My Names

On Names and their meanings

My name is jkhinzman. I have had many different names that I have gone by; some used to call me SPoT!, some have called me phlooid, some have even called me Dungeon Boy. But all that was a long time ago. I only tell you now in case it comes up later, you know, because that's so likely to happen. All of my names have had meaning at the time, with the exception of SPoT!, but that was the point, to have no reason to call me SPoT!. I was really proud of each name, so maybe I should explain them and get the suspense over with. I mean this page is all about introducing myself, so why not introduce the many different names of me?

The story of SPoT!

SPoT! came about because a long time ago, I used to go to a church camp. At that camp there was another boy with the same name as me. Now unlike me, he was a real troublemaker, a Ne'er-do-well. So, the adults were always calling his name. But because it was the same as mine, I would respond as well. But this got tiring so one night at dinner I asked my fellow campers for a name that would not get called so often. My friend Ash looked down at the table and then looked up at me and said "SPoT!" and it stuck. For a very, very long time.

What is that? Some kind of fudge?

Later on when I got on the internet I discovered there was a veritable army of SPoTs, so I needed a new name. I Tried several options and ended up on kludge, a programming term meaning to force something to work in a particularly inelegant or messy way. But there was a hacker by that name and he didn’t appreciate me trying to steal his name. Just in general it is a bad idea to steal a hacker's identity unless you know what your doing. I did not know what I was doing, So I needed a new name.

Dripping names on the floor

I happen to be reading Chaos: The Making Of A New Science at the time. In the book they gave an example that involved coffee and cream. The author talked about how no matter how many measurements you took, you would never know exactly where the cream in the coffee was, because there were just entirely too many variables. Now you might know roughly where it was, but sometimes it did really unexpected things because you didn't account for something. I felt that I, myself, was a lot like that. You probably knew what I would do, but you never knew exactly where I was going. Since this was fluid dynamics, I became a fluid which a friend turned into Phloo-Id which has finally rested at phlooid.

Ego gone awry

Later in life still, there became too many phlooids. I was starting to get a little confidence under my belt and as per my usual methods I went to another extreme. So I wanted to be a deity, but one that didn’t matter. I had just gotten my third Apple Macintosh computer. I was a deity that was three apple’s high! Smurfs are supposed to be three apples high, so I became smurfgod, added 23, and then I was smurfgod23.

Now, don’t you feel like you know me much better?

The real irony being that now that I have explained all these names to you, you should just forget them. I am jkhinzman. I don't need to be anyone else anymore.