Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Why "KingTermite"?

This is a question I get quite often. Why in the world do you call yourself "KingTermite"? What does it mean? Was it random? Is there any meaning behind it?

The answer is yes there was thought and meaning behind the name. It was certainly not random by any stretch. It's a bit of a long story of how the name started and evolved, but bear with me and I'll try to make it as short as I can.

The story, according to my family, was that I chewed the stuffing out of my grandmother's rocking chair cushion one day when I was about 2 years old. She immediately gave me the nickname "Termite".

The nickname stuck and most of my family called me "Termite" growing up. I liked the nickname...it was fun and original. All my cousins had goofy nicknames, but I was the only that "earned" his nickname and I was proud of that fact.

Fast forward now to college. It was about 1995 and I was creating my first web page for a project for a club I was getting in to. The web was very new then and there did not seem to be much originality in the few web pages that did exist. I wanted my web page to be a bit different....original.

I have always enjoyed fantasy literature, so I decided to sort of make it castle themed. My plan was to have each page on the website be sort of a room in the castle. The website needed some sort of "name"...and I was struggling with that. I finally decided to call it Castle Termite since I enjoyed my nickname.

Not too long after that, I was trying to register for Yahoo. I was annoyed, you didn't used to have to register, but it seemed that lately every website was forcing you to register to do anything. Whenever I registered on any website, I tried to use "Termite" as my user name and usually had no trouble. Now, though, on a much bigger website, like Yahoo, I found that "Termite" was a taken user name. I was not happy. Who in the world would be "Termite" other than me?

Anyway, I had to come up with a more unique name it seemed. I also decided that day that I needed something VERY unique so that I could always assure it was available, I didn't like the idea of just attaching some number to the end like Termite0785697 like many other people seemed to do.

I sat and gave it long thought as it seemed this might be "my name" online for a long time to come. I started thinking about my website at school, "Castle Termite" and realized that if I was the creator of Castle Termite, I must be its king. Thus King Termite was born in cyberspace that day. I only dropped the space between the words to make sure it would work on all systems.

That was about 13 years ago. I have been using the name for that long now.