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:??;

In addition, I always thought that Jeff and japhy sounded quite similar. Prove:

use Text::Soundex;
$\="\n";
print soundex 'Jeff';
print soundex 'japhy';
[download]

;-)

-- Hofmator

Are you sure of Erudil's etymology?
I have The Languages of Tolkien's Middle Earth by Ruth Noel, Houghton Mifflin Company. This book contains an English-to-Elvish glossary. This glossary contains no entry for "servant". On the other hand, page 81, there is the entry:

friend (n)dil, (n)dur, nil, nur, S mellon.

So I think Erudil is rather God's friend, not His servant. The meaning is rather different.

The meaning is more familial than "servant", but the suffix (n)dil implies strong devotion. I have the Silmarillion backing me on this one. It's somewhere between "friend" and "servant"... a word that escapes me at the moment.

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

I am a fairly dark-minded person, that is, not given to light and cheeriness. Back when I first needed a signon I decided to do a little research to find something I liked.

xenchu comes from the Japanese word zenchu. Zenchu is the swordcut used by the second to dispatch a samurai commiting seppuku. I changed the first letter because I wanted the nickname to be unique and I like x better than z.

xenchu



On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. -woof woof

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.

davorg's name is a contraction of dave.org.uk, a domain he owns

True. And that's the reason I started using it. But later on I heard someone explaining it as a contraction of Davros (the creator of the Daleks from Dr Who) and Borg (the Star Trek nasties) and as a fan of both of those shows, I now often use that as the "official" derivation of the name :)

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

Perl Training in the UK <http://www.iterative-software.com>

Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!
Sorry, moral imperative.

Not that it matters terribly, but turnstep is not a piece of equipment, but the name an aerobics move (thus the animated gif on his homenode).

Scott

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)

To further preface the explanation demerphq has given, merphq was meant to be a word which means nothing but can be used to mean anything. There was much debate over how the word should be spelled and it was eventually agreed that m e r p h was appropriate, until seconds later, when someone in the party shouted out "with a silent q" and the word merphq was set in stone.

When the various parties involved had returned to their respective cities around the world, I decided that I would set up a website so that we could all keep in touch. merphq.com seemed like the most appropriate domain name and also the least likely to be in use already. These days, most of us use 'merphq' in some form in our usernames as it is a sure bet that nobody else has taken it. Thus 'merphq', 'demerphq', 'smerphq' and 'merphqette' (until an recent breakup) are currently in use today in various ways. So in actual fact, it's not as uncommon as you might think.

Having French as my third language, I can't stop ROTFL when I read the "Yves, Yves with a Q" above.

In French, this would be pronounced as "Yves, Yves avec un 'Q'."

Which very naturally could be interpreted as "Yves, Yves avec un cul", and which in it's turn would mean "Yves, Yves with an a*s" when translated to English.

I'm not sure if demerpq will appreciate this interpretation, but I'm sure that many french speaking people have at least silently laughed when Yves was presented that way.

(Biker runs off, trying to save his own 'Q'.)



---

Everything will go worng!

Hah. Im sure a french speaker finds the whole issue humurous even with out the unintended pun. The ease with which I can confuse a fellow english speaker by saying my name is "Yves with a Q" alone Im sure does it.

But I assure you I do have an ass, and have even been called one at various points.. ;-)

Also I wonder if this is a Parisian French versus Quebecois French thing. None of my quebecois speaking friends noticed the pun.... Or at least none of them told me about it...

:-)

Yves / DeMerphq
--
When to use Prototypes?
Advanced Sorting - GRT - Guttman Rosler Transform

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 :-)

EES, or Enron Energy Services, the American energy company, used to be called something boring like National Gas Pipeline Authority (I don't recall, but it was something along those lines). Then they got all fancy. They paid some huge sum of dollars to an image consultancy to come up with a memorable name and after months of work, the answer was Enteron. Modern. Technological. A Word of Power. So they had all the letterhead printed and everyone got new business cards and then right at the last minute some bright spark looked up the dictionary and found "NOUN: The alimentary canal; the intestines". Which you might actually think was pretty good for the name of a pipeline company - but the suits wouldn't wear it, so they dropped a syllable and became Enron. Just thought you might like to know that.

§ George Sherston

I would have thought this was funny even if I read it last year, but now it seems even funnier given that their infamous name has become a household word.

