Hello Steemers,
In public, I'm The Cheshire Catalyst. Can you tell it isn't my real name?
When asked, "What's your real name", I reply "Richard Cheshire". I started using that name when I went to work for Harry Newton, a magazine publisher in New York City that published Teleconnect magazine for the telephone interconnect industry (manufacturers of business telephone systems). I first took the name I'd thought of while sitting bored in a high school chemistry class when an article I wrote was being laid out in TAP, a newsletter for Phone Phreaks in the mid 1970's. I'd written the article under a pen name I'd used while hacking the telex circuits over Marisat, the original Maritime Communications Satellite that went into orbit in 1976. I would get on a computer terminal, and chat with ships radio operators who received the calls on their telex machine.
TAP's editor was also pasting up an article opposite mine from a fellow who was spoofing the telphone opertors at the Marisat switchboard and talking to people on the ships via telephone. I knew that article would come to the attention of marisat's opertors, and didn't want my marisat name to come to their attention at the same time (from this source, anyway). I had to change the name on my article, and the old chemistry class name came to mind. I've been writing as The Cheshire Catalyst on and off ever since.
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I've come to SteemIt as a friend of Captain Crunch, who I first met at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in 1977, but I was first introduced to him in the 1971 Esquire magazine article that introduced him to the world. We became friends, and I've helped him out when I could since then. I've never had much in the way of spare resources, but I let him live with me in the early Double Ought's (00's) in my apartment in Florida. Once again, I'm following his lead, and joining this "social blogosphere". Yes, I've got other "social media" accounts at Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In, but I don't post much there unless it's information that I really want to get to a wider audience. I need to think the information is Important, or I'm not going to want to draw attention to myself. That's the fallout from having had the TLA's (Three Letter Agencies) actually tracking you in your past. John and I still refer to people from a certain agency as "The Fibbies".
In fact, I've got three accounts on Facebook. One as Cheshire, one as Ozzie (my 'real' identity), and one for Ozzie to enter contests and sweepstakes with without giving his Friends to the Facebook advertising firms. At this point, I'm going to refer you to the page I first put up in 2003, explaining the Ozzie identity to those chasing Cheshire:
http://CheshireCatalyst.Com/identity
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I hate re-inventing the wheel, and this wheel has been around a while. Why did I have to go so "public"? well, in 1999, I got my very own Area Code and that was a very public activity. And wanted credit for it. Of course it's unbelievable, but it's also very true, so chase down this link next:
http://CheshireCatalyst.Com/321
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OK, l so that's the Intro. I haven't done Blogs in the past, because if I needed to get something out on The Net, I created a Web Page instead. Including a small tutorial on how to create web pages
http://CheshireCatalyst.com/tutorial
Since The Captain is leading me down this primrose path, I may actually keep it up as a Blog. I'll have to see what Responses I get from you, dear reader. Drop me a line, but don't be surprised if I only send back brief comments with hyperlinks to more information. As I said above, there's alot of stuff already on the web, and no real need to retype it if I can just link to it.
73 (ham radio for "Best Regards, but Cheshire doesn't have a ham license),
Cheshire )
Richard Cheshire, The Cheshire Catalyst
PS: I used the "=" character to separate groups of paragraphs, because when I punched Telex in the US Army, They used the letters "BT" on a separate line to mean "Break Text" to group paragraphs together. In my Ham Radio identity, I found that the equals sign in Morse code is the letters BT strung together (-...-), and was used by the Western Union Telegraph Company as a separator between a Message and a Signature in a telegram.
As to a Signature, The ITU (International Telecommunications Union) Telegraph Regulations (still in force) state that the signature of a Telegram "shall be indented 5 or more spaces", and since I consider an E-mail to be the direct linear descendant of the Telegram, that's how I sign my e-mails (and now blogs), either as Cheshire, or as Ozzie. We're both Geeks and nerds, after all. :-)