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.
I'm a technology strategist for the
International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, one of the world's leading development institutions. We're building a
new knowledge sharing system for our researchers and partners, and weblogs are part of the strategy. My personal site is called
tranquileye. I'm also a Ph.D. student at the
University of Toronto's Knowledge Media Design Institute.
"tranquileye" is not my first or oldest online nickname; that honour would go to the hacker handle by which many people have known me since 1986, but that I still don't spread around. (If you want to read about my "exploits" as a wannabe computer hacker, you can do that at my
hacker\culture site.) This was also my AOL id back in the early-1990s, when I dialled them up long distance, Guelph to New Hampshire.
"tranquileye" is also not the My Yahoo ID I selected in 1997, as Colin has suggested; that nickname was "John S", and at some point Yahoo choked on the space and I had to choose another.
So, as has been the case for years when I have attempted to find a fresh, unused identity, I go to the Cocteau Twins and steal a song title. "Tranquil eye" is
Jen's favourite Cocteau Twins song, found on their 1996 EP/CD
Violaine (red), also covered somehow by
Faye Wong.
I am pretty sure that the Twins borrowed the phrase from German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zarathustra:
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed,--and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it: ... Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!
When push comes to shove, however, tranquileye is really a description of the one eye of mine (either one, actually) that cannot look forward; it is
not lazy or turned out, but simply tranquil, and perhaps
exotropian.
My Amazon wishlist can be found at
here.