Ha!

I thought it had to with blade runner. Theres that line about seeing Starships buring off of Orion and I thought that was where it originates.

To be honest every time I see your name for some reason my favorite line from blade runner comes to mind. 'If only you could have seen what I have seen with your eyes.'

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)

I also enjoyed Blade Runner. While the 'shoulder' quote is memorable, how about these:

Are these questions testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?

Ahh, and my personal favorite. I think about this one when remembering my last job...
Deckard: Have you felt yourself to be exploited in any way?
Zhora: Like what?
Deckard: Well... well, like to get this job. I mean, did... did you do, or... or were you asked to do anything lewd... or unsavory, or... or, otherwise repulsive to your... your person, huh?
Zhora: (Laughs) Are you for real?

All of the quotes from the movie can be found here.

Corion AKA Captain Orion (your cover is blown!)

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 :)

I came here because your name is runrig!

When will we see, your likes again ...? Apologies, I've been drinking.

I tried to ride a bike to Skye once, but the rear cluster fell off and I ended up in a pub in Crianlarich. Never got out.

I'm not Scottish, but spent a year at U. Edinburgh. My best to you for the creative and inspiring name.

--Scott, Perl novice

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

I've never really wondered why your name is Zaxo as much as I've wondered why you write "After Compline" as your closing.

    -Bryan

Compline is the monastic hour of midnight, and I'm a night owl. A themed version of a jazz standard,

I remain,
After Compline,
Zaxo

-- MrNobo1024

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

but 1023 people had already taken it

2^10 is a pretty cool number in its own right, though...

§ George Sherston

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

In no particular order:

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

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "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

I guess if you were MIN-em, you'd be able to abbreviate to 'en'.

cLive ;-)

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.)

Funny how names carry associations. Having read this I shall now not see theorbtwo without thinking of Palantirs (yes, I can't really claim to be a geek but I do like the Lord of the Rings). But in the past whenever I've seen Theorbtwo in the CB or wherever, I've always thought of a theorbo, which is an early stringed instrument like a large lute. Now, this tells you more about me than about The Orb... but it might add a new layer of significance to an already multi-layered name. So here's some information about theorboes.

§ George Sherston

My guess seeing the name, and especially seeing it spelled out as The Orb, was a possible reference to the Orb that circles the head of the Emperor of Dragaera.

I thought it was from Theo Rob Two.

No, no. It is clearly short for THEOlogical RoBoT World Order (which is headed by Theodore Robert Wo).

                - tye

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^)

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!

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"

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

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

Huh, no fair, it's easy to have an unusual name if you're Dutch! (/me used to work with the Dutch when in the City and had clients called Ruud Lipps and Freek Monster)

§ George Sherston

I'm not Dutch (but I do know two words of Dutch, no I can't repeat either of them in polite company -- there is a rather humorous story behind that but I digress), but the story of my name pretty much matches Jouke's.

I really like having a unique name that isn't too weird or too hard to spell for people over the phone. While my wife was pregnant, we worked hard on coming up with good names with this and other goals in mind.

We came up with several names that we really liked and even one set of such names that sounded good together. Unfortunately, the second set of names (yes, we needed two sets) was harder and so we eventually found the final name to complete the last set so that it sounded nice but didn't sweat as much as before on it having the right properties. Turns out it was the number one most common first name for boys born that year! Arghhh! I've named my son the modern equivalent of "John"! I'm so ashamed! ;)

        - tye (but most pronounce it "Ty")

Unusal names rocks. =)

There's only a few hundred people in Denmark called "Ask", and most of them are younger than I. I yet have to meet someone with my name in California. =)

 - ask

-- 
ask bjoern hansen, http://ask.netcetera.dk/   !try; do();

    > Unusal names rocks. =)

Yes they do.
And I'm happy to always find that my username is not taken.
But you've been taking it all over the Perl community,
which is why I had to use my initials insted.

You bastard! :o)




-- ash aka Ask Solem <ask@unixmonks.net>

Hehe, ask, the first time I saw your name, I figured you were advertising a perl advice column. :)
--
Mike

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.

<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

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.

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

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.... :-)

Rejecting anything so banal as "scott" as a login name, I was assigned "scrottie". External chronometer reading 27 years, I just missed the period where where computers were an extremely serious thing, and my first "real" job found me in the hands of people holing up and holding out against The Powers That Be. For the first time, the dream of running a timeshare system not under draconian control was within reach of the common University department.

