Usernames are something we choose for ourselves. We use them to express ourselves, and sometimes we hide behind them. Some of them are connected to our real name, like a nickname. Others have no connection to us.

This is the story behind mine.

The first username I used for a long time was given to me by my best friend from high school. I used it for more than ten years. It wasn't as hard back then to clear your data from the internet as it is now. I had a list what to remove to leave no trace in search engines. It took me years to choose a new username, and that was Gridranger.

The word 'grid' has many different meanings for me.

The Neon Grid from the 80s

The game grid from the 1982 movie Tron is a place where anthropomorphized programs play for survival. This movie was the first feature film built upon using lots of CGI.

The way it depicted the grid influenced many creative minds. From music videos to toy box decorations, the neon grid became an iconic design element of the 80s.

I loved Lego M-trons by the way. Some of their sets had small, strong magnets inside, hence for the letter M in their name.

Synthwave album covers still use neon grids to capture the spirit of that decade.

Grid computing

Before 'cloud computing' became the trendy buzzword, 'grid computing' was already way to distribute resources among loosely connected computers in a network. Database administration was part of my work when migration started at my workplace from Oracle 11g (grid) to Oracle 12c (cloud).

Volunteer research

For years, I (or rather, my home computers) participated in many BOINC projects. BOINC is a volunteer research framework based on grid computing. Have you heard of SETI@home, for example? That was the forerunner of the BOINC projects. I registered and started using the SETI computational screensaver in the early 2000s. But that was only the beginning. There was a bunch of other projects I took part in.

I run a lot of different projects, from medical ones (COVID, Zika, cancer, and AIDS research) to astronomical ones (neutron stars and SETI), as well as some math ones. Besides my home PC, I have collected old Android phones and created a small home cluster with them. I experimented to find the optimal workload for their CPUs. Then, for just a few cents of electricity per day, they did the work.

My overclocked Raspberry Pi also did its fair share. I used a full aluminum case for passive cooling and took advantage of the waste heat to keep my balcony above the dew point in the winter, thus avoiding mold growth.

Although I haven't run any projects in the past couple of years, I'm still in the top 0.33% of BOINC users.

I was devastated when the Arecibo Observatory was damaged beyond repair. Not only was it the source of data for the SETI@home project, it was also a symbol of humanism to me, reminding me of Carl Sagan. I'm a member of the BOINC team named after him.

The 'ranger' part

I loved the Space Ranger series by Isaac Asimov. One of his earliest works. Yes, he wrote much better novels than those, but they are still great. To me, they symbolize that positive values will prevail, even in the harshest circumstances.

I hope that one day, good will dominate greed, selfishness, and ignorance in cyberspace.

The icon

The icon, avatar, or profile picture that I use hasn't changed much since I drew it. It's a 5.25-inch floppy disk with a transparent side that reveals an identity disc inside, in the style of the original 1982 Tron movie, instead of a magnetic disk. A couple of months later, I corrected the color of the logo. This week, after seven years, I updated it again to replace the text on the label with my own handwriting.

The original version of this post is part of the Blaugust 2025 series on my blog along with:

• Space Colony
• Friendships in my life
• Jousting in video games
• Helsinki Biennial
• Data & Encryption
• Intro through traits
• Hospital visit
• Win 3.1 Nostalgia
• Poets of the Fall
• Project done!
• Video games that made me learn
• Blaugust