Our new project has been given the code name “Betazed”. You can distinguish the geeks from the non-geeks at work by whether or not they recognized the name*, or at least suspected what it might be. The non-geeks were the ones saying, “Be-tased? What is that?”
I personally would have been more impressed with a TOS reference, but the product manager is the right age to have had a thing for Deanna Troi.
I suppose it’s better than our last project name, which was “Medusa”. I’m not sure if the manager actually realized he was naming his project after a Gorgon, or if he just thought the name had a nice classical ring.
We’ve got the usual level of geekiness here. Prowl any corporation’s list of server names, and you’ll see what departments are into which movies or TV shows.
anakin, amidala, luke, obiwan - pretty obvious…too obvious
beejay, hawkeye, klinger, radar - MASH fans
malfoy, patronus, umbridge - what else but Harry Potter?
I’m a little worried about the group that has servers named:
dulles, ohare, skyharbor - airports they’ve been to?
At the biomedical manufacturing facility I work at some of our multi-million dollar equipment that was built on site have names rather than id numbers.
For example our chemical operations plasma chambers are named Homer, Lisa, Marge, Bart, Apu, Maggie, Smithers, Krusty, and Burns.
It threw me when I first started to hear a technician comment “We had a breakdown on Homer over the weekend.”
One group named their servers after Civil War battles, which was a pleasant change from Star Wars/Trek.
I once started naming everything after less-known Knights of the Round Table - Aglovale, Safir, Griflet, etc., but discovered that no one got it and they couldn’t pronounce many of them anyway.
Clever names when each lab has 300+ servers just doesn’t work, so we had to stop.
The problem with that is they can be difficult to remember how to spell on the commandline.
I once worked at a joint that had a habit of naming the servers in the web cluster after female Star Trek characters. We had deanna, yar, jadzia, kira, ezri, leeta, and bellana. I once made the mistake of pointing out that there was no consistency: servers were given either the family name or given name of the female Star Trek character at will. This precipitated a months-long debate about what to rename all the servers. :smack:
At the same place, we had three database servers named crosby, stills and nash. You don’t want to know what happened when it came time to add a fourth DB slave.
I knew I should be worried when I found out my previous employers had named the servers “Bugsy,” “Corleone” and “Scarface.” Yeah, it really just reinforced my opinion of them… :dubious:
I once worked at an IT company that wrote medical software. All of their servers and printers were named after alcohol (Whiskey, Vodka, Guiness, Kahlua, etc…).
Slightly off the current topic of server names - I can tell who is a geek in my office depending on how they react to my new mail notification. (it’s the Tardis)
Anyone who laughs is a geek, and therefore cool in my eyes.
Anyone who is confused, or asks “hey, what’s that?” is not a geek.
Quantum Leap, right? (At least Bingo Bango Bongo is)
When I started working where I am now all the printers where named after Crank Yankers characters. With stickers with their pictures. :dubious:
Now they’re all named after graphic design terms. I thought it was more professional.
At my workplace, servers tend to be named for their functions, or given a code like ‘ptis10’. Sigh.
At home, however…
I mane my computers after characters from The Aedena Cycle: stel, atana, grubert, etc. With the rise of virtual machines on my system (I now have VMWare), I’ll have a lot more possibilities to be named now.
Not necessarily. I was born a geek, but I didn’t know what a Tardis was until just a few years ago. Do you know what a Veritech is? Jenova? Wave Motion Gun? Tanooki Suit?
