(This is a repost from the GranularIT Blog.)
I couldn’t stand it no more.
After my latest timelapse experiment (a frame every minute for three days; over 3 GB of photos), not to mention mucking around with stop-motion, I decided to bite the bullet and get myself a non-laptop based storage system.
In the end I went for two Seagate 2 TB drives, sitting on their own surge-protection board, with a cute little 4-gang USB hub into which I could also plug my SD card reader (and still have a slot free for the USB cable to my camera).
The full Monty was mine for under 250 quid, thanks to an offer at Maplin’s (and that included a Cat6 patch cable. Geeks give the strangest Valentine’s presents). One drive to dump all of the camera files, and the other to back it up.
The naming of parts
But then I had a problem. As any geek will tell you, one of the most important things to get right with new kit is naming it. What should I call my new drives? What convention should I follow?
Given that one was to be the primary and the other a backup, I thought something like ‘Batman and Robin’ would be appropriate. That wasn’t doing it for me, really, so-because I’m a biology geek, first and foremost-I toyed with the idea of something like 5′ and 3′ (“five prime” and “three prime”), followed by ‘GEF’ and ‘GAP’, and then ‘Rac’ and ‘Rho’. ‘DNA’ and ‘RNA’ didn’t sound quite right, but I did think ‘coding’ and ‘complementary’, ‘sense’ and ‘antisense’, and then ‘Crick’ and ‘Watson’.
Then again, if I were to nod to Crick and Watson, then why not ‘Crowfoot‘ and ‘Franklin‘? Or perhaps ‘Rosalind’ and ‘Dorothy’?
It wasn’t until then that I remembered that I already had a naming convention: my laptop’s drive is ‘Guinevere’, my Time Capsule is ‘Galahad’, and my printer is ‘Gawain’ (which all started back in Sydney when I had the only Mac in the lab-it was white, and therefore had to be ‘Gandalf’). Steering away from the ambiguity of ‘Lancelot’, I first considered ‘Arthur’ and ‘Merlin’, but finally it hit.
Merlin and Morgana.
Magic.
Cute. We (predictably) have dual mirrored webservers here called Watson and Crick, and two newer ones that are Franklin and Wilkins.
Previous ones (now long retired) were DaVinci and Illuminati. Disclaimer: that was long before my time.
Another researcher had a (Mac-rack) server called LunaticFringe. Named for his favourite Drosophila protein I believe.
The Mac Minis are Galileo and Copernicus. The lappy is Voyager. The wireless access point is Andromeda, and the printer is Orion. The decommissioned kit in reverse order was Cassini, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab. This is where the manned space programme ran out of names and became deep space probes … and astronomers, and finally some constellations.
oh.. I realise that I’m not as geeky as I thought (just childish).
Have done nicknames for my drives and storage units. (‘lillan’ [‘littleone’] and “storan’ [bigone] among other things, the others’ are too childish or practical to reveal 😉 )
My MacBook is called MacTavish and my iPhone is called iPhone the Terrible, but nothing else has a name. My Time Capsule is imaginatively called “Cath Ennis’s Time Capsule”, and even my WiFi network has a boring name. I didn’t realise I was doing it wrong – I suddenly feel so inadequate.
p.s. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1467
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1468
& http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1469
🙂
So far we have Chainsaw, Skilly and Sprocket (our cats at various times). Then there is rat, beast and (for reasons unknown except to the teenager that owns it) bukkit. I like your names as I’ve always had a soft spot for King Arthur and Morgana took my name as her human aspect. Or I was given her name 🙂
Go figure 🙂
viv in nz
Ha ha. Brilliant.
Somebody I know has disks and Macs called Whitey and Blacky—no prizes for guessing why…
I am reminded by those PhD Comics that:
1. Someone named our various sequencers with Disney character names (Mickey, Goofy, Pluto, etc.) – which is fine I guess, except they were labeled with signs clearly visible from the adjacent public hallway. Not Good, especially when Terribly Serious Funders come to visit. The signs are now gone, but the naming convention remains AFAIK.
2. In a similar vein, our rack of PCR cyclers were dwarves (at least some of them): Goofy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Doc, etc. I took a video crew through the lab yesterday, telling them this, and then discovered when we reached that rack that they’d all been re-named as members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Puzzling, but definitely more full of street cred.
3. None of my own electronics are named, although our home Wi-Fi is called “Thrud” (long story).
Oops, “Goofy” wasn’t one of the seven dwarves was he?
Wait, wait: six out of seven dwarfs aren’t Happy.
What about the ones that didn’t make the cut? You know: Itchy, Smelly, Barfy, Lumpy, Skanky, and Noxious.