Naming scheme for computers

I’ve decided on a naming scheme for my computers for the immediate future: monstrous and highly dangerous women.

My Macbook Pro which was recently stolen (more on that later) was named Sveethot, which is “Sweetheart” when spoken with a thick German accent, as the Jägermonsters do in Girl Genius. I imagined Sveethot as a female Jägermonster, which implies a predilection for hand-to-hand combat and a great deal of raw “processing power”, where by processing I mean the ability to dice you up into little pieces and serve you for dinner.

I am currently borrowing an IBM Thinkpad laptop from Prerna (whom I cannot thank enough for her generosity), and after backing up her data I wiped it and installed Ubuntu on it. A newly installed computer needs a name, and I decided on Terminatrix. This is in part a homage to my old old Dell desktop, which had a model number beginning with a “T”, something like a T-1000. This also reveals that I am really interested in seeing Summer Glau in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and in seeing Terminator:Salvation, even though I expect to be rather disappointed by both of them. Surely thinking of Summer Glau and deadly robots when I look at my laptop can’t be a bad thing! Terminatrix brings to mind a machine that keeps going and going despite whatever punishment you might deal out to it, and I hope that this laptop will be similarly indestructible so that it will always continue to work when Prerna (or her friends) need it.

Really I just like the combination of attraction and fear that these names imply. I love computers, but they are fickle creatures that can arbitrarily destroy you whenever they feel like it. Treat them with the respect they deserve.

I’m an entrepreneur now!

I have received funding to build a startup this summer with my friends Asheesh Laroia and Raphael Krut-Landau, who I know from our work together with Students for Free Culture. The funding is from [UPDATE: whoops our funder is currently secret, can’t tell the internet who it is yet].

We will be moving to Atlanta for the summer as part of their startup accelerator program starting May 18th, so if you are in Atlanta or know people there, please drop me a line, and maybe we can hang out 🙂

The startup will be closely related to free culture issues, specifically free / open source software. I don’t want to say too much publicly about the startup until our company is ready for the attention and makes some official announcements, but if you want to know more feel free to contact me privately and I can tell you about it. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: OK, you know what, for my loyal readers I’ll drop another hint. The startup is loosely based on this idea I posted about a few years ago, although it has evolved a lot since then. Once again, talk to me privately for more details.