We control the horizontal. We control the vertical.

by Mike on 3/19/2004

One of the nice things about moving into the house is that I have a chance to design and build exactly the home network that I want. I took the excuse opportunity to upgrade to an 802.11g router, and I expect to have a wireless bridge to connect to the computers that will eventually live upstairs. The cable modem is in, and the speed is quite nice thankyouverymuch.

I’ll also rebuild one of my Linux boxes (and likely retire the other) for the move. This got me thinking about naming schemes. I name all of my machines after muppets*, and the wireless network is named accordingly, which got a raised eyebrow from Christine.

What do you call your machines?

* – this is why, after building a virtual PC image at home, I’m now blocked from the network in one of our offices.

{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }

Ginger March 19, 2004 at 9:07 am

I think we’ve had this discussion before, but: all our hard drives are named after planets in Star Wars, except the little portable drive (X-Wing).

The ones at the office Greg and I used to work at were named after Beanie Babies until they went to corporate standard names. You could tell which was which by the Beanie Baby sitting on top of the machine. (I still have mine.)

Greg names his after Middle Eastern goddesses: Astarte, Ishtar, etc.

Andy March 20, 2004 at 12:44 am

For my first computer, I did what I sometimes do for such things, I let something pop into my head, and then I used it. The result was a computer named ‘Uncle Joe’.

For my second computer, I attempted to do the same thing, but was thwarted by thinking of the first computer and ended up with the name ‘Aunt Ruth’. Karen found this amusing since she had an Aunt Ruth married to an Uncle Joe.

Natalie March 24, 2004 at 5:35 pm

All of our computers are named after types of beers: Amber, Lager, Stout, etc.

eliot March 25, 2004 at 2:18 am

Nice blog. Just stopped by while looking at WordPress blogs (considering switching from MT).

I used to pick plays from Shakespeare and go with characters from those. Now I use words and characters from Mystery Science Theater. My beautiful, and recently-acquired Mac is called Diabolik (the last MST3K). My faithful Debian box is Oik (someone marked an episode is Oik! and I had no idea what it meant until I found a British slang dictionary.. loved the word ever since). I’m waiting for a notebook to be called Mighty Jack. :)

C March 26, 2004 at 4:51 pm

I was asked by G to name the computers with “French banker’s names”. We now have Maurice, Francois, and Jacques in the house.

G March 31, 2004 at 7:16 am

I **LIKE** French bankers!

Sherri May 20, 2004 at 9:06 am

My husband set up this pc, and almost put in my ‘real name’…ACK! I stopped him just in time, but had to come up with something in the few seconds he gave me: hers

So later on, when he rebuilt his (after his master HD said whooomph), he named it ‘his’ LOL.

I name my drives by what I keep stored on them; he doesn’t name his drives. He named one of the machines he’s making (not a pc) fludderwhumper. I’m going to have to come up with machine names ahead of time to avoid him naming my machines after hearing that!

Sherri May 20, 2004 at 9:07 am

geez I can’t even type my url in correctly…this one’s correct

Marc July 8, 2004 at 8:15 am

The last place I worked, I took them from their infancy in computers (a Burroughs B96 with about 6 dumb terminals) to 3 full pc networks over the years. One LAN was called AcmeAcres and all the computers were named after the Looney Tunes and Tiny Tunes characters, the second was called Springfield and all those were named after the Simpsons characters and the third was called Marvel and they of course were named after comic book characters.

Also, we had a bunch of HP Unix boxes that we named after “great” birds…Condor, Raptor, Hawk, Eagle. We had a lower end HP that we named Crow (our webserver).

We had a lot of fun there! :-)

I have to admit, I started running out of names for both AcmeAcres and Springfield.

Matt October 8, 2004 at 2:09 pm

my office computer came with an imaged drive called ‘IBM PRELOAD’. I renamed it to ‘Preload THIS’.

Jesse October 13, 2004 at 11:12 pm

At home we’ve named our machines after characters from Mystery Science Theater 300. Our Airport base station is named Servo (as is the wireless network). My laptop’s name is Crow, and the computer in the family room is named Gypsy. Another of my computers is named Torgo after the character in the MST3K episode “Manos the Hands of Fate.”

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