started Grad School at UCSC in Fall of 1990. While it was all very well that I had a grad student account, I decided I wanted a B account as well. At the time, I was dating a UCSC alum who described B-geeks as evil and warned me away from ucscb. I was intrigued to say the least.

So after breaking up with her, I applied for one of the more imaginative names I could come up with -- "william". It was taken, so in a fit of inspiration, I chose "will". Bad choice for two reasons. First, someone else had had it recently enough that I got email intended for them. Worse yet, many people did not understand that sentences should not begin on the Cc" line. I was privy to all sorts of personal email.

I had wanted to use forum to post information on the Israeli and Palestinian situation (I had researched this quite extensively at the time), but eventually found myself posting in my three favorite nodes: whine, sex, and romance. It just has a nice ring to it.

I also put a lot of work into creating a finger file. With slow baud rates, a lot could be done with control characters to make the text appear to move or dance. I received lots of email from people who were intrigued by my finger file. 90% of them were women. Did I mention I was newly single?

Upon graduation two years later, I created a different account -- "wastrel". I would like to claim that my imagination had grown beyond its old boundaries, but a wastrel was a small desert creature from a rather inane game called "In Search of the Emperor's Treasure" that I had once played. Actually, I liked the dictionary definition of wastrel and felt for some reason that it applied to me.

I credit Hugo with telling me where to go (ahem) to get my account. I also dated and was engaged to andreas before we broke up when she went to med school (and now she's a doctor!)