Fred is also my favorite. This comes from my first job as a firmware developer many moons ago; I copied the practice of the somewhat curmudgeonly senior programmer on the team. He explained that Fred was an acronym for "F'in' Ridiculous Electronic Device."

Interesingly (?) this came up in the context of picking a good bit pattern for use as a signature for a data structure. "Fred" was exactly two bytes long and easy to spot in hex dumps. (He used a 4 for the r.)

laughingboy