Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2006 03:41:58 +0300 From: "Andrew Pantyukhin" <infofarmer@FreeBSD.org> To: "Ruslan Ermilov" <ru@freebsd.org> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <chat@freebsd.org>, David Xu <davidxu@freebsd.org> Subject: My weird login names Message-ID: <cb5206420611301641r299c61baocf011d905fe8b665@mail.gmail.com>
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On 12/1/06, Ruslan Ermilov <ru@freebsd.org> 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
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