MetaFilter

What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

MaoXian (mao-she-en) means "to take a risk" in Mandarin Chinese. Adding Chairman in front of course makes it a play on the Great Helmsman's name. I'm a big white guy who happens to speak Chinese... came rather late to the web and missed out on all the cool domain names, so I settled for something that is difficult to spell and impossible to pronounce... for at least 4/5ths of the world's population anyway.

I remember all my wow moments with the Internet. I graduated from college in '92 and knew nothing about the Net (even used to type my papers on an old Sears Electric, and I think it's safe to say that only the biggest geeks were hip to the Net then). But in 1995 I was visiting a friend who had AOL and I chatted online in a stock talk group. Came home to my girlfriend and said, "Honey, this is gonna be BIG" (this is the point where the old hands roll their eyes and snicker). Other wows were discovering Silicon Investor ('96), ICQ ('97), QCharts ('98) (a sophisticated stock price charting program), and most recently, Napster and Google ('00).

The route to MeFi went something like this: a friend sent a link to the web economy bullshit generator (dack.com) > kottke.org > harrumph.com > MetaFilter. I think that's the way it went, but who knows?