Wherein slampoud explains where "slampoud" came from

People wonder what the name "slampoud" is all about, and why random folks refer to me as such, so I thought I'd do a little writeup about it. Let's begin by pointing out the obvious: it's not a name, it's a username that became a nickname. In the olden days (1998!) the University of Chicago ran its mail, web, directory and other services on a very old UNIX machine. (I don't know whether the servers actually ran on midway.uchicago.edu or harper.uchicago.edu or those were just the front-end machines. The campus-wide stuff was handled by NSIT, which was probably the only sysadmin outfit on campus I never worked for. Incidentally, midway was finally taken offline in the last couple weeks; we held a minute of silence for it on Facebook. RIP midway!) Back then university policy was that every incoming student got an account, with an 8 char username, which was made up of their first initial and however much of their last name could fit in the remaining 7 chars. So "slampoud" was born.

ANL's username policy was less automated, and therefore appeared more enlightened: on ANL's machines I was "lampoudi", which actually made sense, but never stuck. However, the account creation folks must have been completely stumped by the task of assigning a username to Bill Allcock. He ended up as "ballcock", but I'm not sure "allcock" would have been much better. But I digress...

"Slampoud" propagated to Uchicago Computer Science, where all the 1337ness began for me. Around CS, or at least around Techstaff, where I worked, we all referred to each other by our usernames. Brian Ward ("bri") was especially persistent in calling me "slampoud", and it stuck.

I was hired as a summer student at Argonne's Math and Computer Science Div'n because I was just about the only person in Illinois, and probably all of the Midwest, who knew anything about Myrinet, the high performance interconnect that MCS was planning to use on the cluster they were building, Chiba City. Indeed, Ridgway Scott had hired me to build a cluster at Uchicago CS, codenamed "Avalon", that used that very interconnect. So when I started working at ANL, my self-chosen username on the system administrators' MUD was "myri", short for Myrinet. There are probably still people who think of me as "myri".

But coming back to "slampoud", I have two more things to say. One: I love the ideas people come up with to explain what the heck a "slampoud" might be. The real provenance of the name doesn't occur to almost anyone. I especially liked the suggestion that some really twisted climbing move should be called "slamming the poud". Two: I briefly had a twitter account with that handle. I hated it, because every little 160 char remark I made got copied over and over by this and that meta service, completely robbing a google search for "slampoud" of any meaningful results. So I trashed my twitter account, which I'm sure caused a kerfuffle in the twitter-climbing community, but I'll tell you more about that decision some other time...