Monday, January 7, 2008

The truth is, my real name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I am very embarrassed about this.

The normal reaction to my use of an alias for posting purposes is disinterest, but over the last few days I've seen a couple of online "who is this guy?" wonderings.

Jake Kuramoto compiled a list of tweeters who are interested in Oracle, and he explained the purpose for his list as follows.

I’ve seen some tweets in past from Julio Fernandez, about which Oracle employees tweet, and my goal here is to start a list of people who Tweet, including Oracle employees, ACEs, anyone who’s interested in following Oracle happenings, and AppsLab readers. This serves a couple purposes. First, it connects those of us who have similar interests and already use Twitter. Second, it offers a nice list of people in the extended Oracle Twitter community to start following if you’re brand-spanking new to Twitter.

Jake had compiled a rather extensive list of people, including yours truly in the following bullet:

Ontario Emperor (can’t recall his real name)

You see, as it turns out, some of my Oracle contacts happen to know my real name. This is because I attended Oracle OpenWorld primarily to represent my Fortune 500 employer, and secondarily as a personal blogger. Therefore I was juggling personae all week, having several "You know me as Ontario Emperor, but I am X from Y" - or, alternatively, "When I'm not product managing my widgets, I blog under the name Ontario Emperor."

But that's the Oracle people. There are also people that I've met solely via blogging or tweeting, and they don't have the slightly idea who I am. For those people, my reluctance to blog my real name is puzzling. Take Shawn Zehnder Lea, who responded to my memetag as follows:

My new online friend Ontario Emperor tagged me, so here goes. (And I am one of his online friends that doesn't know his real name - makes me wonder if he's in the witness protection program or something. Sheesh!) ;)

Actually, it's something similar to that, which I tangentially alluded to in my own response to the meme.

I eventually left Usenet after an unfortunate pizza delivery accident, and have never returned.

Without going into too much detail, my activities in alt.non.sequitur and other Usenet groups earned me the enmity of someone who then proceeded to talk about my real name.

And some other stuff.

And the name of my then-employer.

A couple of years after that, I got an email from my mom, asking me if I knew the things that were being said about me on the Internet.

Thus, I have become more careful about my online persona (although my city of residence is obviously a matter of public record).

P.S. Ignore the title. My real name is not Richard Milhous Nixon. My real name is Oprah David Duke Obama. No wonder the guy on Usenet hated me.

[mrontemp business] | [mrontemp politics] | [mrontemp technology] | [mrontemp del.icio.us tags]

Sphere: Related Content

3 comments:

Jake said...

Lulz, so your real initials are ODDO FTW! I know you introduced yourself by name somewhere in a "You know me as Ontario Emperor, but . . . " moment, but I can't find it.

Anyway, I like the current moniker. You pwn the IE; is Ontario considered IE?
Jake

Ontario Emperor said...

The Inland Empire is considered to extend as far west as the San Bernardino-LA County border, so Ontario would be included. A newspaper, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, came up with a self-serving definition of the Inland Valley, which included their readership area and stretched as far west as La Verne.

Anonymous said...

Wow. I never new Usenet had an Asshole Protection Program (APP). Cool beans! ;)

If we ever meet in person, I shall just call you Ontario. Or Emperor. Depending on how you strike me, I suppose...