new accounts

I recently changed usernames. this is something i do not recommend to anybody. the best thing you can do in this day and age is a) have a very unique name or b) come up with an interesting and unique screenname at a young age and stick with it. I have a name that ranks in popularity somewhere between bob jones and john smith, so using my name is out, and unfortunately for me, i never had a consistent username for anything when i was younger. when i was about 12 or 13 i would use simple names like "tiger" or "maverick" for games like doom, quake, and warcraft, but these are no less common and every time i came up with a new name i got sick of it quickly or found some flaw with it.

I am now on my fourth gmail account because of these same reasons. I wanted a name that is pronounceable, unique, robust (6-12 characters, no numbers or special characters), and a name that would typically be at the top of an alphabetically sorted list. the last stipulation led me to something related to "aardvark" for its double a, assuring alphabetical superiority. variations of the word aardvark are more common than i would have thought (uniqueness was measured with google searches) and somehow i came upon "aarduous", which just added an extra "a" to "arduous". it was a common enough typo (about 50 hits on google) but none of the links appeared to be profiles. This became gmail account number three and i began the process of creating accounts for everything i could think of with this name, hoping to reserve every site for myself. one of the last sites i checked was aim, and aarduous was taken. i have tried emailing aarduous@aim.com and have been watching to see if he/she logs on to aim, but nothing yet. this, and the fact that aarduous is an adjective, not a noun, led me to reconsider it as a username.

as evidenced by the name of this blog, i settled again with aandroyd. the extra a and y instead of i make it extremely uncommon (as seen here, there were no results when i published this. i hope that soon there will be results and every link will reference me)
Just by posting this i suppose i run the risk of somebody taking an account with this name just to spite me... i hope nobody would do that though :( be nice.

my goal is to stick with this name and use it whenever possible to build up my web presence, but at the moment i find myself sacrificing functionality to reach this goal, as many sites (gmail, last.fm, any site that grows in usefulness with time) have no way of transferring information, emails, logs, w/e between accounts. with gmail, it is certainly possible to copy all my archived emails between , but i hit snags with slow internet at home, and proxy bloxy at work. last.fm comes right out and says they do not allow transfering of accounts.

this was a long rant for me, and i forgot my point now... but if you are young and dont have a name picked out, find one ;-)