Internet Woes

[ellenkushner]

Thanks to the Kindness of Friends (one on Skype, one AIM, both exceedingly patient with a technodork like me), I have just reconfigured all our wireless doo-hickeys. I named the Base Station Fiorinda, but then I had the brilliant idea of naming the, um, other thing - the Network, that's it! - The Golux (and not a Mere Device).

Now I'm sorry that I didn't name the Base Station Saralinda (or even Zorn of Zorna) instead. . . Oh, well! My communication system as the Love Child of Thurber & Eddison?

Bound to happen someday.

Comments

[catwithclaws.livejournal.com]

Naming them is a wonderful power, until you find yourself with bird names on every SD disk (sparrow, wren, redwing, nightbird, orange canary, magpie, etc) and cannot keep it straight. Then different components of my network are based off of my primary moniker (catspaw), so I've CatNet with KittyNet as the airport express extender, Catspaw as the primary printer (paw, print, get it?? sigh), CatsTail as the smaller cheap printer, and Faithful as the shared network drive.

Alas, when things break at 1am I start to get lost and forget what I named what. Sudden bouts of uncreativity hit and tempt me into nice normal and sensical names.

Then I reacall the sheer JOY of renaming my hard drive 'Hannibal' after it quite literally ate itself my Freshman year in College. I haven't looked back since.

(current harddrives: Andromeda, le dragon, Neverwhere, Athena, and others I'm forgetting, I just know it). Let's not even get into the ipod names....

[darklingwoods.livejournal.com]

I love it! I named my new Epson printer Grendel due to the fact he's so huge he pretty much ate my studio desk.

My 12 year old and I were painting her room last week and I taught her how to remover the wall plates off the sockets. When we were finished she wanted to know if she could put the plates back on the "Docking Stations" I laughed to myself and then wondered if this is what the new generation is calling outlets?

And my hats off to you for figuring out your wireless stuff!

Cat

[saralinda.livejournal.com]

Thurber would be pleased (I think) :D

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

Main computer is Fafnir, laptop is Wanderer. The two external hard disks are Hugin and Mumin.

Is my Wagner showing?

S&S Letter Part I

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

. . . and you lost me at "SD disk." But no matter: wiser heads than mine have contributed to the discussion, as you shall see. And I do appreciate 'Hannibal' . . .

FULL DISCLOSURE: The following letter is about the re-run of a radio show we (Kate Borger, her husband Jeff Ritter & I) wrote nearly 10 years ago - the STUFF (http://www.wgbh.org/pages/pri/spirit/listen.html) episode of Sound & Spirit - but it's so great, we re-ran it on Sound & Spirit (http://www.wgbh.org/pages/pri/spirit/) last month . . . . It's a great show (listen online (http://www.wgbh.org/pages/pri/spirit/listen.html)), got some great letters - but one eagle-eared listener pointed out a comment I made that struck him as false, even for an elderly rerun....

Dear Ms. Kushner,

While enjoying your program about "stuff" this morning, I was astonished
to hear you say that "nobody names their computer." Prior to Internet
commercialization in the early 1990's, nearly every computer had a very
meaningful name.

Computers started being given names, out of necessity, when the first two
computers were joined to form the ARPAnet in 1968.(*) The early names
were extremely functional, e.g. "CMUA" for Carnegie Mellon University's
first machine on the network. But in the 1970's and 80's, as the number
of computers on the network grew into triple digits and beyond, there was
a great flowering of whimsical naming schemes that a generation of
engineers will remember to our graves.

I could probably fill a book with examples of whimsical but personally
meaningful computer names, but I'll offer just one story from my own
career by way of example.

One of the early relays on USENET, the first distributed newsgroup
mechanism, was a machine at ATT/Bellcore called "thumper." Bellcore's
research lab at that time was naming machines after Disney cartoon
characters, and sister machines included "faline." When domain names were
introduced in the early 80's, this became thumper.bellcore.com.

For several years, I worked at Bellcore and my email address was
@thumper.bellcore.com. Then, when I got the entrepreneurial bug and was
setting up a new research lab, we took a vote and decided to name all our
machines after famous historical computers. I naturally named my own
machine thumper, in tribute to the well-known Bellcore machine. (Our one
non-computer-geek named hers HAL, after the computer in 2001; at least she
was a science fiction geek.**)

The story doesn't end there. With a wife and four daughters at home, I
quickly became the first one on the block (actually the county) with a
network in my home, and I needed a naming scheme for our home computers.
I decreed (as both father and network administrator, I was as close to
Zeus in that moment as I will ever be) that all of our computers would be
named after famous rabbits of literature. Voila, my home machine was
still named thumper, and our house quickly filled up with references to
one of my all-time favorite novels, Watership Down. Naturally, my
then-goth daughter quickly introduced me to Bunnicula.

I suspect that computers aren't often named nowadays because they've
become such fleeting commodities. If you buy a new laptop, you expect --
nay, you hope -- to be tossing it in the trash in 2 or 3 years for
something better. You can't afford to get too emotionally attached to the
hardware, but people still invest tremendous emotion in naming more
enduring artifacts such as domains, web sites, and blogs. But by the time
you get to your 27th laptop, it's hard to think of it as anything but
laptop #27.

Anyway, I've been an admirer since your first show, and am delighted to
have finally been inspired to write. Thank you for being part of my
Sunday mornings for all these years.

Yours truly,
Nathaniel Borenstein
http://guppylake.com/nsb

S&S Letter, Part 2

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

(SORRY - I DID TRY TO DO AN LJ CUT ON THE PREVIOUS POST, BUT THEY WEREN'T HAVING ANY.)



*That two-computer network has grown steadily, without interruption, into
today's Internet. From both a scientific and a spiritual perspective, I
have come to consider the net to be a form of life, an ant-like collective
consciousness built of smarter ants. You might be surprised how many
computer scientists share similar thoughts.

** HAL itself is another example of how computer names have always been a
playful but serious topic. Advance each of the three letters in its name
and you can see that HAL was Arthur C. Clarke's tip of the hat to the
dominant company of the era, my current employer.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

A bit - but it's very becoming.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Well, thanks!

(Love the "docking stations" - shades of 2001!

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

I told my tale to tech support, but tech support weeps no more.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

!!!

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Once they wept when nodes went live, beneath the August moon.
Now they weep not when routers die, even in the month of June.
They have no tears.