About Your Handle on HN

'verisimi' is a shortening of verimisimilitudinal (too long for HN) where the meaning is that we are all very similar.

RBBS used DOS files for user data, the filename was your username. So the limit for usernames in the software to sign up was 8 characters. But if you could get into the filesystem direct, and create your own user file, you could use the extension and have up to 11 characters (8.3); because it was liberal in what it read and strict in what it wrote.

I'd pop up as "h2odragon" on people's boards and be there for a while before anybody noticed and said "hey wait WTF?"

k310 is the Köchel listing, hence the "K", of a favorite Mozart piano sonata.

It's also the office number I had at Itek Optical Systems.

Must be lucky.

Mine comes from a line in an episode of an 80s American TV series called Riptide. One of the characters used that as an alias. For some reason, that stuck with me ...

My (admittedly lame) homage to /dev/null

In high school I toured Oakland Center, the regional air-traffic control center for much of the U.S. west coast. The controller with whom I sat had the big circular display we've all seen, and I noticed one contact labeled "NASA 714" moving away from the coast to the southwest, and I asked what it was.

It was the Gerard P. Kuiper Airborne Observatory¹, a converted C-141 transport with a telescope inside, en route to Hawaii on a mission. (Nice!)

"714" is also the badge number of Detective Joe Friday from the "Dragnet" TV series², and is a telephone area code serving part of Southern California³.

The "cylinder" part came when I was casting about for an HN handle, and it sounded good in combination with 714.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Airborne_Observator 2: https://www.perfessorbill.com/misc/badge714.htm 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_codes_714_and_657

It's the alias of a minor character in the novel The Nuclear Age by Tim O'Brien -- one of the two trainers of a small group of radicals that included the novel's protagonist. Not that I train radicals or anything like that.

I was always enchanted with the name of a cat, "Mister Guts", in the 1967 story "Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber.