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From: "Jerry Keller - K3BZ" <k3bz@...>

May we know your name and callsign milady?

73, Jerry K3BZ

----- Original Message -----
From: "jdow" <jdow@...>

{^_-} I suppose I'm a lady. W6MKU sure as heck ain't a gentleman. I'm
to vicious when riled. {O,o}

Um, I'm good on QRZ and the call is right there before your eyes in the
message in which you posted that request. I find that amusing. {^_-}

{^_^} as a signature is so ingrained in me it's hard to break. It started
over a couple decades ago.

The first part, which actually happened after the second part had
begun, was my being assigned some work on a VAX-780 running VMS. I
have a character asset called curiosity. When I had time I prowled
around the machine, harmlessly since I could not finish my job if it
broke. I discovered that VMS disks and partitions are referred to as
[000,000] for partition zero disk zero, and so forth. I soon learned
that you can shorten this to [0,0]. I noted the resemblance to a face
right away.

The second part of its beginnings was my participation in an "Amateur
Press Association" "distie" (or distribution) called "APA-L" that is
collated weekly Thursday evenings as the LASFS, Los Angeles Science
Fantasy Society, meetings. Zines, a person's contributions, often had
interliners, stings of symbols to set off sections. One day I used
"[0,0]" repeated across the page for the first interliner. Then I
decided a variation on the theme might be interesting. By illogical
progression I started using [^_^] as a signature at the end of my
Zine.

Now, it seems Jerry Pournelle (yeah him) is a member in very long
and good standing of LASFS. He had gotten to know that I had computers
and modems. This was in 1985 with SLOW SLOW modems, mind you. He had
also heard I was doing some BBS work and CP/M hacking. One day he took
me aside and told me to find a "Tymnet" phone number and type "bix" at
the prompts, or something like that.

So when I got home I did. BIX was booted near the last day of March. I
was on it by early June of 1985. And [O_O] became my signature. On BIX
it was easy to "show resume" to figure out who a person was. So that
soon became my only signature. That lasted until not very long ago
when the lights were finally turned out at BIX. During that time the
signature rounded out a little, which I think is a little more
feminine. And I developed the {O,o} (crazed}, {^_-} (wink), and many
other variants.

It's hard to break a habit of essentially 20 years making. I still tend
to sign messages {^_^}. There is this little "reinforcement" that I see,
too. The ambiguity tends to lull people into thinking I might be one of
the guys. So when I start talking dirty er technical they have a better
chance of listening. Can you guess at my degree of contentment with the
kind of situation that has me the senior engineer present in a meeting
with the customer's men all asking the other men questions I should be
the one answering? Then when one of them turns to me to ask if I'd go
get coffee.... They were customers. I managed to hold a straight face
as I said I'd ask a secretary to get it. "My" half of the room visibly
relaxed when I kept my cool. At least some of them had noticed my
growing irritation. {^_-} So anyway, the "logical mistakes" tend to
reinforce the relative anonymity of the "BIXie" signature.

{^_-} Joanne, Wilma's 6 Mangy Kinky Undies (Wonderful 6 Million
Kilowatts Unleashed?) And for the record "every Thursday"
above means it. There have been fewer meetings that did not
happen than there are years the club has existed. And it's
the oldest SF club in continuous existance in the known
universe. (Yes, Larry Niven, the author, is also a member.)




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