Earlier on, I was secretative about my name, for I fanced myself some kind of cracker, and whiled away the time doing my utmost to annoy BBS sysops. It was a long dry spell before satire or even humour was accepted "on line". Next came a period where my Internet access was via an annonymous "port" on a DEC terminal server, and my only login name of any sort was what I used on a Multi User Dungeon - Phaedrus. No one uses their real name on MUD - MUD is fantasy. Of course, I had no idea that that book was popular or I would have made an attempt at creativity. Since MUD stuck with me, so did that name, for one compartment of my life, atleast. Next came a phase where I had login accounts, and they were derived from real names - just not *my* real name.

Point being, it was instilled in me over and over again that login names aren't permement, and using your real name is a luxoury unaffordable. With high contention for the @yahoo.com and @hotmail.com namespaces, and preasure to change addresses due to spam and the adolescent search for identity (netters are younger and younger), for many people, my plight exists amplified.

I've always had respect for people that used their real names online. It implies that that you can finger them, take a bus downtown, walk into an office building, down a hall, and shake their hand over a messy desk and a large monitor attached to an expensive Unix workstation. It implies position and power, and the intelligence and dedication associated with it. I've always wanted an office and a nice workstation...

Nice - a point, contrary to mine, powerfully and eloquently argued!

It implies that that you can ... shake their hand over a messy desk and a large monitor attached to an expensive Unix workstation. It implies position and power...

Heheh! Well, not really. In my case (which is probably all too typical), we drones get stuck with 200-MHz Wintel boxes running Windows 98 or something, on corporate Windows network domains with login ID's derived directly from the payroll database. And internet access through some creaky old Frame Relay cloud, bouncing through a X.25 gateway on the opposite coast. :-)

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.

And I'm pleased to discover that esr seems to agree with me:

The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.

jdporter
...porque es dificil estar guapo y blanco.

What if you don't like your real name, and moreover, people keep mispronouncing it and asking what it means in your mother tongue?
-nuffin
zz zZ Z Z #!perl

I'm with you. I still use some online psuedonyms that I established in the early 90s, and I refuse to have anything as lame as logan_2342 as a screen name. Wherever possible, I use my real name online. Besides, Logan is a pretty distinctive name. I've never met another (Fictional Characters notwithstanding).

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

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

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.

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

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;

I read this a while ago, but only recently paid enough attention to notice the J. in your sig. Does that have a comparably interesting story? :)

Makeshifts last the longest.

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

Urm... so what happens if the father's father's name and the mother's father's name are the same? Does the second son get the same first name as the first — or is the naming scheme not so strict after all?

Remember it is a tradition, one based on obligation within the family, but not the law. And naming the first son after his grandfathers’ shared name fulfills the obligation to both.

Makeshifts last the longest.

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!

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.

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');"

After that kind of lead-in I am rather curious about what your real name is...

BTW FWIW I once knew a guy who so hated his real name that he refused to tell it to anyone. Since he wouldn't give us a name, we took to calling him "Alice". I later found out that he was named "Trent", and I never understood why he hated it so much.

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.

Near Annan, in SW Scotland, there's place called the Golf Hotel, and I've always wanted to go there with a girl called Juliet ask them to play a Tango. But the best news is that when I was in aid work I knew a lot of Finns, one of whom was called Karsten Lemni; so his call sign was Kilo Lima; but in Finnish, Lima, so I'm told, means "Phlegm". So I'm just saying, handle with care :)

§ George Sherston

When I was 16 and on one of my first solo flights,a falcon jet was sitting there - forever. I vividly remember it's tail numers 601SB. I was in this tin can for a plane being blown all over the place because I had nowhere to go. When I got on the radio asking if he was ready to go, I almost let out "601 Stupid B***h", it just rolled off the tounge easier.

Hey!!! That's the serial number of *my* trumpet that I lost a long time ago. Give me back my trumpet!

;-P

-Blake

Hell, my father had a *trombone* with that serial number which he lost in Singapore in 1962! It's obviously been stolen by a brass instrument Triad, chopped up and refashioned into a trumpet. I claim it on his behalf!

§ George Sherston

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 =).

