On 12/1/06, Ruslan Ermilov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
P.S. BTW, what info{farmer,sat} mean? You can reply in private and in Russian. ;)
OK, since you ask, it might as well go down in history ;-) infofarmer is a bit tricky. It means I'm a high school [1] student, blessed with broadband (64 kbps) Internet access at school, trying to come up with a new nickname/alias/login for an account in the most popular national free webmail [2], because all of my current nicknames have already been taken. I'm sure the result does not sound very well, but at least it's easy to look me up in search engines. satellite was the first thing I could come up with [4] a few years prior to infofarmer, when I was invited to join a gaming clan (Quake and StarCraft mostly) named RoS [3]. We wrote our names with clantag attached and we mostly played in local area networks, so uniqueness was not a big issue. I retained the "satellite" nickname when I joined another clan, this time just a bunch of guys from my neighborhood. We mostly drank beer (and some of us even played Counter-Strike), so the clan was named DwArFs (the weird capitalization was in trend then). It's not very easy to pronounce "satellite" in Russian, especially when you're drunk, which we were most of the time whenever we got together, so naturally my nickname got its short form "sat". Some people in my neighborhood still say "hey, sat!" when we meet in the street, and sometimes I answer "hey, x-pac!", or "hey, sof!", leaving the bystanders wondering about the mental condition of parents who gave those pretty names. Anyway, when krion asked me what login name I would want to use I still couldn't believe that I was being invited to become a FreeBSD committer, the feat a was planning to accomplish in 2007ish. But I didn't want to appear hesitated, I wanted to reply right away. It was late and I spent 5 minutes generating PGP keys (I forgot the passphrase the next day, which, I guess, did not make them less secure), I knew that a 10-letter login name ("infofarmer") could cause some problems, so I thought, to hell with it, and gave the login I already used on many boxes, which was "sat". You can't use a three-letter word in a search engine (if it's not something world-famous like "phk"), so I asked our eminent postmaster for an alias and David Wolfskill was very kind to grant me my wish. infosat is probably the easiest. It means, "hi, I'm a new guy on IRC. infofarmer is too long, and sat is already taken and anything else would make me unrecognizable. Well, maybe a mixture of my two FreeBSD aliases will do..." That's about it, thanks for skipping a bit of my story right to this point ;-) [1] http://sch57.msk.ru/ [2] http://mail.ru/ [3] RoS stood for Rat of Steel, and allusion to one of Harry Harrison's characters, the Stainless Steel Rat. [4] One of my pages elaborates on where "satellite" actually comes from - http://people.freebsd.org/~sat/me.html _______________________________________________ freebsd-chat@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"