cat /proc/claus

Today I was supposed to write a Post about having installed Ubuntu in my academic laptop - but it so happens that I can remember exactly its model number, and the post would be quite useless without mentioning the model of the little computer So I’ll have to leave the ubuntu post to a later occasion - hopefully still this week.

Instead, I’ll discuss a somewhat more “philosophical” subject - naming computers.

To tell the truth, I have never meaningfully named my computers before. I had this “rule”, where I would name my computers after female friends of mine. I don’t remember exactly when I decided that. Maybe it was when I received “my” first laptop from my mother, near the end of my undergrad carrier - since it was my first mobile computer, it made no sense to name it in a similar fashion to the other computer in the networks they belonged (like the the computers in my student house, which were all named after Lego sets).

So, why female friends? There is no deep reasoning for that, to tell the truth. It was nice naming my computer after females, but I didn’t feel like using personalities, or any particular fictional characters. Since I was moving to Japan at the time, using the names of my friends felt like a tribute to my past life - I would remember them while working/studying/etc. But this is retconning my reason - It was a spurn of the moment kind of decision, and I just stuck to it for lack of anything better.

Until this week, when I had the chance to name two computers of mine, which systems I had re-installed (more on that on another post). This time, I had just finished reading the Chobits manga series. Removing the sugary plot and the Dragonball Z moments, that comic invites you to a few reflections - like the nature of the relationships between people and machines.

In Chobits, Persocons were part of the daily life of most people, just like PCs are becoming today. Among the major and minor characters, we had those who hated Persocons, those who treated them like people - depending on them, or loving them, those who saw them as entertaining machines, those who saw them as working tools, those who saw them as sex toys, etc, etc, etc.

From that, I started thinking: How do _I_ see PCs?

After thinking for a small while, I came to the conclusions that I see PCs as PLACES. When I use a computer, I don’t feel like I’m using an object, as much as I’m using some toy (program), inside a big room (computer) - Each of the computers I interact day to day have their own quirks and feel, but not like a particular object, or like a “person” (person, pet, animal, character, etc) - but like a living space, like a room, apartment, office, house, etc.

Thus I decided to change my naming convention for computers I own - Instead of people’s name, I decided to use names of fictional places from books/movies I read/saw.

If you took the time to read up to here, why don’t you contribute with your personal method for naming computers? And for those scowling me with “why would I name a computer?”, remember that even if you don’t think about giving computers a particular name, you still need to name them when you put them up on a network - and having a system to name them makes things easier if you want to assemble a network with more than one computer.

See you!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Filosofando, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.