more class.

Anyway, I'm dash2 for a very mundane reason: it was my login at university, and using the same login everywhere saves memory in my head. Otherwise I would probably be something much funkier.

dave hj~

[defjukie]

I think my personal node pretty much explains it--- I am a "defjukie" because of my love of hip-hop, in particular the NYC label: Definitive Jux. This label is a vaccine for those infected with intense mental torture at the uninspired state of much modern hip-hop.

peace out

[f00li5h]

Expectation Management.

[Kit]

Okay, I'll chime in. Kit is just a shortened version of kitten, which an ex-boyfriend used to call me(no I won't tell you why;)) and the name just stuck. Sorry for the first post as Anonymous Monk, I thought I was logged in. Kit

[Fengor]

Well i just wanted to add my name to this list :-p

Fengor dates from my early role-playing days. Since most of my experience in that region was from Tolkien books at these days i used them to create a character name for me. But i didn't want to just simply take a name out of the book (a bad habit of many new role players ;-) so i made a name up by combining two other names. Namely: Feanor and Fingon.
These are two very different charcters and over the years fengor inherited some of both into his character.

This was how i came up with the name fengor, who is btw one of my oldest and most liked characters :-)

--
"WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR IF NOT THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN"
-- Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"

[hardburn]

I'd like to know just what the frell I was thinking when I started using this nick. Not just here, but the first time I used it on any site. It's primarily used for gaming, but I started using it as my nym on any site (with my CPAN ID being one of the few exceptions). I have no idea why I started using it, except that "hardburn" sounded like a really cool gamer's nick back in high school. Most high school kids think sniffing a mushroom is cool, so I guess I'm not too bad for merely having silly nym.

I've thought about changing it from time to time, but it has kinda taken on a life of its own after seven years or so of using it.

[bibo]

BIBO is the name of my favorite alarm clock (if there could ever be such a thing).

Archie McPhee sells them, and the prose describing bibo's origins are almost better than the hideous noise it makes. My real name is bill, and I have used bilbo in various incarnations as a name for years. Then I decided I needed to make a change, and it's only one letter different! Easy to remember when it's 4:30AM and sleep seems so far away...

and it's only 4 letters, and since I'm also a C programmer it seems appropriate. Like the quote about how a C programmer would spell "terse" trs

cheers

bibo

[tjh]

Oddly enough, since I first discovered the net via The Well, then, the 'very advanced' CompuServe, (very early 90's) this is the only nick I've ever used, on any public system, that was based on my name. (A couple of work-related systems required otherwise)

I wonder if I had a mid-life identity crisis and missed it...

[blue_cowdawg]

I took the name blue_cowdawg as a reflection of the breed of dog that I am very much into. the Australian Cattle Dog. In particular my favorite variety of ACD is the blue merle variety that gets tagged with the moniker "Queensland Blue Heeler"

The ACD is a breed of dog that takes a very special kind of personality of human just to live with them. They are very active dogs, highly intelligent and if they are not kept busy they will get themselves in all sorts of trouble just sorting out what they should be doing.

If you train an ACD wrong they will do what you've trained them to do exactly wrong as you trained them without making a "mistake" in how you trained them. They are fiercly loyal to their handlers (owners) and have a lot of drive. They are aloof to (and often downright suspicious of ) strangers but once they warm up to you they will remember you as "friend" until you do something to change that.

My own personality is somewhat akin to the ACD. I'm very loyal to the few folks I call friends. Tend to hold people at arm's lengthy until I feel they are trustworthy and while I may forgive a wrong I won't forget it happened for a long long time. Like my favorite breed I tell folks all the time that my hands being idle are a very dangerous thing indeed.

Why Blue Cowdawg? And why Dawg and not Dog?

I like the sounds of Dawg so Dawg it is. Blue because I do that in memory of a dog that I lost three years ago who was a blue heeler.

---

Peter @ Berghold . Net

Sieze the cow! Bite the day!

Nobody expects the Perl inquisition!

Test the code? We don't need to test no stinkin' code!
All code posted here is as is where is unless otherwise stated.

Brewer of Belgian style Ales

[Shinwa]

Shinwa Komoto Okami

Shinwa is translated into "Legendary" from Japanese.
Komoto is the family name of Shinwa Okami from "Shadow of A Dream"
Okami is translated into "Wolf" from Japanese.

This name is going on about...four to five years now. It was created as a way of dealing with a major mental breakdown after the suicide of a loved one. From this name came a book, and soon,a Perl-based RPG.

The name Shinwa has always been attached to me in some way or form. Those around school, work, and home even call me Shinwa or Shinny from time to time. Everything in my life has usually had the name associated to it. Be it in school work, gaming, programming, writing, or the arts. I doubt I could ever really give up the name for another, as it is in a sense, a way of rememberance for my own reasons.


