Tuesday, April 01, 2014

I am Bill Gasarch

I have a confession to make. Remember back in 2007 when I retired from the blog for about a year. I didn't actually retire at all but instead took the blog in a new direction by writing under the pseudonym William Ian “Bill” Gasarch, to be more playful and irreverent. All I had to do was be a little off the wall, add a FEW CAPITAL LETTERS and some mispellings and voila, same blog, new blogger. I’m especially proud of the fake conversations “Bill” had with his “relatives”. 

Now that I have come out, I’d like to thank Samir Khuller to help me set up a website off  Maryland’s CS page. The pictures of Bill are a friend of mine, a web programming consultant. Most of the rest of the links were plagiarized from the far corners of the Internet except for the God Play--wrote that one myself. 

In 2008, I decided to return to the blog as myself and also continue as Bill. Great fun switching context between the two personalities. I particularly enjoyed doing the typecasts with the two personalities talking to each other.

I have to admit Dick has done me one better, with his teenage-chess-genius-turned-complexity-theorist alter ego Ken Regan.

I’m surprised how few people had caught on, after all how many of you have actually met Bill in person? But now that I have a respectable job, I realized it just wasn't right for me to keep fooling the community.

6 comments:

  1. Brilliant, best of today!

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  2. April fool post?

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  3. I was expecting "and I approve this message."

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  4. This deception should be thoroughly investigated by the TCS Ethics Board.

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  5. Very funny! Thanks for the good laugh :)

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  6. The first rule of Theory club is you don't talk about Theory club?

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