In Unix, you could "finger" a user, if you knew what server they had their account on. This is the first example I found:

finger skywalker@moe.cc.emory.edu

Luke Skywalker (skywalke) is not presently logged in.
Last seen at moe on Mon Jul 23 05:13:06 2001 from larry.cc.emory.edu
Mail forwarded to skywalke@mail.service.emory.edu.
Project: Save the galaxy!
Plan:
*Star-hopping Friday night with Han
*Appointment with Yoda Monday at 3:15pm

The information given would vary, but it could be a lot of detail, including when you'd last been on or read your mail, or whatever. Stalkeriffic.

I would have chosen a different name.

in 1995, my college got email, but I was very against it. My BFF figured out the password (I think that your password was your name or something-- very insecure), and she sent funny emails from other people, including a professor. They were very silly. This made me even more suspicious of this email thing!

Oh yeah, I remember dying laughing over fingering people.

We spent most of the evening talking about how, if we ended up together (we did not), there would be a story in the New York Times romance section, because who ever heard of people meeting over a computer. Insane!

That's awesome, Rick.

This was the first time I had to crack open a computer to install something, so it was very exciting.

I remember working on a bunch of computers with my dad while I was in high school. We had a few that we put together from spare parts. When I was in college, I worked with a volunteer group that took university computers that didn't work anymore and rearranged the salvageable parts into frankenputers that we used to put together a computer lab in a spare room in a church in the Ninth Ward, and taught the neighborhood kids how to use the computers. There was one kid who seemed to crashed every computer literally the moment he touched it. We were wondering if he was somehow radioactive or something.

I haven't actually physically built a computer in a while. Everything I do now is with a MacBook, and I don't know what I'm doing well enough to feel comfortable messing around with the insides of one of those.

I got online around 1995 or 1996, but only because I went to a nerd magnet school in high school.

My Nexus 7 arrived this afternoon. New toy so shiny.

Kid opens lemonade stand to raise money for the city of Detroit. He's made over $3,000 so far. [link]

My project this afternoon was repainting the bumper of my car that got scratched up when the screaming lady hit me a few weeks ago. I think I did pretty well. Not quite good as new, but pretty close, and it looks a whole lot better than some other scratches that I paid $75 to have repainted last year. (My car has ended up with a lot of scratches. There is someone in the faculty parking lot who does not know how to park, and several times, I've come back to my car at the end of the day to find scratches that weren't there in the morning.)

share information via fingering

Oh, I used to love to stalk people that way! Also, after college when I'd moved to not using my oldschool college email, but had moved on to WEBMAIL (ooh), I still went back and fingered some friends who always updated their "plans" or whatever, just to see what they were up to. You could even do it to friends at other colleges!

Liese, what does "fatou_dust" refer to? I've always wondered!

Fatou dust is the disconnected bits of a Julia set (like a Mandelbrot set) in fractal math. They're really pretty. [link] (Scroll down to the bottom image.)

My project this afternoon was repainting the bumper of my car that got scratched up when the screaming lady hit me a few weeks ago.

In my only car accident (literally just a fender-bender), I hit a Mini. Did more damage to my car than the Mini, which just had a broken tail light.

(The Mini pulled in front of me and stopped.)