07 March 2009

user names

When I first started using the internet many years ago, I quickly discovered that there were too many people out there with the same name as me. Of course the problem was that when I went to create a user name, say on the times in new york, I would find that byap and brianyap and various combinations were already in use. I did not want to have to create a new user name for each site as then I had to write them all down. This particularly applied to sites I rarely use. At the time I was trying to learn Mandarin Chinese so I chose my name in mandarin as my user name - yewenyi. This is different to my name in hakka (yap) which is on my birth certificate. BTW yap is still spelled incorrectly, it should be yup. For many years this worked. I had my user name to myself. It worked until the chinese started using the internet in large numbers. But still I rarely encounter them and often I will go in and make a user ID if I am considering a site to stop someone else from taking it.

One advantage is that I can search on this name and see how the search engines rank my sites. This morning I thought to look some where else and the result was quite surprising. As far as I can see most of this stuff is virus and other malicious software. Certainly none of it was ever created by myself.


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