Gavin Andresen - 2011-01-21 22:21:42

Satoshi once suggested that people could hack their client to generate and discard a bunch of random addresses until you got one that started with your initials or even your name if it was short.

I wrote a 'vanity bitcoin address' patch a while ago that lets you do exactly that:  https://gist.github.com/614460

I bet finding an address starting  1HAL...  wouldn't take more than a few hours.  If I recall, it took a day or so to find one with the string 'gavin' in it.