PC Naming Convention Needed
One of my favourite daily-reads at the moment is Volker Webers's Vowe.net. Everything a blog should be: sometimes funny, sometimes interesting, sometimes useful and sometimes personal.
It seems Volker and I have similar interests and have both recently fallen for the appeal of the Apple and acquired some nice new goodies. The difference being Volker has cool names for all his kit. He's got an iPod named Woodstock and an iBook called Lucy. I'm jealous! I want cool names for my kit. That's where I need your help. Can anybody think of a theme to follow. Volker's is Snoopy. What should I use? How about 3rd Rock From The Sun characters? Harry, Sally, Tommy, Dick, Don, and Mary for instance.
Anyway, come in to my office. I've got them all together for a photo-shoot. I know, I know, it's a mess.
So we've got a pair of Netfinity servers, a Dell laptop, an iBook, an iPod and the clear PC in the bottom right that I built myself in a moment of common-sense/available-money stupidity.
The clear PC has been named once before now I think of it. I once showed a girl my bedroom and she was amazed that I had all these PCs with no names. Quick as a flash she decided I should call the clear one "see-thru-pee-o"...
So get your thinking caps on and give them all a name. Winner to be announced next week some time.
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How about the Archie comc series?
The Netfinity servers (the alpha males) could be Reggie and Moose)
The Dell laptop could be an Archie, the ibook - Veronica, ipod - Betty and the clearPC definitely a Sabrina :-)
Hehehehe !!! Have fun !
Dan
Firstly, never show a girl your bedroom. OK, so you've now gone and shown the entire web one corner of it...
I don't think that was the hardware the poor girl was expecting to see.
You need help.
How about "Wallace & Gromit", "Feathers McGraw" or the characters from "Chicken Run" ... being an avid fan of Aardman Animations helps ...
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How about Gods? The UNIX server at my company are all named after different gods Zeus, Hercules, Odin, Thor... We have quite a few servers so use many different mythos but you could stick to one type.
Are you a sports fan? Maybe your favourite players name.
How about a Lord of the Rings fan?
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Apple iPod = Grigory Danderfluff of Willowbottom
Apple iBook = Grigory Bramble of Willowbottom
Dell laptop = Till Brownlock of Overhill
Those could be a mouthfull though. ;-)
The Isle
The Netfinities: Gilligan and the Skipper of course.
The Dell Laptop: The Millionaire
The Ipod: Ginger. Sexy, but that's about all you get.
The iBook: Mary Ann. Almost as sexy as the iPod, but with a bit more functionality.
The Clear PC: The Millionaire's wife. Almost worthless, and what you see is definitely what you get.
Unfortunately, Jake, that makes you the professor
The clear one can be called "Orac" after the clear box they had in Blake's 7.
The servers can be Buzz and Lightyear - "To Netfinity and beyond!"
The Dell can be "Dell Boy" or "Dangermouse" to be more cryptic.
The iBook can be called "Danno" - after the famous line in Hawaii 5-0.
That leaves the iPod - Hmmm... "Colin Mac-Crae" - talented but always crashing out!
Well, I've got my servers named after Dilbert characters: 'Dogbert' and 'Catbert', and my desktop machine was dubbed 'The Black Hole' by my wife, because to her, money vanished into it like one.
One place I worked had two schemes: servers were named after gods/godesses, or Japanese movie monsters. We had servers named Zeus, Hera, Godzilla, Mothra...
The 7 Dwarves has always been a good theme for servers. The iPod can be Snow White - complete with poisoned Apple? :)
You could do train companies, with the slowest crappest one being connex. :)
I've always thought that the off-shore UK shipping areas used for forecasting the weather would make an interesting name format. With such gems as Viking, Dogger, Finisterre and Fastnet, you can make your way around the UK.
Does any other country have this type of thing, or is it just us Brits?.
Well, you're prolly better off going through the rest of the SW canon if you're gonna keep the gals name for the clear computer...
Netfinity servers: Obi and Wan or Anakin and Vader.
IBook - Leia
Ipod - R2(D2)
Dell Laptop - Luke
'Course, this is to be admitted as highly, highly geeky, and if my experience is any guide, not successful with the female gender. ;)
The more interesting question is why would an adult male feel compelled to name his computers...hehe...
Lucy is not an iBook. She is an iMac. :-) And she is also little bit jealeous since I started checking out the 12" PB. Not for delivery this year though.
How do I know she is jealous? The mouse pointer is sometimes jumping all over the place.
And finally: It is not all about the Peanuts. There is also Ernie, Kermit, and Bert. And Circus - vowe's magic flying circus. :-)
BTW: Thank you for the kind words.
thats messy?
As youre a cowboy developer, how about:
Lone Ranger (iMac)
Tonto (iPod)
Billy the Kid (Dell)
Butch Cassidy (Netfinity1)
Sundance Kid (Netfinity2)
Pancho Villa (Clear PC)
I jest of course.
I used to do this all the time at Notes R3 rollouts for servers.
Some themes I've enjoyed...
