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.