so here i was going to UCSC, trying to figure out what to do with my time. first the earthquake happened, and afterwards i went to all kinds of events that interested me, and over the course of that year, i met quite a few people in random places who i later found out were all geeks (just off the top of my head, lucifer, beeman, aeron, galpin, aaronf/sors, gollum). that first quarter, the CIS/CE department decided that all students in the department need to have an e-mail account on a machine called slugmail, so i went to sign up for it. i had to find an account name quickly, so i thought of how to say "slug" in hebrew. the closest i could think of was "shavlul", which means "snail". no one really used slugmail for much of anything (it was a crappy XENIX machine with really nonstandard versions of everything). i'd started to hear rumors about the ucscb machine towards the end of that school year, and finally got an account the next fall without much idea what to do with it. i went to CC39 and would log in and type "help" just to see what it would do, and (amazingly for a UNIX machine) it actually had a catalog of help files for all kinds of things. from here i discovered IRC, Usenet, and much later forum. slugmail then served its most useful purpose - to allow me to rlogin to ucscb without waiting in the queue for 20 minutes.
the only e-mail i've received about my account name was around 1991 or so when i got an e-mail from someone in the netherlands who asked if i picked the name because it means "shaved penis" in dutch. at work my account name has always been "dan", and i've made a point to get the "dan" account whenever possible. when the small company i worked at was bought by a 1000-person company, amazingly the "dan" account was not taken.
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