[mahmud]

OT:

9oliYQjP: you're one very interesting person but with a bad user name. Do you mind putting a note in your profile with a more pronouncable name? Everytime I read a comment of yours I am distracted by the machine generated name, which I somehow pronounce in my head as "Nine Olly Qiyuu Jay Pee".

[9oliYQjP]

Heh, it is a machine generated name. I am by no means well-known or a public figure, but some of the people I deal with regularly are. I have had the unfortunate experience of having people digging up dirt on some of these people try to use comments I posted to the Internet against them (e.g., an extreme example of a similar situation is how difficult it was for Obama to shake the notion that Reverend Wright's opinion was also his own). Around the same time I had to undergo a security clearance. It got me thinking about the breadcrumb trail I'd been leaving online. If I could change my cryptic alias to something more readable I would. It just so happens the easiest way to randomly come up with a username was to use the script I use to randomly generate passwords with.

I've spent the past few years SEuO (search engine unoptimizing) my personal online presence including quitting Facebook and started signing up to new services with different aliases so that people can't so easily aggregate what I say. It's kind of embarrassing how paranoid that sounds, but there's the rationale. I don't mind defending my opinions, but I'm loathe to put my friends in a position, as one was, to try to explain my opinion when they might not share it. On the other hand, it's quite liberating being able to say what I want without having to worry about the political costs associated with those comments.

From PG's essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html):

When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

My tactic online is to say it anyways but make sure nobody knows who said it :)

[kirubakaran]

In future perhaps you can put two or three random words together to generate the username.

For this account, you can ask email [e-mail] to change the username to woollymammoth (available)

[mahmud]

Now I am gonna Olly and it's gonna stick. You could've been "Adam", in quotes, but you blew your one chance.

:-)

Take care man.