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Author Topic:   What's in a name?
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 18 of 42 (496314)
01-27-2009 4:31 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Larni
01-27-2009 7:45 AM


It kind of started as a private joke.
In the mid 80's the company I worked at used the common user-name convention of prefixing the last name with the first initial, like the Dilbert joke about Brenda Utthead constantly asking to have her user name changed. So my username was "dwise".
We also got a few of the first-generation Macintoshes (which were brand-new at the time) to do some of our documentation on. Each of us had a system diskette (no hard disk on those suckers) and a data diskette (3.5-in and colored, just like in Star Trek! Cool!) and we each labelled our diskettes with our username. Then my data diskette filled up and I had to expand to two data diskettes. I labelled the new one dwise2 and went back and labelled the first one dwise1. Then one day a co-worker read the label of my first data diskette and started laughing.
A few years later when I signed up for AOL and it wanted a screenname, I remembered that incident and used dwise1.
Quite unintentionally on my part, a few creationists had chosen to try to pick fights with me because of my screenname. More notably, when I emailed Kent Hovind for clarification on his solar-mass-loss claim, in order to weasel out of supporting his own claim, on two separate occasions he tried to pick a fight with me over "dwise1".
Edited by dwise1, : added explanation that that was when Macs first came out

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Larni, posted 01-27-2009 7:45 AM Larni has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 19 by Modulous, posted 01-27-2009 5:23 PM dwise1 has replied
 Message 22 by Larni, posted 01-29-2009 6:36 AM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 20 of 42 (496328)
01-27-2009 7:16 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by Modulous
01-27-2009 5:23 PM


Actually, if there had been another Wise with first initial of "D" who had gotten a username after me, then that person would have been dwise2. Such is the username-assignment convention.
Kids' initials are IAW and MDW.

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Replies to this message:
 Message 23 by kuresu, posted 01-29-2009 6:53 AM dwise1 has not replied
 Message 25 by Straggler, posted 01-29-2009 12:22 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 27 of 42 (496635)
01-29-2009 3:06 PM
Reply to: Message 26 by kuresu
01-29-2009 12:49 PM


Re: My Dad's Wise
No problem. I've gotten that all my life.
What does get me is how hard it can be for people to get the spelling of my last name right. Throughout my childhood, I could not understand why they'd always ask me how to spell my name, a simple, very common four-letter word. That mystery wasn't solved until I started learning German in high school. Then when I was stationed in North Dakota, even after I would give them the correct spelling they still insisted on using the German spelling. True, it's the anglicized form of a German name, but that name was Wies, not Wei.

This message is a reply to:
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