Masterpiece Network

You know how computers on a particular network will commonly be part of a naming theme and the more popular themes are from the genres of fantasy or scifi. It's natural for geeks to be drawn to computers, so many times you'll see networks with machine names such as Gandalf, Frodo, Gollum or Worf, Picard, Geordi (wouldn't a machine named Data be confusing?). Well I'm proud to say that my home LAN is no exception to this.

First, some background. Our first apartment was in an edition that was itself a theme - famous French people. Each of the streets were named after the celebrities from that culture and we lived in a small two bedroom upstairs apartment on a street named Rue Renoir, so named after the famous impressionist artist. So we decided to name our first computer in that apartment after an artist to keep with the theme of our humble abode. You'd think we'd call it Renoir, but for some reason we went with the cubist Picasso. Picasso was a Pentium 2, 266 Mhz which retailed for $2000 - a great deal at the time. We moved later and picked up another computer. Even though we weren't living on Rue Renoir anymore, we stayed with the artist theme. Our second computer was Van Gogh, a Pentium 3, 450, cost $1300 - another fabulous deal at that time. We now had two computers so we had to get a router to connect them. We named the router after Van Gogh's good buddy Gaugan.

Many years later, it was time to upgrade one of the machines to keep up with the rapid evolution of technology. We chose to upgrade Van Gogh since it was the machine we used most and we gutted it by taking out just the motherboard (chip attached) and replaced it with an AMD Athalon 1800. I think I paid $300 for it. Keep in mind it was just the motherboard and chip. New motherboard/CPU meant a new identity (philosophically anyway) so we called that one Monet.

In my last post, I mentioned my newest purchase, a Celeron 2.0 Ghz laptop, $1000. For a computer of such small stature we picked the appropriate artist - Letrec. And wth Letrec, I needed to setup a wireless network to be able to use the laptop anywhere in the house. If you want a wireless network, you need a wireless router, so I had to replace Gaugan with a Linksys 802.11g standard WiFi router and we named that one Degas.

So Picasso is still hooked up although rarely used. Van Gogh is in the closet (who did he cut that ear off for then?), Monet runs full time and Letrec gets transported a lot. The active machines are able to talk to each other through Degas who just recently replaced Gaugan. Oh, and the printer is Da Vinci.

I almost have a baseball team. Want to know who's on first?