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You see, first year of university is a transitional period. It is a time when a person discovers new hobbies and new interests, some out of a sense of need, some out of a sense of frustration. First year at Brock was not very frustrating, on the whole. By and large the class work was relatively easy. But I was somewhat frustrated with living in dorm. No, let's be honest. I hated living in dorm, especially after my room was vandalized.
But a couple good things happened in dorm. I made some good acquaintances (I hesitate to use the word friend, since I seem to have lost contact with EVERYONE I was in dorm with), a couple of whom even had the Internet connected in their rooms. (You laugh, but remember, this was 1995. The ethernet connection in every room was a new thing that year, and most of us didn't have computers powerful enough to support connecting to the internet). And I did learn how to get along with some people I really didn't like.
The other good thing was I made some friends in the math program. A couple of them were IRC addicts (which was bad for them, as they took to skipping lectures in favour of spending hours in the computer labs). But I started doing IRC chat as a result of that. To log on with the default user name of ak95ah looked pretty dumb. So I needed an IRCnick. But what?
I never did find a nick worth using, so, on the spur of a moment, I used qaz. It was easy to type, and usually didn't collide with other nicks. When it did, I'd just add a number, like qaz1 or qaz2. I chatted from time to time between classes or on evenings when I had no homework (and having no money to do the bar scene, this was cheap entertainment).
At any rate, I think you're beginning to see where the qaz1 comes from. As I chatted more, I took to simply signing on with the IRCnick qaz1, since it almost never collided, and when I switched networks to DalNET, the collisions were even less frequent.
But back to my acquaintances in dorm. One, Jill, was kind enough to let me swing by her room and search for stuff on the internet. She was a Christian and was into the same sort of music I was, so we would search the web for pages on our favourite singers and bands. One evening we ran across the Steve Taylor for President page-- it was a hoot, and I ended up spending copious amounts of time on that site. Other frequent visitors to that site included Melissa Hoffmeyer and Matt Prins (who actually created the site).
Melissa, or "melvan" as she prefers to be called online, decided to create a Steve Taylor for President IRC chat room. It was called #bannerman, after the Steve Taylor song "Bannerman." I was at the first chat, and it was a hoot, although there was copious lag.
The school year ended shortly thereafter, but I returned to school in the fall to find that that channel was still going, and reacquainted myself with the regulars there, eventually becoming an operator on the channel.
There's a lot more story between then and now, but the long and the short of it is that the people who just never quite gave up on #bannerman long after that campaign had ended became the 'residents' of #bannerland, which recently registered its own domain, www.bannerland.org of which this domain is a subdomain. So there you go. A silly story, I suppose, but most things start inauspiciously.