CS:

So I guess it is safe to assume that you cannot be extrapolated beyond the scope of your data points?¹

Oddly, I actually enjoy numerical methods.

Scott

¹ Cubic splines a nice for drawing curves that run through the points provided, but tend to do crazy things outside of those points.

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.

Everytime I see your username, I think of a guy I knew in college from Oregon. This man accumulated nicknames like some people accumulate spare change. He picked up a new one when we met this girl at a party who introduced herself as "Tina from Argentina".

In the spirit of the moment, somebody said "You should call yourself 'Gon from Oregon'!", and it stuck. College is funny like that.

Now whenever I read g0n my mind goes "g0n... (fromoregon)".

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!

Pour fin, je sais! After wearing your Amsterdam obfu on a t-shirt for a year, I started thinking it was a syllabic transliteration of bouquet, implying that you were a florist friar (a great joke, poorly told)

as for my own nick, I was full of myself at the time and I get the feeling it's too obscure to look like anything other than some initials or a dodgy games house.

perl -e 'print qq(Just another Perl Hacker\n)' # where's the irony switch?

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.

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

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).

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 (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 :)

"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

Liukas is a Finnish word and means slippery.

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.";

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.

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!

Huh. I figured it was a reference to Dr. Johhny Fever

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

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.

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.

'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.

Strangely, when I first got here a couple of years ago, I seem to recall that davis (which is my last name) was taken, so I picked d4vis in a panic. Oh, how I rue the day!
Maybe the first davis got wiped or purged.
These days I pretty much go by st_davis, which are first initials_last name, but given the closeness to St. Davis, I think it'd be presumptuous to use it here unless I actully reach sainthood.

~monk d4vis
#!/usr/bin/fnord

My Apologies!
I've only just spotted you in other users - until then I had no idea of anybody so similarly named.
davis
Is this going out live?
No, Homer, very few cartoons are broadcast live - it's a terrible strain on the animator's wrist

--PotPieMan

It doesn't stand for anything.

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.

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.

Given some of what you say perhaps you should look into an excellent mountain bicycle called the "Off Road Toad" (which I cant seem to find a decent link to, but whatever..)

Btw, when I was a courier I rode a Klein or did until I cracked the frame :-( , but also rode KHS (nice bike) and Marin as well as a GT for a while.

Ever checked out any of Brody's bikes?

Yves / DeMerphq
--
When to use Prototypes?
Advanced Sorting - GRT - Guttman Rosler Transform

i used to rock the toad. horny serial number 006. i wish that i could find one today and restore it. off road toad rocked disc brakes in 89. and forwards seat collars, and hite rites, and top tube cable mounting. god, what happened to mountain biking?

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.

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

The white hole.

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."

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

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_Ż/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

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

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)

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*

Happy the monk
With the face that smiles

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?

------------
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
[download]

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.

In a somewhat related note, I'm going to China for a week in September, and I'd be interested to find out how you prepared for living in China. Lanuage, customs, whatever.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

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 riffraff@gte.net, and riffraff@tampabay.rr.com (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).

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.

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 :)

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.

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'

=cut
--Brent Dax
There is no sig.

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.

C'mon, you *have* to tell us now... why Bucknut?

§ George Sherston

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...

What a belated response, but I wanted to ask if you were thai with a thai middle name :)

My mother is, but my father isn't. I was born in the USA, but I don't really consider myself to be of any specific nationality.

How should one pronounce it? I have it reverberating in my head to rhyme with hem and cry... where am I going wrong?

§ George Sherston

Let's see now... p unaspirated, r half-rolled-ish (between an English r and the unvoiced t in Tao), em pronounced like aim, ch actually somewhere between English j and English ch, ai pronounced like ie in tie, emphasis second syllable. "21" can be pronounced as in any language.

I HTH (though it probably doesn't, much).

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.

• Slashdot
• use.Perl
• Kuro5hin, thought I'm not there much anymore.

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

You mean you're not an invasive exotic or hideously annoying Plug-n-Play?

--
I'm not belgian but I play one on TV.

No, and I am not a shoe. Spelled 苦 痛

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

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!

Thank you. Ever since I saw your nick the first time, I read it as a compound noun (I'm german) rather than a condensed sentence. I'll sleep better now, knowing about that connection of you and `/anick, rather than feeling that some eyepopslikeamosquito are watching me from afar, after having read some of your nodes...

