--adam
wow, my first everything contribution.
I was eight years old. I was in the middle of registering for AOL, this back in the days when the maximum amount of characters was ten, not sixteen. I kept thinking...trying things about football (american), WdRecevr, etc. everything was taken. This is when I realised that I could connect my piano playing and my first and middle initials. A. J. Piano. wow.
I was also enamoured with the SimCity series of games, and found the concept of words with two capital letters in them *extremely* cool. AJPiano.
Sure, this suited me for a while. I kept some other nicknames around, using different names at different sites. This was a period when my friends were changing nicknames and screen names at a furious pace. By this point, I'm about twelve.
Though I'd been using computers since I was two, I finally got my own when I was thirteen years old. It moved to my room and I became a twenty-four/seven user. I started registering for bulletin boards and other sites. AJPiano.
When I was nearly fourten and one-half, in August of 2000, I registered for the bulletin boards from Lionhead Studios. AJPiano. Then, I discovered IRC in #lionhead, and at that point I did not know that I'd stumbled across a life-changing phenomenon and some of the greatest friends I have. About this time, I also began to develop a general displeasure with capital letters, finding them aesthetically displeasing. ajpiano.
Suddenly, ajpiano was me. I was ajpiano. March 2001, I started work on ajpiano.topcities.com. I grew as a webdesigner, poet and person. Still was on IRC all the time. February 2002, I decided to register www.ajpiano.com.
By this point, I've had one nickname for more than half of my life. People call me AJ now, they hadn't before. A search for ajpiano on Google yields me. I am the ajpiano, and the two concepts have become eerily convergent.
A nickname can become more than you expect. Pick yours wisely.