n high school my band was called "falcon white" which was actually taken from "gyrfalcon". when i got to ucsc i met louis imershein (bytor) in my photography class and he told me about ucscb. i'd been mostly a pc sorta guy and took to unix and the net happily. i also liked that after the few dormies i had at stevenson stopped staying up late enough for my tastes, there were still folks around to hang out with up at crown stat.

oh yeah, so anyways, when i had to pick a login at the cc i wanted to choose gyrfalcon but it was too long so i just went with falcon instead. for my NAME environment variable (and forum posts), i used frederick smythe, esquire which was a revamping of a name i used back in 6th grade when a friend of mine and i had a little money loan and candy-selling business going. i was "fred smith" and he was "seymore simon". a number of years later, i dropped the alias from my email headers since people through work got confused thinking they were actually two separate people. the only other forum nick name i can remember was "figure jon" from john forum. i remember forever ago thinking chuck "mr. mtrek" peterson was the coolest and i think that's when i converted to posting with "jon r. luini" since i think he used to post as "chuck l. peterson" or something and i liked how it looked. i kept it on since i like the idea of not needing to hide behind an alias.

when ssyx was around, i chose account niteowl for the obvious late-night hours reason (and 7 character limit).

i also had a few "fake" ucscb accounts i used for disk space, the most common one of which was "psycho" (which i got my roomie to open) which i developed a fake persona for who pilpel (for those who remember him) developed a crush on. the running gag was that he'd see "her" logged on and come in and ask folks at crown stat about it and everyone would say "oh, she *just* left". it was never more than that 'cuz i sorta felt bad about it.

back in the day, mike kaye (acct horny) and adam margulies (acct vespa) and i did a lot of stuff online together and formed "HFV Prod", for horny-falcon-vespa production. we helped people set up their ucscb accounts (through a shell script i had called "womp") and also tormented each other's accounts with various jokes and games-- one faked write messages from root and eventually disconnected you. we were hated by some of the older geeks in our youth for prepending a header to all of the manual pages which had an ascii version of bill the cat and the text "this manual page brought to you by HFV Prod". i always thought it was a pretty minor hack since it didn't inconvenience people :}

though i kept my cats accounts alive through consulting when i wasn't an active student, there was a brief period of time when i didn't have a b account-- i used john dubois' account for a bit to store BoFf and some forums, and then briefly had an "illegal" account called "frm" (for "forum") before getting falcon again. oh, and i was also commonly seen logged in as "public" or "games" when i achieved enough geek points to be a public manager and games "mangler".

there are a few rare places that i had a jluini account-- one that comes to mind were the ocf computers at berkeley.

my icb nickname, sl'lee, is a combination of the gorn ship captain from star trek and the sleestak from land of the lost. when i was a kid, i was afraid of the sleestak and my brother would come in and whisper ssssssssleeeeeeeesssssstak to me as i was going to bed to try and torment me.

Gorn was a name i picked up for most of my machine names from 88-96 or so-- gorn.sco.com, gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us, gorn.evolve.com, gorn.hal.com, gorn.iuma.com, etc and was sort of tied in with the game s&mtrek that i wrote with my friend tim wisseman.

my work email has always been "jonl" though pronounced "jawnull" by most, i used to joke it was jon-el, lost son of krypton. ah, those geeky days of yore!

maybe i should go through a story of all of the weird programs i wrote too... naw, that might take too long. some of the names were: romp, gazebo, gromp, fhop, BoFf, maim, vegimatic, honk, sme, madraine (version of rain that showed madonna lyrics instead of raindrops), and the one that still continues: yam (taken from my nickname in deth specula).

one of my proudest account names i influenced was blarg, which was a word i made up at the time. i've discovered in the years since that it's appeared many many different totally unrelated places which was a bit of letdown to my claim of having created it. but what mike knight did with that name i will be forever proud!