Comments on: I'm getting an iPhone! And celebrating with a contest!

By: annathepiper

annathepiper — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:11:34 +0000

Hey there Denelian, thanks for chiming in all these suggestions, wow.

I’ll go ahead and take them all, although re: whether a name out of Faerie Blood would be appropriate, sure. However, I’m going to take the liberty to give that to kisanthe over on LJ because she already called dibs on Kendis, the heroine of Faerie Blood, and you’ve got a bunch of other options here!

By: denelian

denelian — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:01:53 +0000

not related to you fandoms per se (maybe?) but being that i am still a total Heinlein fan, and you are getting what is, in essence, another miniature computer…
there are a few options. if you think the phone is gendered male and it involves *very* immature humor, i would totally go with Mycroft (Mike) after the computer in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
if you think it may be gendered female, and you think it is very helpful and not annoying, i suggest Minerva (Time Enough For Love is the first book – after that, she gets a human body…)
If you think it may be gendered female, and it is somehow snarky and sarcastic and laughs at you because you don’t know as much as it does – i say Athena, also first seen in Time Enough For Love, and still a computer as of RAH’s death, although she had plans (that involved Mycroft and a laaaaaaaaaaaarge orgy)
if you think it is gender-neutral, and it contains some combination of the above (sometimes helpful, sometimes laughs at you), then for some reason the “successor” computer to Athena/Mycroft was named Shiva.
If you think it may be gendered female, and you use it for GPS and/or lots of math things, then Dora! *also* from Time Enough For Love,

wow… Heinlein really liked his AIs that were real people…

also: if it is more of a PDA type thing (like, a phone+PDA, which is what my phone is) i recommend Friday. for lost of reasons, not the least of which is the RAH book of the same name, plus the movie named (i think? been too long) His Girl Friday about a woman who was the *best* at her job, but was getting married so was having to quit, but couldn’t *quite* bring herself to quit, because she was SO GOOD AT HER JOB. it is obviously a very old movie lol.

hrm… music wise… it being a phone, it may interupt you – stacata (not that i am spelling that correctly). i like the word Sonata (and my favorite piece of music *period* is Moonlight Sonata) and depending on how you feel about the phone it may be apropriate…

i’ll see if i can’t think of more

oh – so, would names from Faerie Blood be at all appropriate? because, um… well… it;s *your* book and *your* phone and…

By: annathepiper

annathepiper — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:14:15 +0000

Ah, you win for first vote here! And you have a fine point re: naming schemes. I’ll do a separate post about that.

By: Rachel Blackman

Rachel Blackman — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:14:40 +0000

I admit, I name all my portables things starting with P. The MacBook Pro is ‘Pico,’ the MacBook Nano (Dell Mini 9 hackintoshed to run OSX) is ‘Packet,’ the iPhone 3GS is ‘Ping’ and the T-Mobile G1 is ‘Paradigm.’ (Servers start with ‘S’ — Snafu, Segfault — and desktop boxes start with G. Gizmo, Glitch, Gamma.)

The gist of which is, if you have an existing naming scheme for your computers, it might be useful to include in the contest info in order for folks to find a name that fits in!

Other than that? Aether. Both in honor of early forms of of certain characters, and because the iPhone is a little shiny box that magically plucks information out of the ether whenever you need it. (Wiki Mobile is /awesome/.)