My first email address was something memorable like lady0266@ermine.ox.ac.uk. Then, when I started my DPhil, I managed to grab rpgrant@molbiol.ox.ac.uk. Not very cool, but much more memorable.
On leaving Oxford I was saddled with a ‘professional’ email address of rgrant@cmtech.co.uk, which I never liked (I rapidly went off the management in that company too, so was only stuck with it for two years). About that time I registered a yahoo.co.uk, with username rpg14. That still works, although I seldom check it. When I left ‘cmtech’ and went to work at the MRC-LMB I was fortunate enough to obtain ‘rpg’ as my username. ‘@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk’ was still rather a mouthful, but at least ‘rpg’ was pretty memorable.
I went through quite a few ISP-based email addresses at that time, Tesco, Waitrose, Flyer, NTL . . . before bothering to register rg-d.com. Naturally, ‘rpg’ at that works, although I’ve switched off the ‘catch-all’ facility because it gets spammed to buggery. I also got an invite to gmail.com (thanks CK!); and although ‘rpg’ was taken, ‘rpgrant’ was free. I belatedly realized I should have tagged ‘rpgmail’, so missed out on some coolness there.
On arrival at Sydney Uni, changing my login ID from rgra3423 or whatever it was became a priority, and I was able to reserve ‘rpg’. rpg at usyd . edu . au thus became the coolest email address I’ve ever had, if not the shortest (rpg at rg-d . com is short, but not incredibly memorable. rpg.com is taken, of course). rpgrant @ my Australian ISP is also mine.
But two weeks ago I found out that the University of Sydney have pulled a real swifty, and created a memorable alias (that is bound to piss off the Yanks, but hey; .edu, as .com and .org, should never have been country-specific).
Ladles and gentlespoons, short and sweet:
Bugger me, that’s a lot of email addresses for one young lad.
I have, um, er, three I think. At one time I had a utoronto one (which no longer works), as well as two functional ones at crapbiotechcompany.com (oh wait, maybe three… there was also crapbiotechcompanydrugdiscoveryspinoff.com as well). Now I have Ricardipus, firstname_lastname at yahoo.ca, and my work one (which also works in the version I had the *first* time I worked there, i.e. with an extra provincial domain part plugged in… bighospital.on.ca, now bighospital.ca).
Does that all makes sense?
Hm, strikes me I might have had another one on a genetics server, which I never used… hard to say really.
Clearly it is late and I should be doing something else.
R.