Nix Bits

So last week we finally purchased ourselves a new laptop, an Acer Extensa 4420. We’d been putting it off for a while limping along with an old Dell Inspiron 8100 with a failing hard drive. That laptop had been pushing 5 years old. It was actually in our old house after Katrina and managed to survive though I did have to replace the hard drive. You couldn’t move it around much as the original power supply drowned.

So we scooped it up. There’s a lot of bang for the buck with this thing. I spent the last several days immediately wiping Vista off the drive for ubuntu. Everything works pretty well, from 3-D graphics to the built-in webcam.

Well of course there was the challenge of naming the thing. I have long named machines after 80s-90s era SST bands and their albums. Machines I or my employers have owned have had names such as: zenarcade, blackflag, daydreamnation, and my firewall, minutemen. I’ve been naming unix boxes this way since 2000.

But what to name this machine, our first since Katrina? Everything is measured in pre-K and post-K terms so when I asked my wife, that is what she immediately thought about. “postdiluvian” was my first response, breaking with the previous naming convention. But then I wouldn’t really have a new theme going forward.

But I finally hit upon it, “New Day Rising“, after Husker Du’s 1985 classic. A bit of old with the new.