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

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

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