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.
Velvet winter is a catch-all reference to my Nordic ancestry (Swedish), my penchant for rich velvety fabrics in home decor, my favourite white and silver velvet bellydance costume, and my fascination with a winter goddess from Norse mythology.
Though I had a Commodore 64 and was writing BASIC code in 1983, I didn't get too far into the computer geek realm until much later. I started using the 'net and got my first e-mail account and Usenet access in 1993; I've been online ever since, under various nicknames. Had my first website in 1996; have created and moderated several (now-defunct) e-mail lists and online forums. But I'm really more of an academic geek than a computer geek.
Links of interest:
She's Such a Geek
Geek feminism wiki
Anti-feminist bingo
A few quotes:
"Beware the barrenness of a busy life."
- Socrates
"Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unnoticed, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit, and simply never leave. Our lives are measured
by these.”
- Susan B. Anthony
"We may truly test the health of our spirit by the appetite we have for the common, simple food of living."
- David Grayson
"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live."
- Goethe
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."
- Ernest Hemingway
"Those things that nature denied to human sight, she reavealed to the eyes of the soul."
- Ovid
"The opposite of a shallow truth is false; the opposite of a deep truth is also true.”
- Original source unknown; attributed to Christopher Morley, Niels Bohr, and others
(Quoted in K.C. Cole, “The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty”)