Rest in peace Michelle...

[secret]

i can't tell : it's a secret :)

I chose it because I like 'word based' logins and because I think it's nice to keep some things secret : secret treasure, secret love, secret hideout ... I like it also because it sounds pacific, unlike many things and atitudes online.

[stefp]

My first name is Stéphane. The diminutive is stef. I called my host zweig in the honor of one of my favorite author. My mail address was [e-mail]. So it was almost prononcable as "stefan Zeig". this was in 89, so it predates the lame stef of userfriendly

And I can prove it. if your follow the link, note that merlyn voted no.

I use stefp here because I lost the info about my first account thas was indeed stef.

-- stefp -- check out TeXmacs wiki

[Popcorn Dave]

My nickname is fairly simple to explain. I work for my inlaw's company who make popcorn snacks, and a lot of people that I delivered to in my earlier years called me "Popcorn Dave" so that just kind of stuck.

Not the most engrossing story, but there it is. :)

Some people fall from grace. I prefer a running start...

[benizi]

My real name's Ben(jamin).

My best friend in junior high was into hip-hop, and one day during the ride to school, he busted out with "Benizi fo sheezy cuz he's off da heezy". This was back in '93, long before Snoop's shizzle dialect, a lot closer to Bop.

It stuck and is currently my nom préféré for online stuff, including my website www.benizi.com.

[jeorgen]

My first name is Jörgen. That nick is usually already taken by a Swede or German and if not, it doesn't work because of the dots over the "o". But you're clear of the German Jürgens and Jörgs anyway,not to mention the Hungarian Györgys.

So then you can go for "jorgen" which is usually taken too, because then you get to compete with those annoying "Jřrgen" from Norway and Denmark as well. So then go for transcription of "Jörgen" to English which gives "joergen", which is usually taken too. for the same reasons. But "jergen" in English would probably be a better pronounciation, but alas, that is a name taken by the Russian Jergens. Last ditch attempt, reverse the o and the e in joergen and you get jeorgen, which is almost never taken, yeeeh!

However a search on Google shows there are Brazilians by that name...

/jeorgen

[jerrygarciuh]

I choose to let the origins of my moniker remain shrouded in their vast and cabalistic shadows. jerrygarciuh

[zby]

zby is just first three letters from my first name. I have been using it as a user name in computer systems since my university years.

[hok_si_la]

Hello,

Originally I thought hoksila was the word 'boy' in the Aztec language Nahuatle. I found out later that many southern Indians used this word, and that it was not specific to the Aztecs. I came into a fascination of the culture after readings Gary Jenning's two Aztec books. Yes, you read that right, two. The third was not written by him, rather written on his behalf. Gary's brother is suing over the third books use of his name.

[MrCromeDome]

Well. . . the name CromeDome originates somewhere around the second grade for me, right during that time when that awful G.I. Joe cartoon was airing (remember? trying to depict modern warfare in a cartoon setting, yet there were never any injuries or casultlies? Yeah, I thought so).

Anyway, during one of those episodes, one of the Joe grunts referred to the Cobra Commander as "Chrome Dome". My friend Nate just thought that was the funniest thing. And, considering I have a remarkably similar last name (Crome), he decided to start calling me "Crome Dome".

This went on for several years before the name kind of faded into memory.

In recent years, however, I've resurrected the name for use in LAN parties, for use on instant messenging programs, web sites, and the like. Unfortunately, CromeDome was already taken on PerlMonks when I got here :( More suckingly is that the guy who has it posted once, and has been gone since November 14, 2000. And so I'm MrCromeDome here.

And that is the sad, boring story of my name :P

MrCromeDome

[/dev/null]

The name I chose (/dev/null) is known as the "BlackHole of UNIX" As a UNIX administrator I find this device very useful. What more can one say besides... How cool is that?

[delirium]

Delirium is a handle I used back in the mid-90s when uploading Doom deathmatch demos to ftp.cdrom.com. It was as in "I left my opponents in a state of delirium." There was also somewhat of a reference to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which I was reading at the time.

The name stuck, and when Quake came out, my gang formed "Clan Schizophrenia", who's members were Delirium (myself), Confusion, and Paranoia. As a clan, we failed miserably, our one good experience being a meeting at OSU's computer lab where we fought students from another campus in their lab. We had a snazzy logo of a yin-yang symbol, slightly skewed, with three circles on one side, and none on the other. To be a kid again...

I kept Delirium as a handle to use on newer forums to replace my old 80s dial-up BBS handle, Reflector. I find that both are taken quite frequently by kids, so if you see Delirium on another forum/IRC/what-have-you, it's probably not me. (If you see Delirium on the road, kill him.)

