From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Aug 16 2000 - 15:10:47 MDT
Doug Jones wrote:
>
> Emlyn O'Regan wrote:
> >
> > I've got a good friend, with a weird name; I've known him since...
> > I jumped onto ICQ the other day and looked him up. Only one person existed
> > in the world with that name; it was him. He told me he had lost my details
> > too; we might never have found each other again if not for that name.
>
> Yeah, I recently found an old junior high school friend online, just
> because his name is unique- he never would have found me amongst all the
> other "Doug Jones" entries. In some circles I've used the name Random
> or Randome, and that made me memorable.
There are at least three other Eliezer Yudkowskys floating around, that
I know of - simply within our family's Ever-Widening Circle of Relatives
- although fortunately, none of them have a net.presence *yet*.
"Abard" doesn't seem to be anyone's name at all... though abard.com is
taken, and there are still 258 hits on AllTheWeb... mostly misspellings
of 'aboard'. If I did switch, I'd probably find something that didn't
show up on the search engines at all.
A good point about distinctiveness and euphony being as important as
uniqueness; I just think it should be possible to be distinctive, yet
easy to spell.
How about "Chester Q. Fordyce"? Just kidding...
Doug Jones also has an interesting point about being able to steal from
Zelazny and the like. I've never been good at coming up with syllables
myself.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://singinst.org/home.html
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