Ok. Every now and then I get asked about this and people don't like "It's not particularly interesting" as an answer. It's not, so don't say you weren't warned.

Many moons ago I went on holiday to Crete with Kathy, Derek and Jane. They'd just finished their A-Levels, I was just about to start my final year of them. We got a very cheap deal for 2 weeks. During the course of these 2 weeks we found the only thing we all ate that we could easily get hold of and cook in the very basic self catering were noodles. At some point I said to Kathy that if I ever got round to running a BBS (which I'd been talking about for a while), then I'd call it Noodles.

As it happened I did end up running a BBS, and lo it was called Noodles (I've just tried to find a suitable Fidonet nodelist to indicate this, but failed. I was 2:443/21 from some time in 1997 until 2000 or so though). And eventually it got to the point where I got email gating to the BBS, so I used a subdomain of noodles. Note at this point I wasn't anywhere near using Noodles as a nick. I was j@ as an email address.

More time passes, I'm getting ready to go to university. My college "father", Jon Chin, writes to me and offers me an account on his machine in college. I suggest jonmcd (which was my Nortel username) or noodles (as I'd used that as an ISP account name for the BBS). Jon decides he likes silly usernames and so I get noodles. Fair enough.

Note I'm still not actually known as Noodles. However when Compsoc ask me for an account name, I choose noodles, rather than having to remember multiple account names. This continues, until I'm noodles most places I have accounts. And then OxIRC starts. And I type "irc" at a bash prompt and magically I become noodles on IRC. And that's really where it started. I think my downfall was the day I failed to turn round when someone shouted "jon" in a lecture theatre, but did turn round when they shouted "noodles".

There. Sorry you asked now?