[RazorbladeBidet]

If you have to ask you really don't want to know

Ok, since most people think it's "Razorblade" and [Bih-DET] it's not, it's French - [Bih-DAY]

Go look it up in a dictionary. Then you'll cringe.

I thought of the name because it is unique, painful, and a swipe at the upper crusty folks ;)

My usual moniker is Gryphon, chosen when I first got into BBS' back in the early 90's and picked something straight out of the D&D Monster Manual.

It seemed to be a noble, brooding, sort of dark creature - which lent itself quite well to me :)
I have a tattoo of a gryphon/griffin on my right bicep.

[lachoy]

While I do like Chinese food (although packaged stuff isn't first on my list), my nick comes from one of our cats. (We have three of them, two from the shelter.) The name doesn't seem to be used very often, unlike 'cwinters', so I'm ensured uniqueness at least among my normal hangouts...

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode

[mugwumpjism]

Check it, yo!
I always hit the tape with the rough road styles
You heard the psychdelic and ya came from miles
Keep my rhymes thick like a Guinness brew
So you could call me black and tan when I'm a wreckin' a crew
I'm like Bill Lee writing when he's in Tangiers
And now I'm on a soul safari with my Beatnik peers
Analog reel and a little distortion
Smokin' on somethin' s'you could say I'm scorchin'
I never been the type to brag but beware
I'll make a man burn his draft card like it was Hair
Send ya up the river like you lookin' for Kurtz
I got the mugwump jism up in every verse

Bug Powder dust an' mugwump jism
And the wild boys runnin' 'round Interzone trippin'
Learning to control about the Big Brother
Try like hard to not blow my cover

[benn]

Just a quick blast-from-the-past for anyone who owned a C64 and was on Compunet (long before this new-fangled academic Berners-Lee nonsense - harumph), when Xyzz nicks were all the rage. Tony Crowther was Ratt, Rob Hubbard was Robb, there was Bogg, Jonn etc...I just added an extra 'n' to my real name and it's been stuck there for over 20 years. A promise of a ++ goes to anyone who's still got the *original* Ratt+Benn demo :)
cheers, Ben(n).
PS. Hey - what a great node! ++George

[coreolyn]

Well I derived the name many years ago -- guessing about 1988-89 for the main character in a Sci-Fi Fantasy novel I started. It's a coupling of both Sindarin and Queyan ( Tolkien elvish languages - so it's syntactically incorrect by JRR's standards.) I'll let those who know how to decipher such things figure out it's meaning. I'll just say its meaning obfuscates my pride in diversity. Anyway it became my handle on the web when it came along. It use to have much more than just Perlmonks hits when it was googled, but I haven't gotten very far on my conversion of my novel to a virtual world, so those links don't show up anymore..

but they will, eventually

[moodster]

Well, as long as I've remembered I've been kinda moody and melancholic (although I had a professional confirm that at least I'm not clinically depressed). I also listen to trip hop (Portishead, Lamb) a lot and I remember thinking "When I release my first album I'll call myself 'moodster'!", because it seemed a good name for an artist.

Then I realized that I would never actually release a record. However, I could do the next best thing and use the name as an online handle... :)

Cheers,
-- moodster

[sintadil]

Mine's nothing special. It uses the -dil particle of devotion / friendship of Quenya and combines it with the stem sinta-, to express my heartfelt appreciation of knowledge.

Yes, I'm a hopeless geek.

[exussum0]

My login changed, it is now exussum0. Original post is now irrelivant. The reply is still true :)

[feanor_269]

feanor is of course from Tolkien, the Silmarillion in particular. I put _269 so odds are no one else would have the same random 3 numbers and I could use it net-wide.

Me

[naChoZ]

Wow. A few more months and this thread will have officially been active for YEARS. :)

Like many others here, mine originally comes from an IRC handle. I used to use Ender, myself also being an Andrew like the character. A few million more people on the internet and irc later, I got sick of butting nicks with people. Based on nothing so glorious as an Orson Scott Card novel, naChoZ is simply a reference to beavis & butthead. I was going for "nachoz rule" but that was too long. naChoZ it was. I think that was 93'ish, sounds about right. I remember first using it as a regular in #mod (who loved future crew and necros' from FM??). Those were fun times. At one point, I had eggdrop bots running on three networks linking all the #mod channels together from each.

I've been using it ever since. I continue to use it simply because that's how a lot of people know me. I still run into people gaming online who remember me from the q1/q2 days, and so forth. I ran the most popular Q2 ExpertCTF server on the eastern seaboard for a couple years (at least that's what people always told me), so I did get along with a whole bunch of folks just from that alone.

But wow, this is the first time I realized I've been using it for TEN years. OMG! Maybe it *is* time for a new nick. But it would have to be something where the domain wasn't taken. YUH right!

