i prefer pi

There was a post on the Seattlest blog yesterday asking about the most common names for conference rooms in the Seattle area. They supposed that “Rainier” would be most likely, which was also the one that Laura guessed first, and due to my extremely limited sampling of local businesses (I’m talking n = 1 here), Rainier is pretty common, along with “Colombia” and “Olympic”. People chime in with their own in the comments, where bridges and trees and former Seattle leaders abound.

I tried coming up with a naming convention for my conference spaces, but my roommates insisted on calling them “bedroom” and “kitchen table”, so I gave up on that and settled for naming my computer hardware instead: my PCs have been named ARATHORN and ARAGORN. My 80GB hard drive (so huge five years ago!) was Earendil, so my twin 300GB drives are now Elrond and Elros. My intrepid iPod, a faithful companion through many journeys, is Samwise, and an external backup drive, a golden and fair and far haven to which old and weary data retires eternally, was recently christened Valinor.

In the student programs office at A&M, at one point, there were a handful of lab machines were named after dwarfs and a central server named “Snow White”, but then “Sneezy” and “Doc” died and they added a lot of new machines and started using planets from Star Wars, which resulted in some odd conversations:

“Did you save the poster files in the lab?”

“Yeah, I think that I put them on DOPEY, but it could have been TATOOINE also.”

“Alright, I’m going to move them to CORUSCANT, along with the flyer docs from WHEEZY.”

“Great. Be sure that you print them to XWING and not TIEFIGHTER, because we don’t want to pay for color copies again.”

In order to avoid copyright restrictions and limited name selection (I’m guessing?), Microsoft have used islands and lighthouses (Visual Studio), elements (Exchange Server), shiny things (Expression Suite), and inscrutable acronyms (my favorite ;)). How do you name things?

I listened to an audio session by D.A. Carson a while ago (”The Supremacy of Christ and Love in a Postmodern World“), and I thought that he reminded me of someone, but I just couldn’t put my finger on whom.  Then I realized that it was Weyoun from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  He came to mind recently when I started looking for a commentary survey, and thus began the rabbit trail:

1. Weyoun
2. Jeffrey Combs
3. List of premature obituaries (The CNN.com Incident)
4. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (”The Queen Mother”)
5. Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
6. Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II
7. All You Need is Love
8. The Rutles

Interruption: good grief, I have to get back to work.

Laura and I and Matt and Lisa went to go see a friend in a performance of The Sound of Music on Sunday.  As we got up to the door, I noticed a guy off to the side who looked really familiar, so I turned to Laura and said “That guy by the door looks like someone that I went to high school with”.  She looked surprised and said “That guy by the door looks like someone that I went to college with.”  It turned out to be one Cliff Nordman, my Computer Science classmate in high school and Laura’s Computer Science classmate at UTD, who also happened to be the cousin of Rachelle Nordman, our friend who was in the play.

It’s a small world, after all.