It’s more than 25 years since I’ve had one name, Stilgherrian. That’s plenty of time to get with the program. So from now on I’ll name the businesses and organisations who can’t get it right — starting with the Australian Business Register.
Stilgherrian really is my legal name. One given name, no surname. It’s on my passport, my Medicare card and all the nasty letters I get from my bank manager. It’s pronounced like this [MP3]. Most people call me “Stil” for short.
It’s not the name my parents gave me. It’s one I adopted when I was in my early 20s. I was, it must now be revealed, part of a nest of Dungeons and Dragons players at the University of Adelaide where one of the people was, like me, interested in linguistics. He coined the word “Stilgherrian” as a name for me — me personally, that is, not one of the game characters. It stuck, and for various reasons I decided to adopt it legally. It doesn’t mean anything, it was just intended to “sound right”.
This category includes posts about the problems I encounter when dealing with inflexible bureaucracies and computer systems — although as you’ll see I don’t write about it very often.
“Oh, no mate, I wasn’t Stilgherrian until after that was taken. For my student card, so that’d be… March, maybe February. Stilgherrian wasn’t until Winter Solstice…”
25 years ago today!
Daggy photo, eh? Am I scared or was I trying for cool and moody, somehow? Scared, I reckon. I was too nerdy to even know how to look moody, let alone actually achieve a significant level of floppy-haired angst. Now Stephen… now he pulls that off so well. But then he lives in Melbourne, it’s “of the place”.
Sydney doesn’t have the sandstone Victorian for a fully grey, Londonesque, Londonangstridden pout, 30% eye shadow and 70% the precisely-edited slow-motion curl of a designer black trench coat. Not with any genuine sense of ennui, anyway.
ABC The Drum
Crikey
CSO Online
Delicious
Dopplr
Flickr
LinkedIn
newmatilda.com
Patch Monday
Posterous
Qik
Stilgherrian Live (Ustream)
Technology Spectator
Twitter
Viddler
Recent Comments