~~
naChoZ

[stonecolddevin]

dhoss, dhoss came from one of my....sorta friends in middle school, he was the "Thugg" type, and one day he and a friend of mine named Katelynn were coming up nicknames, and mine turned out to be dhoss. "D", because that's the first letter of my name, and a hoss is a tough guy, for lack of a better word.

[markgo]

Ahhh...nicknames.

Having spent 6 years of my life inside Buildings 10,17,18,19 and 23 in Redmond, I have spent many hours discussing the morphology of login names (or aliases).

Mine comes from the early MS standard of "your first name + first letter of your last name + second letter if still not unique". That's why billg is [e-mail].

You can often guess whether someone is an MS old-timer by the structure of their name. Obviously, the first name dominant style became unwieldy as the number of logins moved into the high thousands. First they started doing weird things to peoples first names (dropping letters), then they gave up and started giving people last name bases aliases.

Strangely enough, I had never in my life had a nickname until I started working for Microsoft. And suddenly, due to the blessing/curse of a pronounceable email name, I became...markgo. To every one. All the time. In person, on the phone or (of course) in email.

Still, at least markgo was inoffensive to me. I knew some folks who HATED their email names, yet because they were pronounceable, every one called them that any way. My favorite was a guy named John NyXXXXX, who didn't like being called anything but John. See if you can guess what his alias was :-)

On some sites where markgo is taken, I am markgo2k, which is actually a snitty reference to the fad of putting 2k after everything (Y2K, Win2K, etc).

To bring this thread full circle: at the top was some speculation as to why chromatic is chromatic. I've got a pretty good guess from my wastrel youth playing 36 hour sessions of D&D (Dungeons and Dragons for those who have never played RPGs without the help of a computer). In AD&D, Chromatic usually was the top-of-the-line. Thus, Tiamat, the baddest-ass dragon was a chromatic dragon, there's a whole series of spells working up from chromatic spray to chromatic orb.

Roll d20 to save, chromatic...

[SciDude]

MS Chemistry, Tulane.

The approach to modern day wizardry winds through mathematics, art, science, turns left at physics, runs straight through chemistry and comes to rest at a computer terminal near a high purity chemical packaging facility. Well, at least that was my approach to modern wizardry. ;-)

I only use SciDude here. Although not quite as unique as it once was, like others here, the name has "stuck".

I've met many good people around the halls of this place - if ever I can be of assistance do not hesitate to message me.

[LazerRed]

It's really interesting to see how people got their "handles/nicks".

Lets see... Back around 88 or 89, I got my first modem, and began the BBS scene. Back then, like most usual users, I used a character name from a book I had read, "Unbeliever" from the Steven R Donaldson books. I kept that name for quite some time, but like most, found it "too mass market". It's interesting to note though, I did keep that alias for almost 10 years. I dropped it in 1999 when I adopted "LazerRed" (yeah, mis-spelling and all). I'd been pretty heavy into motorcycles for a few years, and I finally bought a new Harley. My FXDWG was two tone lazerred perl & black. So, I dropped the old name in favor of a less widespread LazerRed.

Driver carries > $20 in ammo at all times.

[ggg]

ggg = Grumpy Gray Gnome

I started using this handle on a teletype network in Alaska in the late 60's.

[hannibal]

'hannibal' in my case comes not from the Carthaginian general (although I did have my main workstation named 'carthage' for quite some time), but from Hannibal Smith from the TV show The A-Team. My friends who watched the show also said I had a similar personality. Thus I started using it as a nickname online as well.

[beernuts]

Hmmm. *tries to think of a great story*

*and comes up short*

I'd been lurking here for months and decided to finally get a nick. I like beer, but that was too
short (I felt) for a nick. However, someone that day pointed me at the beernuts website.

The rest, as they say, is history.

[eoin]

My name is Eoin
Cause my eoin is my name.
Eoin is ainm dom.

[TrekNoid]

Wow... what a great read! I just ran across this node, so I guess I'll be the latest to extend it's life

More years ago than I want to admit, a group of friends and I got *really* into a Wil Vinton animated character that used to advertize for Domino's Pizza called 'The Noid'.

So, we created monikers for ourselves that we put on the backs of T-shirts, each reflecting our hobbies... with an airbrush of The Noid on the front. All of the names ended with 'Noid'.

Me, being the Star Trek geek of the group, became TrekNoid.

Years later, we've all grown out-of-it, and that should have been the end of it... but about 13 years ago, I'm sitting at the AOL User Registration page, and it's asking me for a login that hasn't been taken yet... and after trying 50 or so things, I remember my old nickname, and give it a shot... And since then, it's just been my name in any online forum I go to.

