short takes

[cellio]

Larissa: I'm sorry. I can cast four third-level spells per day, but the only third-level spell I know is Fireball.

Turok: That's ok. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every bugbear looks like a nail.

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The Hebrew word "z'vuv" (or maybe "zevuv"; didn't see it written) means "fly", so "z'vuvim" are "flies".

The word "ba'al" means "master".

Sometimes "b" and "v" sounds are semi-interchangable. Akiva and Akiba are the same person.

Putting all of this together, we can now see the probable origin of "Bealzabub" -- "ba'al z'vuv". Except that that's the lord of one fly, which isn't nearly so intimidating. :-) (And yeah, I know I probably misspelled the conventional name.)

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I finally found out recently why someone has been having trouble sending me mail. (That is, I was finally able to look at a bounce message.) It seems that this person didn't understand that user names are case-sensitive, becuase Outlook helpfully capitalizes things in its presentation of your address book.

Perhaps Microsoft is baalzevuvim; that's often a safe bet. Maybe a fireball would help.

Comments

[geekosaur]

We gave up on the case-dependent username fight because certain faculty members flatly refuse to use the correct usernames. Of course, I'm still waiting to get nailed by every mail administrator's worst nightmare: Firstname.Lastname@domain. (what do you do with collisions? especially when you have 20 or so of each of the common Indian names?)

[goljerp]

Firstname.MiddleInitial.LastName@domain.

It happened to me. While my first E-mail address at Yale was Goljerp@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu, by the time I left I was (among other things) Firstname.Lastname@yale.edu. Fine... except another guy (among the 30 in the country, according to that source Monica found the other day) with my first and last name came to Yale (law school). So his classmates sent him E-mail. Despite the fact that I was, at this point, living in Jersualem, I tracked down the guy they wanted (middle initial = N), and forwarded his E-mail to him (while explaining politely the situation to the people who had written).

[cellio]

You're awfully kind. If basic tools like "finger" didn't answer the question of who this guy was, I probably would have just sent mail back to the senders saying "wrong address", and sent mail to some administrator at the domain asking if this could be dealt with.

Firstname.Lastname@domain is just asking for trouble. I haven't been bitten by it yet as a recipient, but I have as a sender. And I don't even want to think about how much trouble my friend Robert Smith would have under such a scheme....

[goljerp]

You're awfully kind.

Thanks. I don't remember what I did, but I think it was basically just finger. No, wait, I think that Yale used to have an on-line directory. And obviously I knew his name...

Firstname.Lastname@domain is just asking for trouble.

Yeah. I think it's used because it's "easy" (until the problems crop up). JTS has an interesting solution: you get the shortest unique combination of your first name and your last name. So you would probably be mcellio@jtsa.edu, but there might be a DavidAFine@jtsa.edu. I'm not sure how they deal with the problem of two people with identical names - perhaps they let the second person choose some permutation?

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

I like the way my alma mater handled it. All the email addresses were of the form [your three initials][serial number]@po.cwru.edu. If you don't have (or didn't provide to the University) a middle initial, they'd use an 'x'. I don't know how high the serial numbers can go, but they'd already broken the three-digit barrier without problems by the time I graduated and left. They apparently aren't that worried about namespace, though - they don't deactivate alumni accounts. So all of the "same name" or "common name" problems are circumvented.

[geekosaur]

That just delays the problem a bit. (The canonical version of the problem is "two Stephen R. Bournes working in the same hallway at Bell Labs".)

Baal Z'vuv

[magid.livejournal.com]

Also, Lord of the Flies, which I found rather disturbing.

Re: Baal Z'vuv

[cellio]

But grammatically, it's Lord of the Fly, right?

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

So this is completely uninformed speculation, but is it possible that it's "Lord of the Fly" in the same way that "Lord of the Dance" is actually the lord of a bunch of Irish step dances and a couple of flamenco-looking numbers?