Boats That Sank (Titanic, Lusitania, Bismark, Arizona)
Diseases (Cholera, Tuberculosis, Bubonic Plague)
Beers of the World (Guiness, Budweiser, Red Stripe, Heineken)
Cheeses (cf: Monty Python's Cheese Shop)
Adult film stars (I won't confess to knowing any names in particular)
Psychoactive pharmaceuticals (Valium, Prozac, MDMA, Ridellin, LSD)
Hanna Barbara Characters -- cause everyone does Warner Brothers and Disney (George Jetson, Barney Rubble, Quick Draw McGraw, Jabberjaw)
Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast Cast Members (Zorak, Brak, Moltar, Galactus)
I hope these are as obtuse as anyone gets. I'd hate to have to get even more esoteric.
Hey, is that a DELL Noteboard? Uaaa. :-)
We've got all our servers named after Simpsons characters.
My fave still has to be "Truckasaurus" *shrug* But there's about a hundred of them, so you shouldn't run out of names any time soon...
well i started off many years ago naming my home systems after some of my favorite bands/performers:
- Rancid
- RHead (named for Mr. Yorke's brilliant group)
- Tool
- Clash
- Blacklab (for my thinkpad)
but then i started deviating to include Matt Groenig's characters ("Barney" and "Bender") and just plain lame-o names ("T8K" for tecra 8000 and "Slimjim" for my little Vaio Picturebook)
If you're going to use the Beatles names then you'll have a problem when you have > 5 boxes. (John, Paul, George, Ringo, and of course Clarence).
That's John, Paul, George, Ringo, Pete, Stu, the other George, Brian, and Murray the K, with guest appearances by Eric Clapton, Yoko Ono, Ravi Shankar and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. If you can't build a home network around that, there's a problem.
I'd go the Foreman route, though, and call them all George, then sit back and watch 'em replicate....
Well, i must admit I'm using the Matrix at the moment, with Zion being the domain and the neo, morpheus etc the computer names.
Next time I might go with a thunderbirds theme - Jeff, Scott, Virgil, Brains, Penelope, Mole, TB1 ...
Hey Jake, I thought you said you weren't a geek??? The piccie above confirms it absolutely now I'm afraid.
So, what do all these machines actually do??? - I mean, _two_ Netfinity servers???
We actually used superheroes for one of our clients (at their request) - like Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Aquaman, etc.
It always brought a smile to my face when I had to tell the client that "Wonder Woman" had gone down again.
We use composers for internet/intranet servers and inventors for everything else...
So you get things like Mozart, Strauss, Handel, Verdi...
...and Marconi, Edison, Faraday etc.
Short and sweet generally and best of all, not the slightest thing to do with our business so when you over hear someone mention those names you can assume somethings up and ask them about it.
We have got tens of Domino servers named as PGWSS001 .. etc. which each of them are a branch server.
The problem is the name is no way related with the branch name. So if there is a problem with X branch server, first I have to find its Domino name.
So I oddly recommend to give your server names such as JH.....037, JH.....049. Fill in the blanks as you wish. And pretend to have at least a hundered computers. And when one visitor asks the name of a computer. Answer him/her in a stern manner that it is JHFITBAUW073. Then wait for the other inevitable questions.
I currently use place names near to where I live, with bigger town names relating to the size of the equipment (size of 'the' equipment, not 'my').
So you could do something like that, with the Dell obviously being called 'Peckham'.
By the way, next time you get a girl in your bedroom, either cover the computers with a sheet and tell her its your exercise equipment, or alternatively try, "and these netfinitity servers I think of as the shapely legs of a beautiful woman, which is why I keep them together, but in your case I could make an exception".
Nerdy, but you'll either get a slap or laid.
What about naming them after Jean M Jarre's instruments? - seeing as you are a fan.
Your PDC being JMJ himself and the rest of your kit being his "instruments"...
BTW: also noticed you have the only mouse worth having...
I come here for tips about domino/html and js - now look at me - I'll be watching Eastenders next!
For what its worth I always regarded codestore as the centre of the universe, so how about Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian and if any of your associated hardware is capable of knowing about Life, the Universe and Everything, you could always call it 42.
Strange that's Joe's suggestions mostly seem to be somekind of cowboys - what is he suggesting ?!
How about naming them after the asterix series... to statr with your see thru could be called Justforkix. iPod could be Musix or Rythmix.
I thought of a lot of name combinations when I was trying to name our two ferrets.
Among my favorites were the Muppets. You got the two Netfinity's... Waldorf and Statler (the two geezers in the balcony. ;-)
Fozzie, Scooter, Kermit, etc. etc.
Eventually we decided on Slinky and Scooter for the ferrets. :-)
Well, I see my Muppet theme has been 'stolen'... I have a pair of older all-in-one Macs named Waldorf and Statler (with icons and sounds to match their names), and my PowerBook is named Zoot. I have an ancient Color Classic II named Scooter, and an old IIcx(?) in my basement storage area named Piggy.
