Huh, until I actually went searching earlier (as part of the Google Imagewhack Your Username thread), I though I'd managed a solid decade and a half of uniqueness, putting shame to all those above saying "I made my username this and someone stole it, wah!".
Only to find it's actually a semi-common arabic surname. I made it up myself in the 90s by mangling some other word... (can you guess which, pfft).
And someone on Bebo has actually taken it. They're the first that I've seen however, and I'm not really bothered because ... well, who uses a pseudonym on socnet sites? It seems heavily counterproductive.
Can't use my real name BTW, because a/ I'm terrified of identity fraud or someone I've offended coming and beating crap out of me, b/ of the, what, three or four other people in the world who have it (mine is an uncommon english/welsh/dutch surname), one of them is a moderately well known road-race cyclist, so there's plenty of chance for confusion or pre-empting.
(as far as a/ goes, I used to happily tie this ID to my RL persona, but I'm now seeing the value of keeping them seperate and trying to cut some of the links... with varying degress of success)
Can't use the first online handle I came up with because a/ it's possibly offensive to some people, b/ the email address tied to it got deleted by yahoo for inactivity (without warning!), c/ I actually took it from one of the two lead characters on a BBC show (at the time, a cult and rarely-repeated one, but nowadays doing regular rounds on UK Gold) and therefore it HAS been name-sniped several times.
So I'm going to stick with this one, until at some point I can come up with something else.