From Firstborns to Chewbacca in between matzo ball soup and matzo munchies

Um, I call my wireless home network Joachim because I’d been reading the Pursuit of the Millennium shortly beforehand, and Joachim of Fiore was in my head for some reason.

There’s no excuse for calling my PC Charlemagne though, sadly.

I called an ancient laptop of mine Hawkeye, after the Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans character. Then each of my external harddrives became places for him to roam: Kentucky, Wyoming, ThePrairies and so on. Eventually I ran out of large states and Hawkeye had to start swimming: Kitchigami (Lk Superior) and whatnot.

I made it very hard to abandon that laptop. Uncas just didn’t work as a replacement, and without an itinerant North American as the subject (I settled on ‘Bandicoot’) the thematic unity is all broken.

Maybe I should toss out all my old harddrives and buy new ones that I can rename in appropriate ways.

There also used to be the disaster cluster at Cal: typhoon, tsunami, etc.

I often use volcanoes, for precisely the reason Vance states. Using this site, I can get a name whenever I need one, and unless I need to name more than 1500 machines I’ll never run out.

When I worked for Tripod, all of our machines were named from the set of words beginning with the letters “tri.” So there was tripoli and triage and trireme, for example. An exception was our one R&D server, which we obtained after some considerable effort to not have to much around with the general dev server, and named Idaho (as in, “Our own, private…”)

My CS department named all of the Sun machines after various types of cattle (longhorn, angus, etc.)

Sadly, since then, every place I worked has had very boring, utilitarian names, like Dev01 or whatever. It is probably the case that the sheer number of boxes that a modern computer company uses makes thinking of a suitably wide namespace too time consuming. My present company has hundreds of production servers, and dozens of dev/test servers.

My laptop is called “Khan,” because when it screws up I want something cathartic to scream at it.

Mine are all named after mountains in the Australian Alps (well, we call them Alps, but the highest are about 2000m).

My first Thinkpad was a sub-notebook.

Small
Black
One glass eye:

Bingo — Sammy.

We once used Wizard of Oz characters, which had the advantage of endless numbers of extras: Munchkin1, FlyingMonkey12, etc. once you ran out of main characters.

The problem is that later, you always want to go back and rename everything in a way that reflects the relationship of their characters; if you already have a Tinman but then get a new item that is even more central, you don’t want to make it another FlyingMonkey.

My first PC (now owned by my sister, and still staggering on at 10 years old) was boswell. My current PC is johnson. My old laptop (a tiny Toshiba) was pope. My current laptop is hume.

(A friend calls her laptop ‘Please’. Best name ever. ‘Please don’t crash.’ ‘Please boot.’)

I’d heard that ‘Homer’ was a very popular name for machines in computer labs, though whether it referred to the one from Springfield or Greece, I do not know.

I once named a machine ‘monad’, after Leibniz’s metaphysical entities. The key joke was supposed to be “monads are window(s)less”. Alas, the intersection of a) the set of people who understood enough philosophy and b) the set of people who understood the anti-GUI/Microsoft jibe turned out to be so small that nobody ever got it without extensive explanation. Which is never a good sign in a joke.

local restaurants: casbah, merle, hecky, and lulu.

Mmmm, Merle’s. We used to go there when I was in high school and get the “Barnyard Platter.” It had all manner of BBQ’d creatures on it.

This reminds me of the Richard Powers novel Plowing the Dark. Short summary: a Gifted Artist comes to the Pacific Northwest to help a bunch of computer geeks develop a cutting-edge virtual reality system. When she arrives, she astounds the systems gurus by insisting on giving their rendering servers names. (I don’t have the book, but Amazon Reader tells me the offending passage is around page 31.)

I had to put the book away for a few days (picked it up later, and got through about half before deciding I’d been right earlier) – clearly, as the comments above show, Powers had never set foot inside a server room.

Back in 1980 I named the sole computer the company owned (an IBM S/34) Phred. We even had its name posted outside the office door on the paper list of people who worked in there. The auditors didn’t like that worth a damn.

MIT has numerous examples of this, as you’d expect. The dial-in servers (when they had such things) used to be types of pasta, and the telnet machines were sauces- so when you’d be dialing in to penne and then telnet to pesto, for example.
The Tech, the student newspaper, names various machines after famous news industry people associated with the function of that machine. So one of the design/layout machines was Paul Rand. An opinion machine was George Will. The EIC / chief reporter machine was Helen Thomas. Photo was Henri Cartier-Bresson. The executive editor machine was Ben Bradlee, and that one has a good story- he was on campus in the 90s and actually came by the office and signed the machine, “No crashes, please! -Ben Bradlee.” The machine was later upgraded but I think they still have the case from the original mac that was signed.
A biochemistry lab named standalone machines different DNA bases, and instrument machines amino acids where the code for the amino acid matched the function of the instrument (HPLC = Histidine, eg)

I guess I should mention (as I did over Pesach) that my current lab names the scientific instruments (though not necessarily the computers attached to them) after washed-up 80s starts. We have a David Hasselhoff, a Molly Ringwald, and a Tony Danza.

A place I used to work used Lord of the Rings characters. Where I work now, we mostly use names of cities and towns in Mass. I await the day we need to use manchester-by-the-sea. One cluster uses players on the 2004 Red Sox. There is some logic to it: the database server is varitek and its hot backup is mirabelli. I like two of the USNO’s time servers: tick.usno.navy.mil and tock.usno.navy.mil.