Moo.


A lotta folks on the 'net know me as Moo-man. It's a nickname I've been using for, gosh, close to five years now. Casual observers sometimes mistake it for "Moon-man", but at least that occurs less often than me getting email addressed to "brain", which still sadly happens more than I'd like.
(If you missed my point above, my name is b-r-i-a-n. On the other hand, b-r-a-i-n refers to the grey matter in one's noggin. Please note the difference)
The nickname was chosen when I first started using IRC. There were a couple of other Brians on the 'net back then (But nowhere near as many as these days. The 'net was relatively dinky at the time.) and I needed a /nick that I could use regularly so my friends would recognize me.
Since I was a student at the University Of Texas at Austin (Hook 'em!), I thought it would be cool to show some school spirit and pick something that reflected UT. Our mascot is the Texas Longhorn (named Bevo). And right around the same time, the ASCII Complete Guide to Cows was floating around the 'net. So I nabbed a cow graphic, gave it wider longhorn horns and stuck a "UT" in it like this:
       (__==__)
         (oo)  ( moo.)
  /-------\/  -'
 / | U.T.||
*  ||----||
   ^^    ^^
And it only made sense that since the cow goes "moo.", then I must be "Moo-man". My friends in IRC had a field day with the name, and would wear around fake cow noses, drink chocolate milk, etc. (Our IRC group, #ecto, took our little virtual world very seriously and improvised an entire environment that we all adhered to, food fights and all)
Eventually, after getting pestered by folks routinely asking if I was from the University of Tennessee, University of Toronto, University of Timbuktu, blah, blah, blah, I decided to remove the "UT" and was left with the incarnation you see today.
The only drawback I've experienced from this is that everyone seems to think I'm infatuated with cows. People always want to give me birthday and Christmas gifts with cow motifs. Sorry... the Moo-man persona exists only online and really doesn't need to have a toothbrush holder shaped like a cow. Really. Trust me, I'm sure.
Several other people (who are a lot more into cows than I am) have put together some pretty cool cow pages. Here are some of the ones I've run across: Since most of these sites link to other cow sites, you should have hours of bovine web-surfing ahead of you...



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