Another personal FAQ I've gotten over the years has been about the title of my LiveJournal.

I first joined LiveJournal on August 12th, 2003. And as I mentioned in my first post, I was joining only because "A friend sent me a link to a LJ post, but it is protected. The only way to view it is to give in and at last create an account of my own."

To put all my LJ-addicted friends on notice that I was here to read and not to post, I titled my journal: "I will not give in to this addiction... Really!"

Three years and nearly 300 journal posts of my own later, I think it is time to confess that I have indeed succumbed to LiveJournal.

And I guess it is time to stop confusing new readers who always ask about the name, puzzling over just what addiction I am talking about.

The theme of my life lately has been one of trusting in nomadic serendipity, and thinking back on the origins of "radven" gave me the rest of what I needed to come up with a new title for my home online...

As of today, my new LiveJournal title (I hope) makes a little more sense:

Adventures in Nomadic Serendipity
Life is a radical adventure indeed...

Chatting with james_the_evil1 just now, he asked me: "Where do RenDevang and Radven come from?"

I get this question all the time. I guess I should start working on my personal FAQ:

RenDevang: Years ago (1997 - 1999) I was the "Developer Relations Manager & Chief Evangelist" of the now long defunct graphics chip company Rendition. One of the then radical things I used to do was to actually TALK with Rendition customers and fans online, and I made myself widely available via IM as "RendEvang". The last time I googled it there were still a few interviews with me under that name online, though pretty much all the Rendition fan sites are now long lost to history.

Rendition got bought by Micron and the graphics division pretty much disintegrated afterwards. Now www.rendition.com is a front for cheap DRAM - how sad. Though if you dig deep enough, you can find a Rendition driver download page here, and also a very old FAQ I vaguely remember writing. Reading the FAQ is a huge flashback for me, and the section on Linux reminds me of one of the other things I was most proud of at Rendition - in addition to being the first graphics company to actually talk in an open 2-way dialog with users, I was responsible for Rendition being the first of the 3D graphics chip companies to give support and even source code to Linux driver developers!

After I left Rendition in 1999 I kept my IM ID on Yahoo and AOL, but eventually changed the capitalization and pronunciation to be "RenDevang". I've had some people guess that it stands for "Renaissance Devil / Angel", and I do happen to like that interpretation. *grin*


Radven: From 1996 through 2002 I was using the supposed lifetime email address of "cmd@thematrix.com". But when my friend who owned The Matrix Recording Studio at last gave in and sold out to the movie guys, I decided that I needed to own my own domain. I started brainstorming to find a short easy to pronounce/spell/remember domain that sounded cool. "Radven" was the result - it came from combining the words radical & adventure. Life, after all, is a radical adventure indeed.


FAQ addendum:
NorthWind: When I got my first 300bps modem WAY back in 1985 or so, I hung out online at various NJ BBS's using the name NorthWind as my online handle.  For a while I even ran my own BBS, first on a C64 using a highly customized version of C-Net, and later on my Amiga 1000 running Citadel. Super-extra-bonus trivia points for anyone who can name that BBS I was sysop of.

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So if I were to actually create a personal FAQ, what other questions should I answer in it? *grin*