n 1983, I was in a band with Q and a couple of PONA's. After much deliberation, we came up with the name Schro:dinger's Band. (The colon there is an umlaut that fell off the O.) To this day, I'm not sure if Q thought of that name, or I did. We put out a couple of tapes, "Quantumusik" and "Quantum Cafe".

Sometimes we'd write the name of the band just as an S with an umlaut over it. We thought the two dots in a yinyang were, in fact, an umlaut.

And after a time, I took to calling myself by the name, David Umlaut.

Betweeh 1987 and 1989, I borrowed a couple of ucscb accounts. First vodoo's, and then julia's. But then I went to grad school at UCSC, and got my very own umlaut@ucscb.ucsc.edu.