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by jgrahamc 2947 days ago
Oh, cool. I can finally fix the bug/feature that whenever someone replied to an email from me they got warned about profanity because of my last name :-)
3 comments

Hehe, to be completely fair with you the first time I came across your name I thought you were pulling a very long prank. But you don't get to choose your name.

An architect in the Netherlands had 'Rothuizen' as his last name, which translates to 'Rotten houses', not the best name for an architect so he changed it to 'Rotshuizen', which translates as 'Houses built like rocks'. Much better :)

In your case I wouldn't change a thing.

Graham-Cumming: Graham and Cumming are both Scottish clan names.

Clan Cumming (or Comyn): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Cumming

Clan Graham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Graham

Do you suppose the original etymology of "Rothuizen" could have been an older Germanic name that might have been rendered as "Rodehuizen" in modern Dutch? (I'm thinking of modern German "rot" corresponding to modern Dutch "rood".)

Wiktionary seems to believe in a Middle Dutch "*rōt (in placenames)" referring to the color red.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

Yes, that is very well possible. But that is not how an average Dutch person would read it.

Your reading makes excellent sense though, since a lot of the houses here are made of red brick.

Maybe he did not want to be limited in his choices of brick colors :)

Could be worse: you could have graduated Summa cum laude and have the store refuse to put that on your graduation cake!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/2...

As long as you're not from Clitheroe or Scunthorpe
That story is so embellished. There's no way a university-aged guy is "so humiliated" by the censored word that he "couldn't even eat it after that". Get real.
Clbuttic!
May I have an off topic question? I know I read in an article that Cloudbleed woke you up like 1:23AM but I can't find that article any more and I used that to tell my junior developers to write code they can understand when they are woken at 1:23AM as you were. So the question is -- is this true or did I dream up something?
That is true.

I woke to my phone ringing quickly followed by this exchange of messages: https://imgur.com/a/7aLLw22

I would love to read about this somewhere. I also share the grand-posters opinion that sharing these kinds of stories with less experienced developers is fantastic culture.
I've done two talks on Cloudbleed (at Virus Bulletin 2017 and at RSA 2018). I would be happy to do a talk about it again somewhere.
Looks like they just put your RSA talk online: https://youtu.be/hojAgTsTeCA