TrekNoid

[Asmo]

Asmo is taken from 'Asmodeus' who was known as one of the 7 demons of Hell in the satanic mythology of the 16th century. He is represented by a limpy man with a goat head ;)

[tubaandy]

I also play clarinet. :)

[RolandGunslinger]

Nothing fancy about my nick. If you've read Stephen King you know who Roland Deschain is; the last gunslinger in SK's Dark Tower series. The only thing you can take from this nick is that a) I read alot b) I was reading SK at the time I created the nick FYI - other fav authors are Tolkien, Dan Simmons, and Terry Pratchett...read on... In retrospect I think I should've named myself wraith_q, which was the nick I used back in my Quake days. I've gotten some negative feedback regarding my nick, mainly from people who either don't like Stephen King, or think I'm a gun toting maniac. I do enjoy a good SK book, but as for gun toting, nothing could be further from the truth.

[kevin_i_orourke]

It's fairly simple to work out where mine came from but the reason it's so obvious is slightly more complicated.

Not long before I finished working in Antarctica I thought it'd be useful to have a Hotmail account (I didn't know they'd been assimilated by Microsoft) so I asked Dad to sort it out for me (no web access if you work for the British Antarctic Survey).

He picked the most obvious username he could think of and it's since become my standard username for web stuff because it tends not to be already in use.

Dull? Oh yes!

Kevin O'Rourke

[aufrank]

in case anyone's interested in the origin story of a newcomer:
nicks have always been a big deal to me, not exactly sure why. real name is austin frank, and I take quite a bit of pride in it because of the family history behind it.

first nick was abo in some dungeon game that I would play sitting on my dad's lap in front of our old apple 2g when I was 6 or so (my dad had the same penchant for appending -bo to things as seanbo's, and so I went from austin to abo).

next nick was for when I first got on aol, which would have been in 95 or so. I tried to register nitsua knarf, my name backwards, and then botched it somehow, and had to come up with another, and so I became nitsuabo (probly my favorite handle to date).

then in 98 I got involved with theonering and wanted a tolkien-ish nick for their chatroom (which has since become barliman's). Enamored of willow trees, I kludged together Tintathar, which I actually meant to be Tirtathar as indicated by my usual tagline "Watcher of the Willows".

Later on, my friends were talking about how I was about to go through a transformation and become far better than before (consoling me after a breakup), and said "It'll be like you've gone from Austin to AustimusPrime", and so that stuck and is my current AIM name.

Finally I signed on in the network systems group at university, and while I was offered a vanity account, it had to be professional sounding (austimus was not acceptable). Some of my favorite people have called me just "au", and a bunch of friends had adopted the conventional of calling eachother by the first letter of their first names prefixed to their last names. I decided that afrank didn't have the ring I wanted, and so I chose aufrank. I've always pronounced it so as to preserve the first syllable of my name (and that's how it's been done by people who call me au), but a couple of french-speaking folk have pronounced the au as "o", which I prefer less.

The coolest extension of my adoption of au as my meta-nick was when I started on linux from scratch and decided to call my project audistro, which I think sounds mightily badas*.

Probly tons more than anyone cared to know, but like I said, the topics always mattered to me for some reason.

--au

[atcroft]

I figured mine was nothing special, until I decided to meet up with Mr.Muskrat and family this past Friday night (15 Aug 2003) near Dallas. He mentioned that on the way over he and Mrs.Muskrat had tried to figure out what an "atcroft" was-was it a nick/first/last name, combination, or what. In point of fact, mine is merely the concatenation of my first and middle initials with my last name, or rather (just in case anyone wondered):
$atcroft = substr($name{'first'}, 0, 1) . substr($name{'middle'}, 0, 1) . $name{'last'};

[kelan]

Once upon a time, years and years ago, I met someone on a BBS. We began chatting, and as time passed we became good friends. She didn't live far, and eventually we met. Our friendship grew. She was assigned to write a story for a class once, and she wrote me as the main character. She called him Kelan, and that's what she's called me ever since. And I've used it for just about every username I've had since then.

PS. It's pronounced kay-lin.

[vek]

I stumbled across this node while browsing demerphq's home node. In the true spirit of better late than never, here's my incredibly complicated explanation.

My first name Kevin, or Kev. Reverse that, change the all letters to lowercase. You have vek.

'mazin.

Update: vek was also the 3 letters I always entered into the ol' video game high score table while wasting my youth in arcades :-)

-- vek --

[renz]

Mine is just a spelling modification: s/rends/renz/

[ibanix]

My name was born out of the need for an IRC handle. Since I was out of inspiration at the time, I looked at my bass guitar, took the manufacturer's name, ibanez, took my favorite operating system at the time, Xenix (yes, this severely dates me) and presto:

ibanix

$ echo '$0 & $0 &' > foo; chmod a+x foo; foo;

[ZlR]

She came to me,
and said I was foxy.
She said I was too nervous,
and way over anxious.
She told me to calm down,
and stay zen,
le renard

[frag]

I'm coming at this kind of late, but my nom de cloister is just a plain old last-name abbreviation. I used to mention on my homenode that I'm not that much of a Quake fan; I'm more of a Robotron type of guy.

