Do you know how many people have asked me, "Where does HazyBlue come from"? Well, not too many, maybe only 2 or 3, but still, I feel it is an important enough topic to devote a page to.

It all started back in the day, when ICQ was just starting to emerge. I was encouraged to try ICQ by a friend, and I figured what the heck, let's see what this internet chat thingy is all about. When it came time to choose a nickname, I had to think. I wanted something a little more creative than just my name, or a variation there of. It couldn't be totally random though, where would the fun be in that? Well, after some heavy brain activity, I came up with, you guessed it, "Neptune". Neptune I felt was significant for a couple of reasons. One, Neptune is my favorite planet. . .yeah, so I have a favorite planet, I'm a dork, I know. The second reason was that Neptune was the Roman (or was it Greek? 8th grade mythology was soooo long ago) god of the sea, and me being me, I love the ocean, and water in general, it's just cool stuff. So Neptune was fine until I decided I needed an alter ego for IRC, just to try to keep all my multiple personalities somewhat organized, you know. Of course, being the twisted person that I am, this new nickname couldn't just be random again, it had to have something to do with "Neptune". Well, the obvious choice of course was Poseidon. And so there it was. Now the problem with Neptune and Poseidon is that they are both actual words, so there were many people with both those names, which wasn't too much of a problem until I broke down and got AOL IM (only because some of my friends had it, and they wouldn't get ICQ) Of course, with IM, there was the problem of not being able to use a screen name that belonged to someone else, and of course both Poseidon and Neptune were taken. I didn't like the idea of simply tacking a number on to the end of a name either, it didn't seem to be unique enough. I decided that I had to come up with yet another name that had something to do with my original. I soon remembered reading the Neptune page in The Space Atlas by Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest, and recalled in the Activites section it said that Neptune could be seen very faintly through binoculars. Neptune, for those of you who are not so knowledgeable about such things, is a blue gas giant. So this got me thinking, and you can probably deduce where I ended up, yep, Neptune, when viewed from Earth appears as a hazy blue dot. Now, the reason I was thinking about this was for my AOL IM screen name, and I liked the sound of Hazy Blue Dot, but I felt it was too long, so I made my screen name HBDot81, which is kind of a cryptic form of that. After that, I decided that HazyBlue had a nice ring to it, and felt that it not only related back to my original nickname, but also presented the image of something pristine and majestic, just like me.