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Ernst's machine naming convention:

My two Alphaservers, Nigel and David (that's Nigel in the background above, partially blocking the lovely view of the brick wall of the building across from my former office at Case Western Reserve University in the late 90s), are named after a pair of obscure characters in the movie This is Spin"al Tap. Nigel has a CPU load map that goes to eleven, which is "one faster" than most other computers, isn't it? The naming convention for all my Alphas, (as well as links to many other sites of interest) is below.

Nigel		David
(a 200 MHz Alpha ev4)		(a 400 MHz Alpha ev5)
...is like ice...		...is like fire...
	Derek
	(if anyone has a 300 MHz Alpha ev4.5 for sale, I'm all ears)
	...is like lukewarm water in the middle.

Of course one quickly runs out of names if one limits oneself to the main members of the band. But one need not despair, since one can then choose from a nearly inexhaustible supply of drummers, most of whom are now deceased, i.e. have no domain names to infringe. So, all the slower-but-still-useable Alphas (and perhaps a few Pentia - I won't tell if you don't) which I accumulate during my lifetime will be peacefully turned out to pasture in that fashion. To paraphrase a Tap song (famous for its delicate sexual innuendo), "Workin' on a DEC farm/Tryin' to run some hard code/Gettin' out my voltmeter/Pokin' your port..."

UPDATE: 20 Feb 2005 The older 21064-based server, Nigel, was officially dismantled and sold off for medical experiments, erm, I mean parts, in February 2005 - I expect David is not long for this world (or at least my home-office part of it) either.