When I started ironSoap, it wasn’t all that common for everyone and their sister’s cat to have some sort of online presence. Out of respect for people’s privacy I came up with some random nicknames for some of the people I talked about to give them some kind of handle. Of course now almost everyone has at least some place online where they present information about themselves so over time the need for this page has dwindled. My style has also shifted through the years and the need to differentiate individuals is less pressing. I still avoid using full names for people who don’t know I’m writing about them but I don’t really feel the need to come up with a persistent name and description for every one of them. This page continues to exist mostly to provide context for some older entries.

This list is in no particular order.

• Dr. Mac – My longtime friend. I’ve known him since fifth grade. He moved out of California to go to college and hasn’t come back yet. Now he’s married and I am starting to suspect that he won’t be back.He’s a doctor and he is a Mac afficionado. Hence the name.
• Mrs. Mac – Dr. Mac’s wife. They met at university and dated for quite some time. She is exceptionally smart and does something with astronomy that my feeble mind could surely not begin to comprehend.
• Harley Brother – Also called HB in the journal. He’s Nikki’s brother and was my friend a long time before he became my brother-in-law. If you want to kick back, barbecue some raw meat and watch the San Jose Sharks play, he’s the guy to call. The “Harley” element of the name is somewhat mislabeled since he’s ditched the trendy Harley-Davidson bike and constructed his own hog-style motorcycle with his bare hands. And some help from RR.
• Gin – Harley Brother’s wife, Nikki’s longtime friend and also a friend of mine before she became related to me through marriage. She works for a loan company where she routinely refers to interoffice correspondence as “facts missles.” Her name has nothing to do with the alcoholic beverage.
• Lister – A friend I met through Harley Brother many moons ago. He’s an Xbox Live Friend, a consumate gamer with excellent taste in hockey teams and the guy who introduced me to FreeBSD, Warhammer and gaming conventions. His penchant for making my sides hurt from laughter using only poop jokes is unparalleled.
• Whimsy – Lister’s wife. Her nickname came from a conversation I had with Nikki where we were trying to decide what the word was you think of when you meet/talk to her. The answer was “Whimsical.” She’s a marvelous Suzy Homemaker type, despite the fact that you’d never guess that about her. She sewed me a sweet dice bag and fixed a shirt for me; I’m eternally in her debt.
• Fast-Track – Another friend from high school. Since graduating he started working for a storage company and managed to go from truck driving flunkie to roaming operations manager in under a year. He is still climbing the ladder and recently relocated to Washington in pursuit of this.He used to play drums in the speed metal band I was in for about a year and I think he still secretly dreams of being a rock star.
• Mr. Drywall – I met Mr. Drywall through Fast-Track (they used to be roommates). If you couldn’t guess he hangs drywall for a living and is generally a Mr. Fixit type who can build you just about anything with a couple bent nails and a piece of PVC pipe.
• StyleGirl – Mr. Drywall’s wife. She works as a hair stylist in a wonderful in-home salon Drywall built for her. She loves cats, but she typically chooses their gender for them, if their actual gender doesn’t suit her. She also plays Mom to two beautiful daughters.
• Mrs. Fish – My sister-in-law. She’s about the most noticeable person, ever. She likes wild hair styles, bright clothing, body piercing, tattoos and repeating her favorite lines from movies, TV, etc. Spending time with her is never dull. Not even a little bit. She also has a penchant for fish and underwater-type fixtures, which is unfortunate for me because I have a phobia about things like that. She use phrases which have become permanent fixtures in Nikki’s and my vocabularies such as “Throwing up gang signs.”
• Pursuit – Mrs. Fish’s husband. A cool guy with a great sense of humor, a wicked bocci ball shot and a surprisingly sensitive side that in no way makes him a sissy. His taste of truck manufacturers, however, does leave his mental capacity slightly open to inquiry. Beware of riding shotgun on a jetski with this man.
• Bosslady – The owner of eggsites, a web design firm I have done work with in the past.
• Bossman – Bosslady’s husband and an impressively talented individual whose photography should be in galleries. He runs a printing shop and is thankful that the noise of the presses drowns out the technical gibberish Bosslady and I seem to think passes for conversation.
• Cajun Blue – Bossman’s brother. When you think of cool guys, the image that pops into your head is Cajun Blue, although you don’t realize it. He’s just a mellow guy who cooks like a pro, digs all the best music, and lives the life of a perpetual bachelor practically by principle.
• Red – I met her when she started dating another friend of mine in high school and even though they eventually broke up, Red and I stayed friends. Her and Nikki are also old pals.
• Ram Rod – It’s hard to pinpoint a guy like RR, whom I’ve known literally as long as I’ve known HB and has been a permanent fixture in the inner circle so long it can’t be defined without him. Trying to place him categorically should be as simple as ‘friend’ but is more aptly something like “surrogate family member.” RR fixes the kinds of machinery that medicine warning labels caution against and, given ample quantities of duct tape, could probably fashion an entire ’78 Buick from memory.
• Drama Geek – Ram Rod’s girlfriend. She is involved in theater, makes stunning art and plays out her hidden dreams of being the next Cher with a karaoke mic. As you may suspect, she is very good at charades as well.
• Virtuoso – Virtuoso is an old friend from my heavy metal band days. He’s one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever heard play, and the fact that he isn’t obscenely rich because of his extraordinary talent is truly a crime against humanity. In addition to being a musical genius, he’s hysterically funny in a completely insane kind of way (are any excessively talented people not mostly crazy?).
• Beans – My youngest Brother-in-Law, he’s actually HB and Nikki’s half-brother (don’t worry, it took me ten years to straighten it all out, so no one expects you to understand it from this one page alone) and despite the fact that all of us (who were in high school when he was born) remember him as a cute if rolly-polly little squirt with a Power Rangers obsession, he has grown into a remarkably cool kid with that sarcastic teenage sense of humor that the barely checked 12-year-old in my own brain finds utterly hysterical.
• ‘Doza – A co-worker of mine who worked in the cube over the wall back when I was at the City. We exchanged paper airplanes, bizarre links via IM, complaints about stupid people and try to help each other stay motivated to work out. We still do the complaining and bizarre links things, but our paper airplane construction has dropped off significantly of late. We also now realize that it was him motivating me to work out since he’s stuck with it and I am a slacker.

So that’s it for now. Others will be added as necessary or as I think of them. I’ll try not to confuse the issue by having a bunch of names that I haven’t mentioned in the journal, though. At some point you have to stop or you could list the whole world. And I don’t think I have that kind of time.