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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.

It all started back when I was going for my Master's at the ACTLab several years back, '96 or 7, on break between crazy dotcom jobs with various Austin companies now deceased. Once settled into the lab, I quickly found myself taking over a number of the Mac-related networking, maintenance, and troubleshooting duties. Just 'cause I like macs.

So we'd finally gotten some new computers in the lab, blazing fast 180mhz processors, I think, and were ready to put the ol' 68020 Quadra 700s to rest. And I was going to go ahead and try and set up a Mac web server there in the ACTLab office -- this was back when it didn't seem like a crazy stupid thing to do, Mac web serving, back before OS 8.6's filesystem limitations had become so blindingly obvious to SSI junkies everywhere -- and to do that, you know, I needed a domain name. something.actlab.utexas.edu had a nice ring to it.

But but but -- this was also back when just getting an email address from the University of Texas required that you hop around three different offices and four different forms, all in triplicate. Well, ok, maybe by '96 it wasn't quite that bad -- that was really more '93 -- but it wasn't much better. And so there was, basically, no way in hell that anyone with access to the DNS setup was gonna give me a new domain name. Nope. Wasn't happening. I wasn't even a professor -- what would I want something like that for?

So I hijacked one. It was easy enough. Remember those Quadra 700's? There were two, Sheena and -- you guessed it -- Monstro. And they weren't doing anything anymore, but they had been the lab's first two net-connected computers. So a little bit of detective work revealed the names attached to their IP addresses, I decided I liked Monstro better than Sheena, and voila! monstro.actlab.utexas.edu, thank you very much. And that's pretty much it -- the Monstro! moniker has followed me around ever since. The end.