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

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

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.

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

Well now you've been and gone and messed up the system... I'm afraid my puny non-fuzzy logic script only picks out the first node from each person in the thread. This is a fault. I know! I'm sorry! Anybody who has the time / skill to do better than this - let me have it, sibling:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard :cgi-lib);
use LWP::Simple;

my $url = "http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=110166";
my $html = get $url or die "could not get $!";
my %names;

while ($html =~ s/=(\d*?)&lastnode_id=110166">[^<]*<\/A><BR> by <A HRE
+F="\/index\.pl\?node_id=\d*&lastnode_id=110166">(.*?)<\/A> on \w{3} \
+d{2}, \d{4} at \d{2}:\d{2}//s) {
    $names{$2} = $1 unless $names{$2};
}
[download]

update: I notice that demerphq has done this already... as has crazyinsomniac.§

George Sherston

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

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.

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-.

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

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

I'm so glad you posted this, as yours was the username I've seen around that I most wanted to see explained. Presumably you're familiar with prior art. I expect there's a submersible toaster in there somewhere.

§ George Sherston

LOL! This thing is great.. Or where have you heard of an antifork before? I must stop before I wear out my refresh button..

Makeshifts last the longest.

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.

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

tretin is a shortening of the medication Tretinoin (I hope I spelled that right). I saw the med on a pen at the hospital a few months back (I'm invovled in a clinical rotation program geared towards those interested in medicine, only I decided halfway through the year to switch career paths and go comp. science, but that's another node altogether...) and I thought it sounded cool so I started using it as my nick on several different platforms (email addresses to video games). Before that I was using the name Haldol (which is an anti-physcosis drug I think) and before that I was using the nick azch which is a combination of my first and last name.

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 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.

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

vroom was taken :-/ ..

But seriously, My nick has deep roots going back about 7 years. My favorite band in the world, Deftones, Inspired my original IRC nick DeF4u which was then shortened to DeF, Well, after being asked if I was Deaf hundreds of thousands of times, I decided to give my then seasoned nick a little pizzazz. Having been dubbed as defiant by several of my friends for my actions at a previous employer(long story), I decided to add the yance to my nick(defiance just didn't look right). That's my story and I'm sticking to it..

-- Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of defyance.

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

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.

I think this is particularly interesting, since "to molt" means to shed an old skin. It's a growing process, and one of renewal. It would not have surprised me a bit to find that was the reason for it as a nickname, as so many online handles are chosen for a sense of renewal from a previous one that doesn't fit so well after a few years.

> 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

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*

When I was getting close to being ready to test for a martial arts black belt a long time ago I was having some serious trepidation about suddenly, magically morphing into an "expert." My instructor told me, "All a black belt belt means is that you're a serious student."

I think Discipulus is an ideal username and my Italian is generally Pre-K. :P

Dave

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 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

A short explanation is also on my homenode...

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

I'd say the meaning is pretty close ... I do not speak german, but...
dictionary.com translates putzfrau to charwoman
Personally I have never heard that term so I fed it back to dictionary.com
We get three meanings all of which are basically "Cleaning Lady"

ps
putz frau translates to finery woman

It does, indeed, mean "cleaning lady"
*in the know*
C.

Putzfrau (no camel case) indeed means cleaning lady. The iron cleaning lady would be die eiserne Putzfrau.

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!)...

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.

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.
;>}

So, when you were young you had a fever? Did your hands feel just like two balloons?

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

Please don't encourage robots to smoke, smoking hardware is not a good idea.

You are not alone, Wil ;-)

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

1. My perception of all new things... fuzzy.
2. My favourite image of wet penguins, they just look fuzzy IMO!

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

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'
[download]

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

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.

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

Surely you don't really mean to say that you've never heard the legend of Paco?

§ George Sherston

My Monastic education was sadly lacking when I made my original post. I have since taken accelerated classes in Monastery culture and am quite up to speed now ;)

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

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 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-

I think this is pretty cool. My dad (Theo for those of you without a scorecard) made his Name Space node on my birthday.

Thanks Dad.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled perlity.

---

Perl programming and scheduling in the corporate world, as explained by dragonchild:

"Uhh ... that'll take me three weeks, broken down as follows: 1 day for coding, the rest for meetings to explain why I only need 1 day for coding."

