The Lincoln Imp
Periodically I am asked why my usernames on bulletin boards are all related to imps and why my website is called impworks. I was born in Lincoln, a city famous for, amongst other things, a carving of an imp in the cathedral. There are various stories about how it got there. My Mum sometimes called me her imp when I was small. Most computer systems I have worked on give you a boring username based on your name, initials or a random string of letters and numbers. I was caught out by being asked to suggest my own one day; mark had already been taken, I didn’t like markc as I don’t want to find myself being called marc because that isn’t my name. The first alternative that came to mind was imp because it was the first nickname I could think of that wasn’t an insult or the name of a rapper. A few years later I was looking for a domain name for my own website around the time Dreamworks was launched in Hollywood. The rest wasn’t exactly rocket science.