At my last job, we named all the servers after Shakespeare characters, so then my G3 PowerBook was Othello, and my beige PC was Iago.
My brother uses Asterix characters, I think, and I used to use Tintin, before I discovered a bunch of Muppet icons and sounds and switched to that. (There aren't too many folks here across the pond that know about Asterix or Tintin.)
I think the best idea I've seen here is Douglas Adams characters. I wish I'd thought of that!
LOL...
Hear, hear! about the Douglas Adams.
What would be really funny, (though admittedly much too confusing) would be to name them all:
jynnan tonnyx
jinond-o-nicks
gee-N-N-T'N-ix
tzjin-anthony-ks
Jess :-)
I chime in with the Simpsons idea:
Your oldest box still running: Mr. Burns
The simplest: Ralphie
etc. etc.
I thought: Douglas Adams, but so did others before me. So, going bck to my photo from the gales last year, the Netfinities must be Bill and Ben, the Dell has to be Weed (sorry Dell). On this theme, but a different programme, remember Captain Pugwash, with Seaman Staines and what WAS the cabin boy called? I know it was another double entendre. You'll have to decide which is which of the iBook, iPod and clear PC. Sorry to be so old, and very British.
I'd go with the periodic table
iBook - Titanium
iPod - Iridium
clear machine - Silicon
Servers - Iron and Arsenic
Dell Laptop - Platinum
Ive gone for slightly more obscure. Star Wars planet names. I have my iBook as Kessel, my main desktop is Yavin and my server is Hoth...personal tastes may vary of course ;)
I just remembered there's another way of doing a survey on this. If you receive mail from people with a personal mail program (i.e. not bulk mailers, and possibly not exchange or notes users), if you look at the message source, and find the message-id header, the text after the @ sign is the name of the originating computer. eg.
Message-id <503949329c4969322934593299@RSLVAIO>
So 'RSLVAIO' is the name of the PC that send it. Some company mail systems seem to put the domain name in here. Perhaps Domino puts the server name in here. Anyone care to check?
If there were a way of analysing the message headers, you could work out the most popular naming scheme!
As soon as I saw the clear computer I thought of the clear box with flashing lights that was meant to be a computer in Blakes 7. A quick google revealed that it was called Orac. I discovered that Zen was the computer on the Liberator, and that there are a huge list of other characters to match all your hardware. I was very young when I last saw that show, but it seemed pretty cool at the time.
And besides, I think anyone owning that many computers should relent to the inner geek and name them in honour of an obscure sci-fi series. Go on - you know you want to!
I already said Orac! Although you have to be careful, as the naming conventions reveal how truly sad we male techhies can be... I worry when someone has called their kit after Tolkien stuff... Too D&D...
Adult film stars.. ;) That's more like it!
Various childrens TV characters could be good. All the Trumpton firemen "Hugh, Pugh, Barney, McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub"., etc...
I'd suggest a Hagar the Horrible theme.
Characters include, Hagar, Helga, Honi (definite contender for iBook), Lute (iPod), Hamlet, Lucky Eddie, Snert (dog) and Kvack (duck).
And the whole viking image has to count for something.
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'nuf said!?!
>^..^<
Captain Pugwash's cabin boy was called Roger (Roger the cabin boy)...
Oh the comedy.
This may sound corny, but i named mine after the characters of Notting Hill..William, Anna, Spikey...etc.
hmm, you could also name them after our planetary system. The netfinities could be called Jupiter and Saturn, the iPod Pluto, the see thru Venus etc...
There a a lot of planets, with more still being discovered, so it's an expanding theme! Off course, stars may be included. ;-)
Since I've a sailor myself, my inspiration (or lack thereof!) has been the "flag" alphabet (aka the NATO Phonetic Alphabet):
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet....
Another standard I've seen is musical styles: tango, jazz, swing, twist, rock...
Iris.com , I mean, notesdev.ibm.com also uses (or used to) use record labels: Arista, Electra...
or maybe drinks? whisky, vodka, cachaca (cachaça), tequila...
Have fun,
Daniel
Hey! Okay I have only one thing to say to the other Jessica Stratton... my name is Jess Stratton and I am twelve years old. I have red hair and im irish. Im in sixth grade and I was born in March. If you read this... if you could email me on WMSchick144@aol.com it will be really cool!i! thanxs!
Jess
Okay this is the 12 years old Jess and I have a good idea for the contest... how bout' you should name them names from toy Story. exsample, Mr. Patatoe head or Jessie, or Woody, Buzz?¿. Toy story's the best because I think a lot of people know who they are.
If not, maybe you dont have to name them tv show names, you could also try food names like cupcake or somthing cute like that.
Another idea I have is maybe after the Adams family. Exsample Uncle Fester, or Wednsday ect. ect. thanx and i hope that you like my ideas!
Jess
It's amazing what utter tripe one finds when one is bored in front of google.
Honestly.
I'm a huge John Le Carre fan (esp Smiley)
My network is called Circus and the Computers Tinker,Tailor, Soldier etc - has been for years whatever computers i've owned