On Aug 29, 2005, at 3:28 PM, Lawrence Lile wrote:

> candidate #2 and 3 have no hits on Google with any variant of their
> name I can think of.
>
> Where have these guys been?   Have they been clinging to the bottom
> of a boat hull since the Internet was born?   Were they buried by
> an avalanche of disco clothing in 1989 and have just now emerged?

Well, people that showed up in the "post-www" era have pretty much
learned to keep their true identities somewhat hidden on the internet.
I hope you can't find any of my kids' names, for instance :-(

And then you have nicknames and variations.  A google search for
"William Westfield" turns up a paltry 600 hits, many of which
are not me.  "Bill Westfield" also turns up about 600 hits, and
more of them look like me.  If you happen to know "William Chops
Westfield", you get a more representative 11000 hits :-), but you
wouldn't be able to derive that from my resume...

Likewise, old-timers are more likely to have usernames that were only
unique within the company they worked at.  When I was "billw@sri-kl",
it didn't bother me that there was also a "billw@isi-a" (or whatever),
but alas "billw" turned out to be popular (there are even "I am a friend
of BillW" bumper stickers, which confused me no end till I figured it 
out!)
and I missed getting it as a username on most of the public email 
services.
"westfw" that I'm using now (gmail, yahoo, .mac, comcast...) dates back
to 6-character limits in college (westfw@wharton-10), and is more
pleasantly unique.

BillW
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist