Did you ever wonder where I came up with the username pogue? Well, here's your answer #longstory:

Many people have assumed my username comes from four different things - none of which are correct. Firstly, they assume I am a fan of the band 'The Pogues'. I'm not. Second, the word pogue is Gaelic for kiss, which also has nothing to do with it. Finally, in military parlance, a pogue is a new recruit, generally a frontline infantry soldier who has no real combat experience and is used in a derogatory fashion. I have no military background. It's also not my last name.

The origin of my username comes from my days as a half computer hacker half script kiddie. Back in the days before the internet was available to the general public, there were dial-up services like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. The choice for most teenagers in the early 90s was AOL, since you could use a program called AOHell to create new accounts, find copious amounts of pirated software & games (warez) and it was done all automatically. AOHell also was the originator of the term 'phishing' because it allowed you to impersonate AOL administrators, called guides, and make it look like you were asking users for their usernames and passwords.

Anyway, with the use of AOHell, eventually you would be kicked off or your credit card would expire. In those days, there were programs called "credit card generators" that would create a phoney credit card based on an algorithm of what a credit card number should look like. AOL didn't have the capability to automatically check if a credit card was valid, it would only check to see if it looked valid and so your account would work for a couple weeks using this method, then be disabled once they caught on.

At the time, I was very interested in computer viruses. Back then, viruses were very complex and worked in many different ways to spread and disguise themselves and they all had very creative names. So, I would pick out the name of a virus I thought was interesting or did something cool and use that as my username. After getting kicked off AOL a number of times, I eventually came upon the username pogue - which I alternated between the spelling pogue or pouge. Incidentally, the word is meant to rhyme with the word rogue although many people assume its pronouced pog.

The pogue virus a very old virus from the MS-DOS days. The pogue virus was very rare and was unique in that it originated in Bulgaria and would play polka music everyday out of the infected users system speaker (these were not speakers like we know today, this was just a basic speaker capable of making beeps and bloops, mainly used to indicate an error or problem of some kind) daily between 8-9am. You can read the history of the virus here: http://wiw.org/~meta/vsum/view.php?vir=1070

Since this was the username that was the only one I never got kicked off of AOL for using, I've stuck with it through the decades. It's just become something of a habit and its become ingrained as my online persona. If I was more creative, I might come up with something different, but since so many of my accounts use the word pogue in them, I just stick with it for just about everything.