The Desktop Fishbowl
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Thursday, 3 October 2002

My two most common typos when writing HTML by hand are trying to close <acronym> tags with </a>, and more embarrassingly, mistyping <cite> as <cute>. 5:17:22 PM

Quoth Mike In the office all our machines are named after Muppets (Gonzo, Scooter, Beaker, Bunsen, Cookie, Grover etc), our servers are all named after Greek gods (Zeus, Bacchus - son of Zeus etc). At my university, the servers were all named after composers (Mozart, Liszt, Handel etc). What wacky naming schemes do you have? Let's see. My personal machines are named after states of religious enlightenment, because I started running them back at Uni halfway through an Eastern Philosophy course. The desktops are satori, nirvana and gnosis, while the laptop is epiphany. That last one is a very obscure religious joke that nobody has ever managed to get without an explanation. At the ISP I used to work for, all the servers were named after casino- or card-games (hearts, craps, lotto, keno, baccarat, poker...) Late in my employment there, we started running out of names, so one of the Cisco RAS boxen got stuck with the name ‘genting-wheel’. One morning at that job I got a phonecall from my brother, who is a journalist for the West Australian newspaper. Apparently, the ISP across the road (to whom we supplied all their bandwidth by running an ethernet cable under the street, and who were constantly getting us on the MAPS RBL by hosting spammers) had been hosting an illegal online casino. Because our nameservers were called “keno” and blackjack, we had to spend a lot of time explaining that no, we weren't involved. When I moved across in the ISP to do web conslutting, I got to name the servers, and I chose to name them after characters from Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy This was done purely for the amusement value of having a host named “Slartibartfast”. At my current employer, all our boxen are named after heavenly bodies—generally stars, planets or constellations. However, I maintain that calling my next box “Sarah-Michelle Gellar” would fit perfectly into the naming-scheme. 5:06:23 PM

Blondes ‘to die out in 200 years’. Get one while you still can! 2:52:56 PM