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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

There is no deal—that's the name on my birth certificate (minus a space). I've always been myself on the Internet.

I got my first Internet account in 1993 (I'd been on AOL, Compuserve, and a few BBSs before that), and still have the e-mail I received in 1994 from a friend saying "come on over to my office, there's something you should see"—that something being Mosaic and the Web. I still remember the visceral excitement I felt clicking from CERN's "what's hot" page to other sites all over the world—it felt almost like teleportation. And the lightning-bolt realization "this is the way the Internet is going to work."