What's In A Name?
My recent post was accompanied by a picture of the Lion and the Unicorn from Through the Looking Glass, flanking Alice holding a cake. This isn’t as random as it might seem. My new server is called unicorn (partly in a nod to Mythic Beast’s traditional branding), and the old server was called cake.
Those names aren’t random either; I follow the venerable sysadmin tradition of naming computers according to a theme. In fact, I have two schemes; one for my personal machines, and one for my work ones. See if you can guess what they are:
Personal: unicorn, cake, cheshire, dodo, tweedle, redqueen, hatter…
Work: gnoll, carrion, kobold, bugbear, owlbear, hobgoblin…
The first is probably pretty obvious, but the latter less so (it’s very specific). As an extra point of clarification, my current personal laptop is called gryphon, and that’s not ambiguous.
Answer:
The personal machine are characters from Alice's Adventure's Underground and Through the Looking Glass, as befits this the theme of this post. The work ones are a bit more subtle; they're Dungeons and Dragons monsters, but specifically from the 1983 Basic Set (which includes the classic dungeon-dwelling monsters like Carrion Crawlers). "Gryphon", being an outdoor creature, doesn't appear until the Expert Set, and so doesn't clash with the Alice character.