-- Frag.
--
"It's beat time, it's hop time, it's monk time!"

[frankus]

At University, the name was coined by a friend: it's the only nickname I've half-liked ;).
I use it online as Frank is so frequently taken.

--

Brother Frankus.

¤

[sierpinski]

Even though the most recent post on this thread seems to be a couple years old, I feel obliged to add to it's history.

Sierpinski is a last name, but it's not mine. Wacław Sierpiński was a Polish Mathematician, famous for his Sierpinski Triangle (or called a gasket in 3D). I first found out about this in a book on Fractals and Chaos that I found utterly fascinating. It's a relatively uncommon name in modern society, so seemed to fit well as an internet moniker.

In other realms, my original handle was Kane, which was the name of a character that was portrayed in the Eye of the Beholder video game manual. I currently use that handle (and picture) on other realms, but unfortunately it's quite common, so I tend not to use it as much where unique names are required.

[krujos]

My username is the username I got in college, what can I say, it stuck. First 3 letters of my last name first 3 letters of my first name leads to krujos.

[tbone1]

Years ago, I got the nickname "T-Bone" from a bandmate because I always wanted to play T-Bone Walker songs. It stuck, and if you knew my real name, you'd know why I prefer it. The '1' is because, when I first chose an ISP, there was already a 'tbone' on there; I've carried it along ever since.

--
tbone1
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

[hydo]

Mine is pretty lame. I own hellyeah.org and I thought it up once when I needed a login for Diablo.

It stuck. Oh, how it stuck.

[wfsp]

The wf are the initials of a borough. p is for party. Many find the 's' word upsetting so I won't mention it.

[mrpilot]

I've used this nick for the past several years. It is really quite self-explainatory. Mr as I'm a male, and Pilot as I aspired to become one someday. And, as of March '03, I am one. So now I can officially be called "MrPilot". *shrug* You wanted to know. :-)

[Boots111]

All~

My nickname dates from my sophomore year of highschool when I was actually on the football team. (I say actually because it is somewhat uncharacteristic) Since I did not own cleats (or sneakers), I wore hiking boots to practice for roughly three weeks. The coach fairly quickly noticed this and dubbed me "Boots". Then I had to get an email address (I did not actually have one till my sophomore year of highschool), so I tried to get [e-mail]. You can guess how well that one didn't work. I ended up settling for Boots111, and now I use it as a pretty frequent handle (that or Booticus which was a joke in my Latin class...)

Boots
---
Computer science is merely the post-Turing decline of formal systems theory.
--???

[HeatSeekerCannibal]

A group of girls i used to hang out with gave me that name.

[pepik_knize]

Here's mine:

Pepík is a Czech nickname for Josef. Kníže is my surname, and translates to Duke, or Earl. I have so many logins, I decided to make it easy to remember, hence pepik_knize. If I'd known that I would stick around, I probably would have just made it Pepík. (I can't change it, can I?) Look at my face, I'm a member! (Perl Golf Club)

[nothingmuch]

~self feels peer pressure...

nothingmuch was a blitz replacement for my old nick, of early 1999, dubbed 'kj', for the first and third letters of my last name. It was too short for many services, and so i had to change it. At times the 'h' is truncated off of nothingmuch. Hence came

-nuffin
zz zZ Z Z #!perl

[!1]

antirice and I are roommates as well as co-workers. I usually post under his account to make him look like an idiot :)

I've never registered because I've never been able to find a good name and well, let's face it, making antirice look like an idiot is too much fun. This was until I saw this post. The author was attempting to describe the duality of the return from the ! operator in cases where it returns false. Thus I was born into your community.

...and yes, tye came up with my name here.

[TomDLux]

I used to be lighting designer / operator for VideoCabaret Internation / The Hummer Sisters ( who later ran for mayor of Toronto ). D.Anne Taylor suggested I use Tom Lux in the program ... lux is Latin for Light, after all.

I gave that name one time when I didn't want to give my real name, and the person asked if my middle initial was 'D'. Five minutes later, when I figured out the joke, it was.

I've used the nick on IRC and other places since leaving theatre ... very convenient, no collisions, ever

[blacksmith]

Just take a look. the picture speaks for itself.

[RMGir]

Cool thread! I also wound up here via the poll, like many others.

