A personal name with four Chinese characters is most likely to be Japanese, with two characters for the family name and two for the given name. Of course, this may not be a normal personal name.
Well, assuming that it is Japanese, the Google translation tool gives “Special gold raw.”
I’m guessing it’s Japanese, not Chinese, even though there’s a great deal of overlap, just because I get all four characters, and I only have the Japanese character set installed here. (and those with just Chinese are complaining that one of the characters doesn’t come through.)
Bingo!
Welcome to the club 德特金生!
It displayed fine for me at work with Firefox, but at home with the same version of Firefox it’s question marks, even after following wolfstu’s instructions (and manually clearing the cache and restarting Firefox).
My opinion is that if it takes so much effort to display it, it’s not worth the trouble it will cause, especially if multiple users do this and will be indistinguishable from each other in the same thread by those unable or unwilling to take the steps to configure to see it.
I realize I can very likely solve this with a bit more investigation (likely I need to turn on support for it at the Windows level, not just the browser level), but IMHO this shouldn’t be necessary.
We are asking for a name change here; management must approve all screen names.
Use before beauty, I’m afraid.
your humble TubaDiva
I vote we just call him Mr Squiggles until he takes the hint.
Now hold on a minute, Case Sensitive. Your very name is quite, ahem, case sensitive. It isn’t really all that hard to pronounce.
Now you tell me. 
Well, it was nice while it lasted… Actually the name “德特金” is my Chinese name here. I’ve been studying abroad for the last year, and the Straight dope has become my real link with the States. Of course registering with only 3 characters isn’t allowed, so I threw “生” because I’m a student. I know I could have done “学” just as easily, but I didn’t want to be saying “I study myself”. Anyways, I apologize for the confusion, although I am a little suprised with only 1 post I have been able to get another thread started about me. Even better, that thread didn’t involve burning effigies and throwing toilet paper. It’s nice to be noticed though.
On a side note, the name is my lastname roughly translated. My first name is much too common, and many foreigners have it translated. Wanting to be different, I decided upon a slightly longer, name. Luckily this name hasn’t had any cross culture mishaps. A student who came in the same program a couple years ago had his name translated, and not untill after living here for 8 months did someone tell him that his name is actually a brand of sanitary napkins.
I’d be honored to have my name hanging on your wall, as far as I know it’s nothing obscene, but then again I doubt anyone would tell me if it was.
He still wins the SDMB name game, just for having a UHF reference as his name.
Personally, I thought 德特金生 sounded just fine. Oh well, 你好 Conan theLibrarian, and welcome!
Oh well, it’s too bad. Even if the screen name did cause confusion, anytime someone came into a thread and wondered about all the funny boxes, they could have been directed to a post somewhere with the boilerplate on how to enable other character encodings on their computer. It could have been a useful part of the fight against ignorance at no real cost to system resources.
At the very least, it was a more useful and interesting choice than the l33t w00t style of some other screen names using †, ® and the like.
The “C” is silent. No word on Conan’s yet. {Hi, Conan}
Haven’t we had a Conan the Librarian before? Maybe I’m misremembering…
Conan the Librarian is a character in Werd Al Yankovic’s movie UHF
I went to high school with a guy named Michael Jackson. Among other things, he wanted to be a commedian. In the early-to-mid-1980s he did a little stand-up routine in the bar of a local hotel. It was really lame. He was ‘reading a newspaper and picking out interesting articles’. At one point he said, 'Ah! There’s a new movie out starring Arnold Schwartzenegger: Conan the Librarian. ‘Cause, y’see… librarian sounds like… anyway…’
The guy needed to work on his humour. He did a routine at the Antelope Valley Fair in 1986 that included this gem: ‘Here is my impression of the Space Shuttle Challenger.’ He produced a paper airplane and either crumpled it up and tossed it, or set it on fire and tossed it. (I wasn’t there.) The Antelope Valley is part of the Mojave Desert that includes Palmdale – where the Space Shuttles were built – and Edwards AFB, where they landed. :smack: Needless to say, his little joke went over like a turd in a punchbowl. :wally:
Gee, I wonder who you are talking about… :rolleyes: