April 11, 2001

What’s in a Name?

I heard on the radio today that a guy had changed his name to Dot Com (does that make his middle name Dot? <g>) While what somebody else does is completely their own business and choice, I can’t help wondering about the reasons for somebody to do that? Is it just to cash in on all the current Dot Com mania or is it simply because they have no respect or attachment to their current last name? I can’t ever imagine changing my last name from Farook to anything else because I love my last name – mostly because it happens to be my Dad’s name 🙂 In fact, till I was about 20 years old I insisted on people calling me Farook instead of Fahim … I was just thinking of that habit on the way to work today and I was wondering whether I had been influenced in any way by Ursula K. Le Guin’s EarthSea trilogy because in that series, a wizard can have influence over you if they knew your "true name" … But then I realized I couldn’t have been influenced by Sparrow Hawk and his friends because I’d been using my last name as my name since I was about 10 years old whereas I hadn’t read the EarthSea trilogy till I was about 15 or 16 …

I received a couple of interesting e-mails yesterday … One was from Raven who had actually given Blog a try and he pointed out quite a few things that I had missed in my release – such as using Scope instead of Blog in the about dialog because I’d copied the text directly from the Scope about dialog … oops 🙂 He also made several suggestions to improve the usability of Blog such as having links to my web site and being able to access the read me from the Help menu … I also heard from Chris (whom I talk to almost every day via instant messenger) about Blog and he had many further suggestions about how I could improve and enhance Blog as well as a lot of annoying usability bugs … I guess I will be working on those sometime soon too but then there’s Scope development to be done as well <g>

And my second e-mail was about Scope development 🙂 It was from Scott Lemon who’s become one of many Scope evangelists <vbg> He’s been spreading the word about Scope to everybody he comes in contact with (and I’ve seen this in action since there’ve been hits to my site from several Novell newsgroups – Scott works for Novell I believe …) and he tells me that everybody he talks to about Scope loves it! And that makes me happy too since there’s nothing like having people like your work! Anyway, Scott reminded me of several things which still aren’t working in Scope so I should get back to coding on Scope sometime soon too – so many things to code and so little time <vbg>

Scott also suggested that I should probably set up a "wish list" on Amazon and have people donate to it 🙂 While I don’t believe in selling the stuff I work on because I believe in the concept of free software, I also have nothing against gifts <vbg> – actually I love receiving gifts! (But then again, who doens’t? :p) So I might actually do that … I’ve been looking at the wish list facility on Amazon but couldn’t find the thing I really wanted at the moment – the ADO components from Inprise so that I can make the Blog distro so much more lean and mean … So I guess I’ll have to be content with putting some Terry Pratchetts, Delphi coding books, lots of DVD’s and some PlayStation and DreamCast games on my wish list if I do intend to start one 🙂

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 9:00 am   Comments (0)

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