nah, i know that mendel isn’t as uncommon as i’d like to believe. a lot of it comes from the fact that it’s an old traditional jewish name.

the greatest is way a long time ago when i was marching in drum corps, we were staying at a high school and the band director at some point came up to me and said, “is your name mendel?”. i said yeah, and he said, “me too.” it’s the only time i’ve ever met another mendel in real life.

even though it’s not your real name, you’re the second ‘mendel’ i’ve ever met online.

good times. :)

I do have trouble getting “mendel” as a username in various places, though, so it’s not uncommon! I ended up having to use “wlonkly” for all of the IM services (except Google Talk, but at that point I used it for consistency); the only reason I got “mendel” on LiveJournal is that the guy that had it first deleted his journal long enough ago that I was able to rename into it after it was purged .

it’s pretty strange to see a lj user named ‘mendel’. funny how i never ran into you before. you’d think that i might have done a search for something like that. not sure what that says.

anyway… it’s nice to meet you.

(Occasionally I’ve been known to say I’m named after Joe Mendelson of Mendelson McKenna Mainline, though.)

It reminds me of a strange hybrid of family feud. Surely, the “power is in your hands” if you want to publish your stuff there, but it’s up to you to create ‘tags’ or ‘attributes’ that you think will be the most popular, thus getting the most hits, which isn’t exactly what i want the web to be or my own content to be. If i put up a site about ‘flizzleblop’, i don’t want to have to compromise by using the tag ‘used car’ just because it will generate more hits.

anyway, you don’t know who i am, but i thought i’d find a relatively interesting post to respond to first before stating the true purpose of this comment: your FAQ is not entirely accurate – there is a composer out there named “mendel”. he was named after felix mendelssohn because he has a brother named felix.

he’s not famous, though, at least not really. he got his masters degree in music composition, but that left him broke because he’s not so good at promoting himself musically, so he’s working now as a tech-support-like guy for Oracle systems for Symantec, and he hasn’t really composed any music in a couple of years, though he’s recently started up some new sketches just for the hell of it.

“I’m a very, very bad item…”

Apart from “Craigslist Killer”, it seems to be one of those “We’re going to throw this versatile tool out there and see what people do with it” things. But not as obvious as mapping or mail.

I want them to come out with Google Fnord or something which is literally incomprehensible but has lots of functions, and then when someone actually figures out what it does, it’ll be as hard as decoding Donnie Darko and then lol its pinhead.

I had full caf instead of decaf today.