CAROLEE

My current login -- my first name -- followed me from work e-mail where I needed to be identified. I like it well enough; it unchangeably stands for myself, and is unusual (as opposed to my last name, Harrison, which brought me many e-mails meant for other C. Harrisons when I used it as an alias).

Now that I think of it, I prefer the way my name looks in lowercase, "carolee," to the conventionally written "Carolee."

I had a very difficult time choosing a login name that _wasn't_ my name, as much as I wanted an interesting alias. I wanted a musical word, maybe something from a Romance language or Sanskrit, or something wordlike from a Cocteau Twins song, but could never settle on something that I felt was an accurate and durable referent for myself. Too self-conscious, I guess. I almost picked "ravenna" as a login back in the days of ucscb, because that was a word I'd find myself sing-saying for no reason before I even knew it was the name of an Italian city. Someone else got to it first, though, and unfortunately, I never met her!

Before I was "carolee" I was "thrush" and then "didthat." My struggle to choose a musical word or a word relating to myself was more or less abandoned; I couldn't settle on one and finally decided it just didn't matter. In fact, when I first went online on ucscb, I didn't expect to meet anyone or ever have to use the login to introduce myself; I rather thought I would just communicate with the people I already knew (who didn't even know about fnet or fora or geek houses themselves)!

The name "thrush" refers to a bird, _not_ to the "Man from U.N.C.L.E." or a fungal illness -- specifically to the bird in the Thomas Hardy poem "The Darkling Thrush" (which was in my .usrrc on ucscb) and to the title of a mystery book I ran across in the UCSC library, "The Thinker and the Thrush." I picked it because I came across the poem and the book on the same day I was going to go to the CC and get my account. My friend John A. DeVries ("At"), the first person I ever met long-distance on fnet (icb), sometimes adopted the nickname "thinker" there when we were in the same group. He and I are still e-mail friends after twelve years!

The name "didthat" came after I'd dropped out of UCSC for a year and went back. I'd have chosen "donethat" but at the time there was a seven-letter limit on logins. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Besides returning to school (after a year answering phones for the engineering department at SCO), I was seeing a whole new group of geeks appearing in fora and at the parties, and I had moved into the Institute and was feeling like an unknown oldschooler. I wasn't "didthat" for too long because I graduated within a year or so and my work login from McHenry, the functional "carolee," became my si/am/meow/ucscb name, as well as my circus.com name (now gone) and lungfish.com name (still alive).

I went from using fnet/icb several times a day to maybe a couple of times a year when I moved from Santa Cruz to Portland. But when I'm on I use "eelorac," for the combination of recognition and variety, at the risk of imitating salguod and enelrad, who've always been backwards!