Some have seen my Github username and have wondered why is this dude calling himself Cynthia? Of all things?
So here is the background story. It isn't a very interesting one. If you were expecting me talking about gender identity and what not, this isn't it. (Although I do wonder sometimes if I am a fish. More on that sometime later.)
So if that was what you were looking for - feel free to hit the back button.
Back in 1995, there was a public and free Unix system which one could sign up, login and try well, anything. This was provided by a Korean company that probably had an unused SunOS machine just doing nothing, and one of the employees probably just thought it would be a cool idea.
Back then - stuff like this was fine to do - nowadays, well - you know what would happen to services like this.
(I had already completely destroyed my dad's computer attempting to install Linux with a pile of bad sector polluted floppy disks and a poorly written guide on how to do it - so having a Unix compatible system at home really wasn't an option.)
So it turns out - this free service had a couple limitations - one was that your shell account was limited to 4-8 characters, was case insensitive (requests would be lowercase converted) - and thanks to that little quirk, almost any commonly imaginable English word - including my surname and my name were all taken. (I was at a friend's place - who also happened to have a slightly better modem than I did, and parents who wouldn't go crazy on the phone bill.)
If I roughly remember what we tried - this is the rough list: (Personal information redacted)
- moon
- sangwhan
- moon[birthYYYY]
- [birthYYYY]moon
- moon[birthmmdd]
- [birthmmdd]moon
- ...and some other ones, can't remember them all.
Then we pulled out a dictionary looking for anything useful under the word "moon", because we ran out of options.
- lunar
- lunatic: This would have been cool.
- ...and through the entire list. Which wasn't long.
No avail. However, it turns out that my friend's father was a hard core Christian and even doing a part-time program in graduate school studying related topics - and had an old Korean-Latin dictionary sitting around. So we took that, and went through the list of words that meant "moon".
The first option was diana, which was clearly a feminine name - so we that skipped that one. The next one in the list was cynthia. Little did this dictionary note that it was the goddess of the moon, not just the moon - so I went for that. This wouldn't have happened in 2018, since - Wikipedia. Google. Or well, actual internet.
I have never heard anyone with this name, so little did I know this was feminine [1] - only having limited exposure to the western world. [2]
So, to this day - all of the accounts which are somewhat related to PAM authentication of some form are "cynthia". I don't really have a good excuse - my fingers have been typing that for 22 years and counting, and I'm too lazy to have different account names across different machines.
I learned the lesson about muscle memory the hard way, as my previous employer forced me to use something that resembled my name - "smoon" in this case. Now at my new workplace I am back to cynthia. If I do hire a real Cynthia, then well - sucks to be her.
To give you a rough idea of how reluctant to change I am - my current macOS home directory (on a Retina 2012) is a cumulative migration which started from a Titanium Powerbook G4 in 2002.
[1] There was a gut feeling that this sort of felt feminine, but shit - it was supposed to be Latin, what would I know.
[2] This is probably why "English" names from people of Chinese heritage countries (e.g. Taiwan) around my age have some occasional surprises. My favorite to this day is Piggyboy - who was a customer contact at my previous workplace. I am not making this up.