When I worked at Mindspring, way back in the day, the web hosting servers were named after Roman emperors. My website was hosted on nero, though I wanted them to move me to caligula just for the “geek cred” factor.

Some people I know name their systems after Star Trek/Navy ships (enterprise, arizona, etc), others use cartoon characters (notably using Simpsons or Futurama references), while others name theirs after planets, Greek gods and goddesses, or other things like flowers, animals and what have you.

I personally have taken a different tactic. I name mine after more…ephemeral…subject matter. My workstation at the office is named serenity, while my laptop is named virtue, and the server this site is hosted on is named epiphany. The new box is named inspiration and the Mac Mini I previously mentioned is named creativity. The “workgroup” all of my machines are attached to is named “ephemera”, though I’m trying to think of something better.

My question is… what do YOU name your machines, and how did you come up with your schema, if any?

I did, however, purchase a new Mac Mini last week, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. The next project is to find my WoW cds and install the game on it, so I can see how well it plays (if at all) — I realize that with the Intel GMA950 graphics it probably won’t play well at 1920×1200 full screen, but maybe 1440×768 windowed will be okay, allowing me to keep various browser/chat clients open and actually pay attention.

Using both it and my desktop nearly simultaneously has proved…amusing. Since the mini lacks legacy keyboard/mouse support (no ps2 ports to be found), I had to find a new KVM, and MicroCenter only had VGA/USB KVMs, and I’ve found that the signal degradation of the VGA system is too much to bear. I’ve ordered a new DVI/USB KVM, that has the added bonus of supporting both speakers and a microphone, so I can happily jam to my music or chat on TS/Ventrilo on either machine.

Ron Paul is a silver tongued maniac.

He talks very well. He says a lot of things that a lot of people want to believe. He says he’ll do things that sound great, but they are things that the President does not have the power to do without a supportive Congress. He’s running a really good scam on his supporters, and for that I commend him, but he doesn’t have a real chance at President.

From his membership in StormFront, to his sexism/racism, to his outright “Libertarian Crazy”, he’s just bad news. Please god, do deeper digging than his PR people would have you do.

I got a Zune. What’s that I hear? Clamoring of “oh my god, you bought a Microsoft product? Are you crazy?” — Well… yes. However, hear me out…

I played around with one of the first generation Zunes when they came out in a store, and immediately dismissed the user interface. However, after buying an iPod and only having the scroll wheel and one button for an interface, I came to rethink that decision. It’s not an easy interface to navigate in the car (my car has an aux-input jack for media players), nor is it forgiving of “fat finger syndrome”, which affects me because I have “huge monkey hands” according to my friends.

So, at Circuit City this week, I played around with a second generation Zune, and was impressed by the UI changes, and the button sensitivity. Also, it has two dedicated buttons, one for “Play/Pause” and the other for “Back” — the four direction rocker button is also touch sensitive and is a “click ok”, but it’s more forgiving of fat fingers. Not to mention that the Song/Artist/Album/Genre browser is… well, not so much better, as it is more intuitive than the iPod. There’s no need to keep hitting “Menu” to go back, since it’s all part of the main “Music” menu.

My current gripes about the Zune are that there’s no equalizer, and that it’s not viewable or usable on anything other than Windows. Other than that, it’s a much better player than the iPod.

First, news about the Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Update has hit Joystiq, and all of you Tversity and Winamp Remote users rejoice, for Mpeg4 Part 2 (aka: DivX and Xvid) will be supported natively! Hurray for not having to sacrifice CPU cycles on the desktop for transcoding to WMV7/8/9 for video playback on the xbox 360.

Second, I purchased a new monitor. More specifically, I bought Samsung SyncMaster 245BW 24″ LCD Monitor. It’s a very, very nice monitor. Running at 1920×1200 gives me a decadent amount of screen real estate, and World of Warcraft looks absolutely stunning. It’s even let me clean up my interface a bit more. Granted, finding 1920×1200 wallpaper isn’t exactly the easiest of tasks, but after resubscribing to Digital Blasphemy for a year, that need is taken care of. However, I now remember one of the reasons I prefer D-Sub/VGA over DVI for most things, and that’s the complete lack of an “auto adjust” feature over DVI. I’m having to hand calibrate the brightness/contrast settings, and I haven’t quite gotten them down pat yet.

More to come later when the work day slows down a bit.