My first name starts with a "D" and my last name is Wise, so at my second software engineering job, circa 1984, my network username was "dwise" -- refer to the old Dilbert joke about that troublemaker, Brenda Utthead, who kept asking to have her username changed.
At that time, we got a few of the brand-new MacIntoshes to use in documentation, mainly for the paint program where we could create graphics and merge in text. Our other documentation tool was nroff, in which we had to enter dot-commands to control formatting, then submit the document for printing and wait half a day or longer for it to be delivered, whereupon we'd see how our latest dot-command had screwed up and we would iterate the process. Also, we thought that the new 3.5-in diskettes were really cool, because they looked like the data-storage media on
Star Trek.
So, for the Mac we each had a system diskette (they were all floppy-based, no hard drive) and a data diskette. I immediately labelled my diskettes with my username. Then when I expanded to a second data diskette, I labelled it "dwise2" and relabelled my first one, "dwise1". Then one day, a co-worker looked at my first data diskette and laughed. Took me a moment to figure out what was so funny.
A few years later when I signed up for AOL, it asked me for a username and I couldn't think of one. So I remembered back to that incident and picked "dwise1". Then many years later as I'd join on-line fora, I continued to use my AOL username.
Over the years, a few creationists have tried to pick a fight with me over my username, usually in the form of run-by flamings (you know them; the single hateful email damning you to Hell for exposing "creation science" or even just for supporting evolution).
About 5 years ago, I came across a claim by Kent Hovind that at the rate the sun is losing mass by "burning its fuel" (about 5 million tons per second), it would have been impossibly massive 5 billion years ago and so would have "sucked the earth in" at that time. He got the rate about right, but at that rate the sun 5 billion years ago would have only been marginally more massive. I ended up emailing Hovind seeking clarification on his claim. He kept ducking and dodging in his attempts to avoid supporting his own claim. He even tried to pick a fight with me about my username. Twice!
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