B. Mann Consulting

Back in my more shy, wanting to be private days, I preferred to remain anonymous. But in many forums, and of course gaming, you need some sort of name, so I went with nonimus because it sounded like anonymous. These days, with business networking and all, people need to know the real me, so I usually go with my initials and last name, rjdempsey. The problem with that though, is that when people meet me in real life they call me "rj". My name is Ryan, but more and more people call me "rj", I'm might just go with it.

Because I have a relatively unusual first name, and I use my middle initial so my user name becomes pronouncable (raw-hell-a-bee), I have gotten rahelab no matter where I go. Well, except for Yahoo, which is a story in itself because long ago, when we were told not to divulge our real birthdates, I lied about my birthday and couldn't remember my lie, and forever more am locked out of my Yahoo account. And though I have another account under another name and pw, I can never, ever remember it, so I tend to stay away from anything Yahoo because it's one of those grunt, sigh, raspberry moments when I have to figure out how to use my Yahoo ID or whatever. To date, I've never collided with another rahelab anywhere, and that always seems so amazing, that with how many millions of users, I have become rather complacent about expecting to get my user name.

I went through my share of nicknames, all thanks to those BBS days.  Beaner, Bean Man, and then college brought forth the eight character jbollwit since it was all unix, eight characters only.  

Audihertz came about because I wanted to become disassociated with my online life from my professional life, and it was available as a domain name.  A nice combo of the words audio and megahertz that I came up with on my own.  Blogging was new to me (in 2003/2004), but I had the urge to write after taking some non-fiction writing courses in college.  Then working professionally in radio drove me to podcasting, and I have always had a love affair with photography.  This allowed me to pursue those interests on a under the horizon level, safe from Google searches. 

These days, I'm actually trying to shed the made up handle and go with strictly johnbollwitt.  It's a more professional approach, plus just owning up to the things I create, whether it's blogging, podcasting, photography, etc.  It attributes, in my opinion, more to me than a persona.

My favourite was that of a gal I worked with named Silvie Trudel. IT did the natural thing using the initial of the first name and first six letter of the second name. Delicious!

i nearly always try to get supersusie, and i'm proud to say that that goes back further than university. in fact, i was supersusie in high school. i don't actually remember the origin of the name, but it no doubt has to do with superheroes or some such foolishness. but really, if you get nicknamed "supersusie" you don't refuse.

i tend to get supersusie pretty frequently although there are clearly others trying to use it and occasionally i'm out of luck. my backup username is susiegard, which is also the username i use on various instant messaging services. i believe aol had some rule about 10 character usernames way back when, so susiegard it was.

in university, i got the username sgarden from the school newspaper's archaic publishing system (ATEX) -- soundgarden! i kinda liked that one, but i don't use it now.

good question!

supersusie.

Much like you Boris, my username is a university heritage thing.  At McMaster when I started in 95 they were giving out email addresses/logons based upon student number.  As an undergrad I was on the McMaster Undergraduate Student Server (muss) and had a username of the form u950xxxx. 

 I'm not sure if it was in second year or third year, but they switched away from that and started handing out name derived usernames and so I ended up with smithdm3. smithd(avid)m(ichael)3.  Not sure why the 3, but I guess I was probably behind a couple of other smithdm peoples.  Anyhow, that's my tale. I've never seen it taken and so I just keep using it... 

I had a very similar username generated back at college on an HP-UX system: henshaj. But I couldn't stand it, as it sounded horrible and unlike my actual name.  

So for years I'd settle for jhenshaw when it was available, and nowadays I have my usernames broken into two categories, work and play.  For most stuff, it's work mode and I try my best to just get "jeff".  For play, I go with "Dingo," which originated on Xbox Live.  Both of those are often taken, so I fall back to longer names using periods, hyphens, and underscores. Most namespaces are polluted ghettos.

I'm increasingly enjoying OpenID logins, (PS: why no OpenID-auth'd commenting here anymore?) but wish OpenID would get off it's arse and really support e-mail address based auth.  I'd be more than happy to just auth via my email address, and let services automatically extract a friendly display-name from the prefix of my address (e.g. pull "Jeff" from "jeff at henshaw dot org".

-Jeff / Dingo / henshaj / jeff.henshaw / jeff_henshaw / jeff-henshaw / jhenshaw 

When I first started at Nortel, way back in my co-op days of '97, for some reason they had decided to assign me a username of haggaret - this despite the fact that my last name was haggerty.  Both are 8 characters long, and 'haggerty' was available so I'm not sure why they picked haggaret.  Typo perhaps?  Anyways, my friends got wind of it and seemed to think it was quite humourous so it stuck as a nickname.  The beauty part is that I've yet to find a site where that username is taken.  Oh and naturally I picked up haggaret.com which I use for my blog.  :)