What's In A Name?

Potrzebie

Flash back to 1997 or so. I forget exactly when it happened, though I could probably figure it out if I cared to. I had just discovered Slashdot, Rob Malda's Mecca for all things geeky. It was a great place. Still is. I don't hang out there much anymore, but that's because I'm doing other things. This blog, for instance.

Ahem.

Anyway there I was, a freshly minted Linux nerd working as a Microsoft contractor and wanting to get in on the action. Slashdot had two options for posting comments. You could post as "Anonymous Coward," lumping you in with all the other people who for whatever reason didn't want to post as a registered user, or you could register and get all the benefits of being a registered user. Like, um, the ability to have a signature. And a user number. Stuff like that. Whee.

So, I decided to create an account, but then I ended up with the same quandry I always end up in when I want to create an account. What account name should I choose? My first online account was the poetic, insightful and entirely descriptive "70635,302" on Compuserve back in the days when it was king of the ring, before AOL bought them out. Successively I had handles like Fearless Leader and Rockefeller, but I wanted something different for Slashdot.

The spy theme of "Fearless Leader" appealed to me, but for some reason I decided not to use it. At the time I thought it would be cool to have a name that suggested intrigue. Suspense. A man on the inside. Spy thrillers sometimes had characters with descriptions like "our man in Havana," so I thought maybe having a Slashdot spy on the inside of Microsoft would be funny. Thus was born Our Man In Redmond, user number 63094. (To put that into perspective, new users on Slashdot are currently up in the 800,000 range.)

When I started up at Daily Kos last year I decided to go with Our Man In Redmond as a handle, and at least one user made the connection between the two. Still, as I started getting more into telling stories as a framing device, I decided a new user name was in order. Omir sounds a bit mysterious, and "Omir the Storyteller" sounds like someone who might go from village to village, spreading stories as he goes. Maybe I'll write a story about that sometime.

I hasten to add that though there is an organization called the Organization of Mujihadeen of the Islamic Revolution, I have no connection with them and in fact didn't even know about them until I chose the name. Nor do I have any connection to Omir Santos, a catcher in the New York Yankees organization.