No name (2)

April 6, 2011

Nameinanimateobject_tweak

I am not a person who goes around naming my objects. I have several friends who name their cars, and I just don’t get it. It’s a car. I suppose I can understand naming ships and trains and planes. They’re big. They have routes. They go places—across the country, across the ocean, to another continent. A car goes to the grocery store. 

And if I were a guy, I certainly wouldn’t name my, you know.

What I do name are my computer hard drives. When I first started thinking about this this evening, I assumed it was because “Macintosh HD” is so non-descriptive that you’d get confused if you didn’t name it something else. But that’s really not true, at least for home use, even if you have more than one computer, such as I do. I’m not going to be too confused by seeing two “Macintosh HD”s on the network. One is the computer I’m using, the other isn’t.

So it turns out that I give in to a little bit of frivolity on this front after all. It is, I must admit, a little more entertaining to see the name of your hippity hoppity bunny rabbit. I name my hard drives after my pets.

My rabbits have gotten the hard drives, the cats have gotten the peripherals. The “turnover,” if you will, in both departments has been compatible. So, let’s see if I can remember what they’ve all been.

Nameinanimateobject_blog

Macintosh Performa 631CD: Hazel (rabbit)

UMAX Macintosh clone: This was probably also Hazel, as he lived for 10 years. This was a great machine.

40 gig external hard-drive: Hilda (rabbit #2)

Sony Memory Sticks for digital camera: Dhia, Yul (1st, 2nd cats)

iPod 3rd gen: Daisy (shortlived 3rd rabbit). This is still a hard-drive iPod, not one of the newer flash drives, so it counted for getting a name.

Apple G4 dual 867MHz: Robbin (5th and current rabbit). This computer is a tank, and if the Mac OS hadn’t left it in the dust, I’d still be using it.

Extra internal HD in the G4: Belle (shortlived 4th rabbit, posthumously named, because this was the one case where sweeties and hard drives got out of sync), used for music storage

(Wow, did I go from the UMAX to the G4? Holy crap, I did. It seems so long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.)

G4 iBook (2004, still in use, I’m writing on it AS WE SPEAK): ROBBINBOOK. iBook 2004, Robbin Rabbit 2003.

Mac Mini dual Intel whatever: ROBBINmini.  Mini 2010, Robbin Rabbit 2003.

External hard drives used with ROBBINmini: Dasie (1), CJ (3rd and 4th, current, cats). Dasie gets the music, because she’s crazy and fun-loving and crazy. CJ gets the one that’s for back-up, because she’s more no-nonsense.

 

Endnotes 

1. Yes, there have been two Daisys. Daisy the rabbit only lived for half a year due to defective genetics, probably due to purebred inbreeding issues. When Dasie the cat came to me, I knew I couldn’t keep her shelter name of Sadie. I thought Daisy was a fun name, so when I realized that I could anagram Sadie into Dasie, it was a no-brainer. It still sounded the same, but was a different spelling as well as a non-traditional spelling. And it totally fits her personality, just as Daisy had fit the rabbit’s. She was a devoted, little ray of sunshine.

2. When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who love Kurt Vonnegut. He also said that he, in his own youth, had had a friend with an unusual name, Noname. When he wondered to her about its origin, she said that when her birth certificate was being filled out, her parents had not yet decided on a name, so the certificate was filled in with “No name.” It apparently stuck and she went through life known as Noname (no-NAH-mee). Weirdly, that story has always stuck with me (obviously) and every time I hear about “no name,” even if it’s just the box of steaks, I think of this woman to whom I have zero connection.

March 27, 2011

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