He knows not what he asks
In a comment to my post on the tragic loss of our computer, Julia, Sam asks, "Could you help me name my computer?"
Ha!
Sam, you only think theology is a battleground fraught with peril and contradictory ideas in which lifelong ill-feelings arise over minor doctrinal points. Forget that. Arguing the nature of the Trinity is child's play compared to picking a name (or even more vast, a naming scheme) for your computer or computers.
We'll assume you don't want the utilitarian, corporate approach (and even that's a subject worth acrimony - do we put machine purpose or geographical location or both into the name, or go for totally random names to confuse hackers?). I think you probably want something a bit more personal. Software company computer naming schemes are a good place to start. Those that I have worked at have included (in no particular order):
- Characters from mythology
- Mountains of Colorado
- Comic/cartoon characters/superheroes
- Mountains of the world (lots of climbers are software engineers)
- Characters from mythology, again (or they're role playing gamers)
- Video games (or they're gamers in general)
- Place names in Colorado
- Children's names
- Animals and plants of Colorado (are you seeing a theme? :o)
- Books of the Bible
- Battles of (name some war)
- Presidents
- Pets you've had
- Animals in general
- Indian tribes
- States
- State capitals
- Countries
In the end, I would recommend that you pick something that makes you happy and interests you. Something that makes you smile whenever it invites you to login. Past that, I can give no help. I dare not.
Can anyone else? Reply in the comments.
8 comments:
Do like the Indians, and name it after the first thing it saw when it was first powered on.
Aaron,
Given your experience just this morning, I guess that could be summed up as:
"Endless Reboots, Screen of Blue Death wants to see you in his teepee, pronto!"
God does not know what you should name your computer!
Jim,
Following your advice, I almost named the computer "Hailey" after Hailey, Idaho. Whenever I hear of the location I have to smile.
But then I thought of the first movie watched on the new 'puter with my daughter, "Prince and the Pauper" featuring Mickey Mouse and almost named it "Mickey."
Still working on it.
Jim,
To relieve the suspense - I've dubbed it "Racer X" after the cartoon character from Speed Racer.
It's a Dell XPS and the hard drive crashed - eRASing a lot of photos I now have to try and recover.
And it's not as fast as I thought it'd be, making the name ironic. Of course, in a few years its processor speed will be considered slow.
-Sam
Sam,
Sorry about your machine! I presume it's running Vista - that will be part of the issue (Vista is slow on anything less than high-end machines). Other things to look into is your anti-virus software - many of them cause your machine to really slow down. For Windows machines in our house and my Mom's I use ESET's NOD32, which basically resurrected my Mom's machine from a slow death by the anti-virus software we had on it before (both McAfee and then Norton) beating the machine to death.
Per losing your photos, I hope you didn't. If you are handy with a screwdriver and still have the old drive send me an email and I may be able to walk you through mounting the old drive as a secondary drive to see if you can get your data off. And in the future, use Flikr or Picasa to save really important stuff, as well as picking up an external USB drive and keeping stuff backed up on to it as well. Better safe than sorry!
But I like the computer name. :o)
Jim,
I'll have to try switching the antivirus. I feel like a hostage to Norton and Mac-us-fees.
Meanwhile, Racer X only has room for one hard drive so I'll have to figure out how to connect the other by USB or put it in my other computer and see if I can shake the photos out.
My mother asked me to put my tremendously large photo collection on Picasa and I didn't. Almost all of it was burned to CDs except for about 24 recently-taken photos - the best of which show up at my blog.
I back up everything somewhere. Learned that back when I took COBOL programming in 1980 with punch cards.
-Sam
Sam,
Good to hear you had most things backed up! That puts you ahead of 99% of most home computer users.
If I explained my backup system you'd think I was nuts. I may just anyway - it will make a good blog post for my technical blog.
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