Something doesn't seem right about that detective work - there's a Jonathan Gillette online who is a web developer in Harrisburg, PA who doesn't seem to be _why. Obviously it's likely that there's more than one Jonathan Gillette on the internet, but it seems odd to me that this other guy is also a web developer, with a decent online presence, in (somewhat) the same geographic area where _why is suspected to live, that isn't him.
But I don't know enough about e-mail headers to provide an alternate explanation if there is one.
EDIT 2: The infamous Zed Shaw posted a link to another page which I'm more inclined to believe is the real _why. I'm not going to post the link here, but you can find it in Zed's twitter stream if you really want to.
That Jonathan Gillette was also going to school in Pennsylvania (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathangillette) when _why wrote that message, supposedly from Salt Lake City, Utah.
He seems to have been working on the same file, in the same day, as Jonathan Gillette. Probably poking around this repository a little more could lead to an almost-definitive answer.
dolphins.ram has "Jonathan Gillette" as the author. Yet another reason to hate Real Player.
I would feel bad about posting this, but since everyone's apparently going to go around assuming it with almost-proof already, I guess it can't do much harm.
Kylie is a relative. He hosts a site by one Kylie Gillette using the alias Whytheluckystiff. If he is NOT Jonathan Gillette he has very, very close ties to him.
Parents divorcing and family members committing suicide._why has written a lot about both topics and the band description matches up with his tastes and quirkiness quite well I think. So Kylie is in fact JGs wife.
And here we are: Miss Trudy (who I definitively know being _why's wife, as I uncovered this some years ago, and _why asked me to not say anything), is definitively saying she belongs to "The Child Who was ..." :
This thread, combined with others combined with the javuh repository on sourceforge combined with all of the friend hosting create enough to bear it out. So there we have it.
Another hint, perhaps going in the same direction: this thread (http://listlibrary.net/ruby-talk/2002/06/00iG41gy) on ruby-talk, where Jonathan Gillette is both using the wgy@riza account and another one ...
The person that Zed is linking to is an art professor who was at Union University in Jackson, TN, now apparently a visiting professor at Lipscomb University in Nashville. You can see that Jonathan Gillette's photo in some faculty photos from a year or so ago (http://www.uu.edu/centers/faculty/faculty/new/0607newfaculty...). It's not _why.
http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/ There are a few PHP apps there. Apparently he did PHP work before. There is also a Java project called javuh that he maintained. Archive.org for these projects reveals that the outing previously mentioned was in fact correct.
Please see the information posted by "burke", a couple of posts up from here. There was a Jonathan Gillette who graduated from Parkland High School in Allentown, PA, then went on to Kutztown University (also in PA). All of this around the time that _why was apparently posting from a company in Salt Lake City.
He mentions his friend Dustin in: 12 Oct 2002 http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary.html?s...
This furthers the belief he is Jonathan Gillette as the band Jonathan Gillette was in contains a Dustin. With all the other evidence I am calling this a case closed. It is interesting to note how different he seems from _why. Maybe the Fight Club analogy (read above) is not too far from the truth.
But I don't know enough about e-mail headers to provide an alternate explanation if there is one.
EDIT: This is that other guy's site, FWIW: http://jonathangillette.net/
And he's on twitter: http://twitter.com/jgillette
EDIT 2: The infamous Zed Shaw posted a link to another page which I'm more inclined to believe is the real _why. I'm not going to post the link here, but you can find it in Zed's twitter stream if you really want to.