Thursday, March 8, 2012

An Online Identity Crisis

Yesterday I was working with some folks in #fedora-java, and after confusion over my IRC versus FAS nicks, someone asked me how many different nicks I had.   The answer, unfortunately, is "at least four."  I realized a couple of years ago that I had created a problem for myself as far as online identities go.  I was never one to go signing up for new services to reserve my nick early, and I've not chosen particularly unique nicks.  So, this is me, currently:
  • mull - an IRC-only nick that dates back to my college days, maybe 1999-ish, when folks in the #aalug channel were trying out new nicks daily for a while.  I have no idea why this stuck, and I've never used it anywhere else. UPDATE: I've now claimed "agrimm" on IRC, so you won't be seeing "mull" anymore.

  • arg - I made a particularly huge mistake when I chose my initials for my FAS (Fedora Account System) ID, even though there was very little possibility I'd be able to use that elsewhere.   I suspect that a FAS account is one of the less trivial ones to change, too, so I'm probably stuck with this being a one-off.

  • agrimm - the obvious first initial + last name choice, more easily obtained than initials, but still not universally unique.  I use it for email addresses and not much else, and I get a *lot* of misdirected email for people who share my last name.

  • a13m - I started using this for twitter and some other random things when arg and agrimm were taken.  In case it's not obvious, this nick derives from my full name, in the style of i18n, a11y, etc.  While very short and almost never taken by anyone else, the relation to my name is subtle enough that most people don't make the connection.
I've clearly been overthinking this, but I really would like to converge on nicks which are clearly related (for example, the guy who has "arg" on FreeNode is "argv0" on Twitter... clever).  Any suggestions?

1 comment:

  1. You masochistic polyglot... Why not standardize now on aa13m?
    ;^)
    or perhaps a=1.3m
    Errr no, I dont think you are *that* tall.. Uh, short

    ReplyDelete