... Meriadoc.
Naming computers is always tricky, especially when you acquire them as often as we do. So, the new mac mini got christened Meriadoc because he's small and he's surprisingly feisty. and 'Meriadoc' shares some alliterative properties with the word 'Mac', which is always pleasurable.
Dotted around our house, you'll find a tragically geeky theme pervades the majority of the computer names - there's Hal, Merovingian, Starbuck, Eowyn, and Marvin (a name which is suddenly en vogue once more after this weekend's spectacular box-office showing for The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie - it grossed 42 decimillion pounds in the UK, a fact that I think would please Douglas Adams, if only for its extraordinary improbability, and utter inconsequence. The film's okay, by the way. Not brilliant, but... okay).
An old naming convention of mine was to use aerospace pioneers to name my machines (I had a 'Lindbergh' once, and my first machine that ran at more than 1GHz was called 'Yeager'). This tradition continues to this day in the form of my laptop, Gagarin, and its small, noisy companion, my phone, whose Bluetooth name is Laika.
Anyway, Meriadoc was named with due ceremony ("... and so, the solemn opening of the 'Sharing' dialogue box... the all-important focusing of the textbox. Then, the archbishop types in the given name, "Meriadoc, dot wireless hyphen lan, dot local". the 'OK' button is clicked, and now the crowd rises for a hymn..."), and will be so named until he passes into the great computer graveyard in the sky... also known as a box in the loft. Because computer names can't be changed, once given - or reused. There's something important about names, even for dumb old things like computers. So the naming is not something to be done lightly. Name a computer in haste, and you'll regret it. Personally, I think I'm going to like Meriadoc. Sounds like a trustworthy soul, to me.