Actually, Nan Smith is my real name -- well, it's short for Nancy Smith, as I'm sure isn't a surprise to anyone, but people have called me Nan, Nance and Nancy. I picked Nan because it was short and to the point. I figure there are enough of us out there that people would have a pretty hard time identifying me in person unless I wanted them to.
I use hachiban for my email address because everything more common was already taken and I don't care for adding numbers after my name. Hachiban means number eight in Japanese. We had a cat that had seven kittens and about the same time we adopted a little stray that she took in and fed with her own babies. Since my imagination boggled at naming eight kittens (and remembering which was which) my husband and I counted from one to eight in Japanese to name them all, which was where the name originally came from. When I needed a name for my email, no one else had it, so I took it and I've been hachiban ever since.
Nan
