The Rule of Names

This is an entirely silly post about the way I name the machines in my house, shared for the amusement of my regulars.

The house naming theme is “comic mythical beasts”.

My personal desktop machine is always named “snark”, after Louis Carroll’s “Hunting of the”. This has been so since long before adj. “snarky” and vi. “to snark” entered popular English around the turn of the millennium. I do not find the new layer of meaning inappropriate.

Currently snark is perhaps better known as the Great Beast of Malvern, but whereas “snark” describes its role, “Beast” refers to the exceptional capabilities of this particular machine.

One former snark had two Ethernet ports. Its alias through the second IP address was, of course, “boojum”.

My laptop is always “golux”, from James Thurber’s The Big O.

The bastion host (mail and DNS server) is always “grelber”, after the insult-spewing Grelber from the Broom Hilda comic strip. It’s named not for the insults but because Grelber is depicted as a lurking presence inside a hollow log with a mailbox on the top.

Cathy’s personal desktop machine is always “minx” after a pretty golden-furred creature from Infocom’s classic Zork games, known for its ability to sniff out buried chocolate truffles.

The router is “quintaped”, a five-legged creature supposed to live on a magically concealed island in the Potterverse. Because it has 5 ports, you see.

For years we had a toilet-seat Mac (iBook) I’d been given as a gift (it’s long dead now). We used it as a gaming machine (mainly “Civilization II” and “Spaceward Ho”). It was “billywig”, also from the Potterverse.

I have recently acquired 3 Raspberry Pis (more about this in a future post). The only one of them now in use is currently named “whoville”, but that is likely to change as I have just decided the sub-namespace for Pis will be Dr. Seuss creatures – lorax, sneetch, zax, grinch, etc.

That is all.