My nick is of the boring "first initials, first few of last name" variety; I started using it ages ago on the DALNet #pern IRC channel...
--
Mike

[kodo]

I started using "GianT" when I started DJing 1995. Then I used it on IRC and for playing games (quake) where giant was a well known nick after a while.
Well nowadays I sometimes wish I would have chosen another nick, because when people see someone with the nick "giant", they probably think "oh that guy thinks that he is the greatest/best". So I thought pretty often about changing my nick, but I would need new email etc. etc. etc. so I've still kept it.
Also giant fits nice to me because I'm pretty large (2m), so when people meet me in real-life they always are like "oh now I understand why you call yourself giant!".

That's my story...

[ChuckularOne]

I have been using my nick since THE BEGINNING. Back in the (very) late 80's I first used Count Zero as my nick on Prodigy. When I could never again find anywhere that that nick wasn't taken, I used my current nick. Chuckularone. This name was bestowed upon me very stoned little brother of a friend of mine back in 1986.

I have been proud to call it my own ever since. I can't believe it's been 15 years. Ugh, I'm old.

It is very likely that if you find my nick somewhere, it is me.

[sedhed]

The 'sed' in sedhed actually has nothing to do with the *NIX tool of the same name. It refers instead to a now defunct band in which I took part long ago, whose name is derived from the acronym for "Severely Emotionally Disturbed". (belg4mit pointed out that it would be better written as SEDhed.) Alas, it's too late for that.

However, you too can do your part: When you see a node by me, think violent outbursts, not fancy text transmogrification. ;)

[Grygonos]

This name is a name I gave my rogue in Diablo, and then my druid in Everquest. I kinda keep a random fantasy name generator in my head, and this is one of the ones that popped out on a whim. I've used it ever since.

[pilgrim]

I'm just here to learn. "pilgrim" seemed monastically-themed, and to connote the journey (to knowledge).

[dsb]

First off, I just requested (and received even) a name change from Amel to dsb. The origins from of Amel come from the series of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. I was going thru a bit of a vampire phase I suppose you could say, and Amel was the name of the spirit/demon which first took possession of a human host when she was almost killed.

The change comes from a desire to keep a standard naming convention across all programming forums and sites and such. dsb are my initials - my name is Daniel Scott Balaban - or Dan if you please :). dsb is more indicative of me than Amel, as I am not the 5,000 year old father of all vampires. Are you surprised?

[StommePoes]

A stomme poes is a dumb cat. What we sing-say to our particularly stupid one, and how I felt when starting learning web development.

Previous nick here was gaviidae, which I'd been using for almost everything after a zoology course. Stomme poes is more fun, though, and makes the Dutch snicker.

[TStanley]

My username falls into the same category as jcwren and btrott, i.e. the first initial of my first name, prepended to my last name. My name is also on my home node

TStanley
--------
Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups -- Anonymous

[Ryszard]

Ryszard, (ri-sz-ard) actually its polish for richard.

I came across this name while working as a phone operator for a major bank in australia. I was in the market for a new handle, and wuh-lah, someone by the name of Ryszard came across my terminal.

I started using the name Ryszard on the local BBS's, then later on the 'net. Its just stuck ever since. Its now a part of the furniture.

[vkon]

vkon is my CPAN ID, and it is first letter of my name and first three letters of my family name...
that simple!

[Mr. Muskrat]

How did I end up with a nick like Mr. Muskrat?

My first name is Matthew but ever since I was little, I have simply called myself Matt. My tale begins when I was in the fourth grade. The other boys kept trying out new nicknames for me. Matt Dillon, for example. One day, someone called me Matt the Muskrat. After a while, they shortened it to simply Muskrat. (My last name is Musgrove, BTW. Several of my relatives tell me that they too have been called Muskrat.)

Several years later, I started telling people my name was Muskrat, or I'd say my name is Matt but you can call me Muskrat.

So when I started hanging out online, I just kept on using Muskrat. On IRC, I am ^Muskrat or ^Muskrat^. I joined The Knights Who Say Ni! Seti@home team and chose the nickname Sir Muskrat for the message board. When I signed up here, I also choose Sir_Muskrat (I didn't know that you could use spaces).

Then one day at work, I tried to sign in and I couldn't remember my password! What to do!? I simply signed up for a new account with the nick Mr. Muskrat. I have been using this account ever since.

[Steve_p]

Steve_p, well, what can I say? Steve's my first name. "P" is the first letter of my last name.

[blue_cowdawg]

I take my name from the breed of dog that I am a fan of. The Australian Cattle Dog is known to its enthusiasts as a "cowdog" and just for grins I corrupted that to cowdawg.

The "blue" in the name refers to one of the two variaties of ACD. The blue merle or the red merle. My favorite coloring being the blue I refer to myself as the "blue_cowdawg"

What is ironic is that I own to reds not a blue...

