cat >/dev/null

After the umpteenth misunderstanding between my nickname and my first name just happened (interestingly, this time the blame is on me, but that’s not the point), I’ve decided to let go of the truth like never before.

A bit of background may be of help here. My nickname is andrew, as you know or may have guessed, from this site’s domain name for a start. My first name is Luca, but clearly the nickname comes from the assonance with my family name, Andreucci. Too bad Andrew is also the english translation for the Italian first name Andrea, which is very widespread, and also a male name. Needless to say, andrew is a very common choice for a nickname or screen name for someone whose first name is Andrea.

To sum it up, apart from the people who simply get it wrong, many among those who know me or hear me called by my nickname wrongly assume that my first name is Andrea. At the end of the day it’s quite a lot of them, believe me.

While there’s no question that this rather unfortunate choice is entirely my fault, there is a little story behind it, that I will use as a lame excuse, or at least try and entertain you with.

I started fiddling with computers when I was still a kid. Of course, like anyone else I had the habit of giving myself funny “hacker” names, but I never really settled on one1. During my early experiments with multiuser environments I’d been using my first name as a login. But when I started my University courses, the lab managers had this rule of using the first n letters from the family name, eight character tops, as a login name. As you may see, my family name is nine letters long, so I was left with the horrible:

andreucc:~$

I remember discussing this issue with one of the admins who, strange as it may seem, wasn’t really concerned; his resolution was then to strip down a couple more characters, leaving me with:

andreu:~$

Big deal. In no time everyone was having fun at my login name.

I asked the lab admin if he could change the last character as to give me “andrew”, but he said this was against the first n letters rule, so I was stuck with andreu.

No wonder I left the University before graduating.

But want to know what’s even more fun? When I left the University to start my own ISP firm, the lab guy ended up being one of my associates. Too bad I couldn’t get my revenge: his family name is only seven letters long! But I finally got the login name I wanted:

root:~#

That’s how andrew was born. No later than a year after that, the andrew.org domain was registered, and the rest is history.

I hope you enjoyed this story. Movie rights are still available to the highest bidder.

1 There’s actually one I was using more often than others, but never in the world I will reveal it, not even under the most excruciating tortures. Lucky for me there’s a very good chance anybody who knew it probably can’t remember, will not read this or does not give a damn anyway.