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

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?

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

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

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

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

You wouldn't happen to be the /dev/null responsible for the The Internet Worm of 1988, would you?

The worm mimics a remote SMTP connection, feeding in /dev/null as the name of the sender

It's the only other time I can recall seeing /dev/null used as a moniker. ;-)

-Blake

No, but I read about that guy in "The Cuckoo's Egg". You should check that book out if you haven't yet. One of the best "computer geek" books I've ever read.

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

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.
[download]

- Plain old 'Jess Robinson' in RL -

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

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

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 may already know this, but the "Dog and Pony" poem is a parody of "Threes," a song by Mercedes Lackey and Leslie Fish. So not only can it be enjoyed, it can be SUNG!

There is a recording of the original version on the album "Harpers Heralds & Havoc". Somewhat hard to find, as it's filk, but might be amusing.

stephen

Not in so many words, but I did find the notes and even some midi versions and stuff a while back. :) However, getting the real, original song would most like be really amusing (there are some limits to midi as a way to convey a melody...)

Thank you!

---

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

Hmmm, it just occurred to me that that I ususally use the term "sparkley crinklies" as a smaller version of "Dog and Pony Show". Keep them distracted and happy.

Matt

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

(Since he didn't: Spencer Portée.)

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

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.

cheers,
Aldo

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

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

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

Ah, looks like there's two of us now !! I chose felonius for much the same reason - altho' Polonius from Hamlet gave the spelling I used. If it causes a problem - having the same name - let me know and I'll change.

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

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.

Anyone with a little bit of math expertise can easily debunk that "paradoxon", though. :) Both the distance and duration of each iteration approach zero, so for an infinite amount of time the duration of each iteration becomes infinitely short. In fact, the duration of the iterations decreases so quickly that even an infinite amount of these infinitely short timespans only adds up to a finite amount of time.

Makeshifts last the longest.

True, but my wife, more a letters than maths person, seldom stops to consider these things as she holds the smelly bag of garbage for me to take down to the dumpster. ;)

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

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 = 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.

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.

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~

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

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

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'};

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"

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.

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

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 :-)

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.

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

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.

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

--

Brother Frankus.

¤

i'm most Grateful for this explanation

§ George Sherston

Dead right.

thinker

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...

Carry on, ripleather.

:)
Matt

update: Oops. Updated my anagram to get rid of the inadvertent 'v'. :)

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

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.)

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!

I'll give you half.

Though I have fond memories of playing the original Ultima on a C64 at a friend's house, I never personally owned one. However, I was a Compunet subscriber around '85 or so, to an extent, but mostly stuck to local BBS's at the time.

Given that...pop quiz...were you active on FidoNet?

:)

Matt

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.

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

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 billg@microsoft.com.

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...

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.

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)

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

'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.

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.

-Scott

Heh! I like it, though, plenty of potential to make people wonder whether you're presenting a deeper insight into the human condition or not. :)

Cheers,
Matt

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

It made me think of the song "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" by Warren Zevon.

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

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?

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
[download]

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

It stuck. Oh, how it stuck.

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

I wasn't logged in! Sorry.
Update: Above post has been fixed. Thanks and apologies to all concerned.

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.

Nothingmuc -> NothingMuck => NothingGross => NothingDelicious => NothingNutritious => NothingGood..

So much fun :-D

---

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Expectation Management.

Living in the moment is the only way, free of the judgements of your own mind and that of others. True wisdom can only be obtained by silencing once's own preconceptions. youtube

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

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.

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

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 :)

oh, Qiang means strong/tough in chinese.

ooops, that was me forgot to log in.

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

A gasket? I've seen it as a "carpet" and a "cube".

From wikipedia:

The Sierpinski triangle (also with the original orthography Sierpiński), also called the Sierpinski gasket or the Sierpinski Sieve, is a fractal named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński who described it in 1915.

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.

-- stefp -- check out TeXmacs wiki

I also love Jazz and had that same nick... but altered it slightly during a pun-filled encounter in IRC in 1993.

-David

shock - v. shocked, shock·ing, 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.

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...

Last name

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.

D'oh! Was expecting a tale about ancient mariners :)

I regret to say my creative and humorous streak was apparently out for a stroll when I posted this. This would have made a great place to just write a fantastic storyline.

:: sigh ::

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.