Gambitronic

I’ve begun prep work for a media center PC that I hope to install in the living room, God and/or the IRS willing (is there really a difference between the two in terms of sheer power?), come tax refund time. A while back I asked if anyone had any ideas on a maniacal supercomputer name to go with the new box. I have a LAN set up in the house called WOPR. My main desktop PC, Zen, is the WOPR hub; other machines already on WOPR are Orac (secondary desktop & file server) and Colossus (Avid). Zen and Orac are supercomputer names from the adorably outdated (and not just a little bit campy) BBC space opera Blake’s 7, while Colossus is the Forbin Project (and a nod to the sheer physical size of the box that runs the Avid).

The new machine will reside on the WOPR network as well, and it’ll be called Gambit. Gambit was yet another supercomputer that made a one-off appearance in the 1981 Blake’s 7 episode Games; appropriately enough, it spent all of its time entertaining an eccentric hermit and occasionally dishing out digital death via its automatic defense systems too. Gambit wound up getting cozy with Orac, and despite all of the advantages inherent in keeping Gambit around for future stories, naturally it was never heard from again. Of course, my wife will see Gambit as an X-Men reference, so it’s a win-win situation. Sort of like the time she named her new kitten Olivia, swearing that she was breaking the cycle of Shakespearean-named cats in our household (see also: Othello, Iago, Oberon). (I had to point her toward Twelfth Night – which features an Olivia – at a later date and then get out of book-throwing distance, because that all-inclusive Shakespeare book of mine weighs a ton.)

So that’s the important issue of naming the machine settled. Will the real Gambit get cozy with the real Orac? Only time will tell. Current plans call for Gambit to be equipped with a wireless keyboard/mouse combo (we’re looking at this one, again as funds permit). Ideally, it should be able to record as well as play back. It’ll also be browsing the web and doing e-mail, so I’ll install the usual security/antivirus/antispyware/antispam stuff on it, and I’ll be keeping a fanatical, Friddle*-esque eye on the thing’s health too.

It’d be nice to have another terrorbyte** drive to stick in there, but you know, I have a feeling that’s something that we’ll be needing to ask Santa about.

Can I actually put another system together and successfully convince it to not suck? Stay tuned, true believers.

* = if you haven’t worked at 40/29, you won’t get this, and trust me, if you’re prone to picking up malware, you don’t want to. Unless you actually like incurring the not-inconsiderable and not-entirely-unjustifiable wrath of the head IT guy, in which case, I’m just stepping the hell back away from you, dude.

** = the official drive name of Zen’s 1TB internal drive.