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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.

Email: meta [at] netwert.com
AIM: wertheimerdavid
YM: davidwertheimer

As for my nickname, Werty is, rather obviously, a play on my last name.

I was eight or nine years old at Camp Riverbend in Warren, New Jersey, in a camp group that had three Davids in it. Children's minds working as they do, Ray Stearn and some of my other camp friends decided to call me Werty, since it was easier than Wertheimer and more interesing than the other Davids' names.

It stuck. Hard.

When I was a kid, I liked it. At one point I even had a three-quarter blue-sleeved white shirt with WERTY iron-on letters on the back. When you're in elementary school, a nickname is just cool.

Werty followed me through high school; I have some good friends who still use it from time to time. Slowly, though, it dissipated. In college I got nicknames like "Wert" and "Wertman" that still come and go.

I got online in 1987, calling BBSes and ddial chat systems at 300/1200 baud. In a world where your handle was your identity, I went for Werty (after a short stint with an added Q for extra anonymity). That was my nickname, after all. And so it went: I became Werty all over again.

Werty became my first Internet-dialup email address in 1995, and the nickname keeps tumbling around on the web, through names like WertyWeb and I Art Wert to netWert today. Horror of horrors, my coworkers sometimes call me netWert. Oops.

Essentially, Werty is me. Has been since the third grade. Pleased to meet ya.