y friend Arthur scammed me a ucscb account while i was still in high school in palo alto, so i could e-mail my friends who had gone off to college. i think the account name was "edtrtla", an incoherent abbreviation of a fairly long nom de plume i used to use. hard to type, hard to say, hard to remember.

freshman year at UCSC, i applied for a new, 100% legit account on unix B, and decided it had to be pronounceable. so for a year there i was account "parsnip". i didn't suspect at the time i applied that a whole cult of B-geeks would start calling me "parsnip" to my face.

after dropping out of UCSC and losing my account, i ended up working where a lot of UCSC B-geeks ended up: Software Company Ononymous, where the standard login assignment rules left me as "mikeha." i didn't suspect at the time i agreed to this that everyone in a 300 person company would start calling me "mikeha" to my face, or "Mister Ha", or else just pointing at me and shouting "Ha!"

after dropping out of SCO and losing my account (and income), i went to college in portland, dropped out some more, and came back to ucsc for one more shot at higher educational redemption. this time i really thought long and hard about my ucscb login name. i ended up using a name i'd used to fake a bunch of forum postings when writing in the famous SCO newsgroups: "toor", or "root" spelled backwards. easy to say, easy to type, easy to remember.

"toor" was kind of an alternate personality, BOFH kind of character. in GECOS, he was "Toor the Totalitarian" or "Toor the Tintinabulous" or similar. kind of a burnt-out sysadmin gone bad. he was intended to be a totally different personality from myself, but as i also became a burnt-out sysadmin and began to go bad, we kind of merged into one unit. after SCO, i remained toor on several other systems in order to cause trouble on the nacent santa cruz.ca.us newsgroups.

after i left santa cruz, i decided i was tired of using aliases online and being called something other than my real name. which i always spelled "mykle" anyway. so i started picking "mykle" as my default login, and at some point i registered the mykle.com domain, so now i'm committed.

btw, several computing labs on the UCSC campus used to use "toor" a a default root password. i found this out accidentally. check it out, they probably still use it.