referring to unknown/absent friends by their name

Here's a linguistic/pragmatic phenomenon: how often one refers to unknown & absent friends by their name. e.g. "One time, my friend Julia ... " vs "One time, my friend from school ...".

Is this related to formality? East Coast vs West Coast?

I usually only refer to someone's name when I expect that it will be recognized. If necessary, I'll introduce them first, before name-dropping. Maybe it's a habit from programming.

bleg: installing python

The python.exe that comes with cygwin is version 2.5 (and I don't know how to add the module msvcrt).

The python.exe that I got from python.org is version 2.6, but I want to run it inside cygwin... when I do that, it doesn't seem to do anything. Probably because this file is meant to be executed from within Windows (double-clicked), rather than through the shell.

Why things worked before, I'm not sure. All I know is that after reinstalling cygwin, python can't find msvcrt... I suspect that cygwin installed a different version of python.