---

Peter L. Berghold	Brewer of Belgian Ales
[e-mail]	www.berghold.net
Unix Professional

[mt2k]

I might be lagging on this, but mine is simple:

m - male
t - teen
2 - two
k - thousand

ie: I used to go by "maleteen2000". I now use mt2k2 in some places (ie: "maleteen2002") lol :)

[Anonymous Monk]

Qiang is my first name in chinese pinyin. you write it as 强. most of the western people pronunce it as Queen. I know, I know, there is no english word started with Qi. the closer pronunciation is like chiang.

oh, Qiang means strong/tough in chinese.

[Argel]

My initials are R-J-L. Say them fast and you get my alias.

[Bod]

I was astonished to find that Bod hadn't already been taken when I finally created an account just a few years ago... On most sites it is taken pretty quickly or it is too short to be used. One of the many things about PM that makes me happy :)

[atemon]

In Sanskrit, we use different terms to call teachers. "Guru" is the term to refer to the Great Great Teacher. Guru means one who removes darkness from mind.

VC is my nickname :)

As per my Gurus, "Gurudom" is a n attitude towards others and willingness to help others, without expecting anything from them. These attitude will eventually make a "Guru".

I wish to be a guru and trying to culte that attitude in me:). So I wish to call myself as Guru and I named myself as "VC-The Guru".

Cheers !

--VC

---


There are three sides to any argument.....
your side, my side and the right side.

[Anonymous Monk]

pemungkah stems from my interest in Balinese gamelan - sort of like low-tech techno, for those who've never heard it - specifically gender wayang, one of the most ancient forms. I needed a nick for IRC, and wanted to pick something that was not likely to spring to anyone else's mind.

The pemungkah itself is an overture played before the traditional Balinese shadow puppet play of the Mahabarata, as the puppeteer is laying out the puppets that are to be used.

[csuhockey3]

Mine is easy, I play hockey for Colorado State University and my number is 3

[stefp]

I suppose that Thelonious likes bebop. :)

-- stefp -- check out TeXmacs wiki

[shockme]

Boy, you should see some of things people have said in IRC, IM, etc., in their attempts to shock me ... some times, I think I should have picked a different nick ... but, it's the nick I chose way back in '96, and it's stuck. Most people don't refer to me in the formal (ShockMe), but rather the more familiar (shock). And yes, many people call me 'shock'. I've never capitalized it (because I'm lazy that way), and I don't recall anyone else ever doing it either.

shock - v. shocked, shockˇing, shocks
v. tr.


1. To strike with great surprise and emotional disturbance.
2. To strike with disgust; offend.
3. To induce a state of physical shock in (a person).
4. To subject (an animal or person) to an electric shock.

me - pron. The objective case of I.

1. Used as the direct object of a verb: He assisted me.
2. Used as the indirect object of a verb: They offered me a ride.
3. Used as the object of a preposition: This letter is addressed to me.
4. Informal. Used as a predicate nominative: It's me.
5. Nonstandard. Used reflexively as the indirect object of a verb: I bought me a new car.

It's all about me, baby. Me, ME, ME! See, you don't realize it, but everything revolves around me. Even you. I am the center of the universe, and you are all just little lights in the sky. Sometimes, late at night, I go outside and listen to my dogs bark at you ...

Seriously, though, it's from the album Love Gun (1977) by Kiss. It was Ace Frehley's first time behind the microphone, and it rocked ... Ace wrote the song in response to an incident which happened when he was on tour in Florida. A high voltage wire had fallen behind the stage and had made connection with a hand rail on one of the stairs. As Ace stepped onto the stage, he held the neck of his guitar with one hand, and with the other, he grabbed the hand rail. Of course, he went down like a ton of bricks ...

The song doesn't have anything to do with the incident. The song's all about sex.

But what isn't?

I chose the nick because (1) it's one of my favorite songs, (2) the definition suits me, and (3) ... well ... it's all about sex, baby!

If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me.

[marinersk]

I'm boring. Last name, first and middle initial.

Great thread; hope the tradition continues for folks to add to it.

I found it thanks to Disease Soup.

[Aim9b]

I used Aim9b because I found out the hard way, that there is some other less-than-ethical hacker out in cyberspace (NOT in the monestary) using 'Sidewinder'. Sidewinder is a snake that moves sideways thru the desert & leaves a rather distinct trail in the sand. It's also an Air-to-Air Intercept Missle used in Vietnam & the Falkland Is.

[morgon]

I recognize azatoth from H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories.

[stevieb]

Mine's pretty obvious, but in some forums, I use the name I used to write as a street artist in my former life many years ago.

[marcussen]

Last name

[Argel]

Say my initials ("R", "J", and "L") fast and you get "arjel". Then replace the "j" with a soft "g" because it looks better and the tie-in to my initials and obfuscated just a tad. If "argel" is already taken as a username then I often use "argel1200", where the 1200 is in reference to the Amiga 1200, which I used back in college.