At the time I was in the 5th grade, not too long after we moved to Australia from the big US of A; I was actually born in Melbourne but for work purposes my whole family moved to sunny California when I was just 3 years old. We stayed there for 6 years and then moved back to Australia when I was 9 years old. Not long after we moved back I was enrolled into one of those fancy pants all boys private schools called Trinity Grammar (http://www.trinity.vic.edu.au).
As a requirement all boys in year 5 and up got their own personal laptops to use as a study tool, and to familiarize kids how to use emerging technology (this was back in 1999 when most families would easily share one computer (and not really know how to use it)). And so I received my first laptop, a Toshiba Satellite (I can't remember the model number). I can still remember just how happy I was to have a whole laptop computer to myself. It had colour screen (laptops 2-3 years before ours didn't even have colour screens), 800 MHz Intel Pentium II processor, 32MB of RAM and a 3GB hdd, all weighing in at just 3.5kg, and all this for only $2000! This laptop was seriously teh shitz, matching the specs of my family's 6 month old Dell *desktop* which would have cost about $1500 at the time.
Naturally having a classroom of 25 boys all armed with their own laptops for purely educational purposes meant that it didn't take long before we were all playing games whenever our teacher wasn't looking, however we had a problem, it wasn't easy to give games to each other. At the time there were two games that everyone wanted to, or was, playing: Croc (the original) and Star Wars: Jedi Knights (also the original). These games were around 100MB in size and we had no real way of transferring files that large between each other. USB's weren't around back then, and floppy disks could only hold 1.4MB. Eventually we came across a solution when someone discovered that you could split a zip file into multiple parts! By splitting a game into a few dozen 2MB files we could attachment to an email and email them to each other! (We could only do this while at school and it took about 15 minutes per file to attach).
The only flaw in our plan was that all school emails were tracked by the Deputy Headmaster, and so if we were to email games around, we'd quickly get found out. That was until we made another brilliant discovery, hotmail! Within the space of a day nearly all 75 people spread across three grade 5 classes had a hotmail account with cool usernames like daniiboy3973! The only person in our class who didn't have a hotmail account was myself, not because I didn't want to, or because I didn't know how to sign up for an account, but because I was terribly uncreative and couldn't come up with a cool username.
Home I went that fateful night wondering what I could possibly call my new online identity. In the end I couldn't come up with anything, and so I did what any 10 year old boy does when they get stuck; I asked my parents for help. I can still remember the exact advice Dad gave me "Try to be a bit creative, but you need to make sure it's something that people will recognize you by, so make it something close to your real name". I think what came next is a perfect example of what they call "children's logic".
I was born into this world as Alexander, but I have always been known as Lex (take Alex without the A). So when my Dad told me to use my real name, I took that literally. Following that theme I decided that I would combine my real first name, with my middle name Nikolajs (pronounced: Nick-o-lies). Unfortunately at the time, I didn't know how to spell my middle name, so I took my best guess, "nickolias" hence my first username was born, alexnickolias!
i was more wondering where rekisu came from. although i know you use it alot from dota
ReplyDeletelololololol so lexy-poo was behind in the craze because of a name and u made alexnickolias then? Huzzah~
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, I'm sure part 2 will come in short time, so there's a sequel to this? Anyhow, keep going.