The history of the handle "the_rush_fan"

Yeah well, I've been buying and selling on eBay since about 1997-1998. My username then was "analogkid2112@hotmail.com" (analogkid2112 was already taken). That worked really well. I was a pretty active usenet... citizen? and posted regularly in a number of newsgroups. I used the same name to post and do eBay stuff. Do a Google search and you will find a whole bunch of archived posts.

Everything was fine until eBay started realizing that a lot of people were contacting each other and making deals without having to pay fees, so they sent an announcement that all usernames that were made up of an e-mail address would have to be changed to one that was not an e-mail address. That affected me directly, so I had to eventually change it or be asigned one by eBay. The aforementioned analogkid2112 was already taken, so I changed it to the non-creative "the_rush_fan".

So there is a little bit of background on the username.