Machine Nomenclature

Geeks name their machines like sailors name their ships and gearheads name their cars. I’ve used Japanese words as names for my computers ever since I had machines that were mine to name. Despite knowing only a smidgen of Japanese, I have a fair bit of faith in the translated accuracy of the words I picked, as (like my Kanji tattoo) they came from respectable academic translation databases.

The Performa 575 I cut my computational teeth on shared my old handle of ‘tensai,’ which means ‘natural disaster’ but is also, to the best of my knowledge, the phonetic pronunciation of ‘prodigy/genius.’ My old brick of a ThinkPad was called ‘tenshi kuro,’ meaning ‘black angel.’ The OpenBSD server that once gave the world the now-defunct hyouden.net (and this very site for a time) was, in kind, ‘hyouden,’ meaning ‘field of infinite/endless snow.’ My last desktop was ‘tenshu,’ meaning ‘Lord of Heaven/God’ (that machine was fucking fast). The computer I mostly gave to my ex, which she later quite sensibly sold off in parts to fund an iBook, was called ‘okurimono,’ meaning ‘gift.’ I forget the names of the PowerBook G4 (something about metal) and Fujitsu I had briefly, but I assure you they were Japanese.

I’ve had my current and sole machine for nearly a year now and have never named it for no good reason. Today I decided to call it ‘koyuki,’ meaning ‘light snow.’ Being a 12" iBook as it is I think the name is pretty self-evident.