The Amusing Tale of Mtrawls/1418

Gather round and old man Phrontist will tell you a story:

About 4 years ago I had just moved from Kent Island Maryland to Falls Church Virginia. Before I moved, I ordered “Learning Perl” from Amazon and had it sent to my new house. I had done a lot of javascript and such, but now I was learning a “Real Language.”

I remember being so excited about my programming Perl, and all the cool stuff one could do so easily with it (I was 11, give me a break ;)). I went to google and typed in “Cool Uses For Perl” and lo and behold there was a site called Perlmonks with a section by this very name. I was hooked, and I quickly registered as “beretboy”. On this website I often proclaimed I was the youngest member, and one day someone responded with roughly this:

“Are you younger then srawls?”

And then something magical happened (que cheesy hallmark music.) This guy had a picture (see link) of himself surrounded by fine ladies at robotics competition.

Needless to say, this blew my mind, but I promptly forgot about it, assuming it was too good to be true.

Then a few months later, WIRED ran an article about this wild guy called Dean Kamen. He started this FIRST thing. Woah, very cool.

So fast-foward a few years and I’m in a lego mindstorms summer camp (which I hated BTW), and the mentor there told me that if Iwas interested in this kind of thing I should sign my teacher up for a robotics mailing list. I did, and about a year later Mr.Ballou started team #1418.

Just a few moments ago I saw this post. In it, mtrawls links to perlmonks.

Picture the thoughts in my head:
Perlmonks: Srawls, that guy who unknowingly created by FIRST team
CD: Mtrawls, a fellow admin on FIRSTwiki

Gasp! Could it be?

Well if it is true, that the two “rawls” are one in the same, I’d like to thank mtrawls.

Well, thought everyone might find that amusing.

No? Well bah! I don’t care. I thought it was neat :wink:

Technically… you may be right. I don’t know if mtrawls and srawls are related but they are both on the CD forums.

But your Srawls is Srawls here too…
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/member.php?u=655

That picture gave it all away… I knew I saw it before here on CD.

Well, I am a fond user of perl … used to contribute to perlmonks under username dimmesdale (though that’s been quite some time, and I only recently started reading the site again). Srawls and mtrawls aren’t quite the same person … about 2 minutes separates us. We’re identical twins. He’s off in college, and I’m heading there soon. It is quite an interesting coincidence, though.

(And he is quite fond of that picture. ;))

after checking team numbers, locations and birthdays… It seems either they are:

  1. Twin Brothers
    -OR-
  2. One in the Same

Theres my conclusion, and once again another story of how small this world really is and how true FIRST is on connecting people around the world together.

Ha! Thats fantastic.
:smiley:

(So I presume you’re the evil twin?) :eek:

Just kidding, one of my friends is a twin and he hates twin jokes.

I’ve met srawls, but not mrawls.