When two computers were in this house I wanted to give meaningful names to them, in anticipation for when there would be a lot on the network and they would all need unique names.
Obligatory Cliché
First I started off with Lord of the Rings. This was about a year before the first movie came out and I had just read all the books, so that was pretty much all I thought about for a few months. If it wasn’t for LotR lore, I would have ended up using ancient Greek gods or some other cliché popular with young teenage geeks. Gandalf was the more powerful one (1.2GHz P4 I think), and Frodo the 350MHz thing.
Breaking the pattern (Does 2 even make a pattern?)
The first machine I made I called Frank. This was short for “Frankenstein’s Monster”, since I had put it together myself from parts bought from places all over the net and all over Limerick. That meant that the LotR naming scheme had gone out the window (or off the Bridge of Khazad Dum, rather).
Japanese, of course
When I started getting Macs I wanted to start using Japanese names. I named the iMac G5 Nozomi, after a female character from a favourite game of mine: Shenmue. However, I couldn’t think of name appropriate for a machine when I got the white MacBook, so I just called it “Nanashi”, which means “no-name”.
Another scheme breakdown
Last year I built a PC and named it Honeybee, just because I really liked the name. It’s a far too cute for a big black powerful Windows box, and I thought it was funny to give it a name like that.
Revisiting Japanese
Quickly I came up with a new scheme for the next machine: Japanese onomatopoeic vocabulary. After just about getting a PC to work after many failed install attempts, I called it “girigiri” which means “just about”. In this case, the install had worked, but just about.
Slightly adjusting this, I decided to use Japanese “bikkuri” words. These are a set of words (mostly adverbs but plenty of verbs) which all rhyme. I called one PC “gakkari”, meaning disappointment. Next one was “yukkuri”, meaning slowly.
Delicious naming
And most recently? My MacBook Pro is called Loco Moco. This is a Hawaiian dish that’s popular in Japan. It’s rice, a burger patty, and a friend egg, in that order, from bottom up, in a bowl. The virtual machines are named Tamago (Windows XP.. “egg”) and Burger (Ubunutu). My iPhone is named Shoyu (“soy-sauce”), a popular Japanese condiment. I figured it didn’t really deserve another full dish name or ingredient, but being a portable device can be given a condiment name. Just waiting for a pair of devices to call Salt and Pepper 
What’s in a name?
I don’t ever anticipate having a meaningful scheme across all my machines. The problem is that I keep getting machines a year or two apart, and I always have a different set of interests by the time I need to think of a new name. I also get bored of my great ideas very quickly. What seems like the best idea I’ve ever had one day will seem really stupid in a week’s time, once I’ve had time to think about it enough. Where’s the fun if you can remember the names of all the machines in the house anyway? To be honest I usually just end up finding which machine is which with nmap -v -sP.
