There is no doubt that the naming process is the bane of anything I create or own. Having to name something is a show stopper for me. When creating an MMO character, I spend hours staring at the character creation screen not knowing what to come up with. When I had to give my blog a name, I couldn’t think of one either, nor my domain. I couldn’t come up with names for the small applications that I’ve written for my own use, the computers in my network, and the list goes on, and in the future, naming my kid, if I’m ever fortunate enough to get married, that’s going to the biggest pain of them all.

Turns out that I’m not the only person that’s struggling at coming up with names. There are guides at coming up with (network) names here and two RFCs that talk about naming, RFC1178 – Choosing a Name for Your Computer and the slightly humorous RFC2100 – The Naming of Hosts that consists of a poem. There’s even an entire site that’s dedicated to helping you chose a naming scheme at http://namingschemes.com/Main_Page.

One thing I learnt from all of that is having a theme largely simplifies the naming process when you need to come up with a large number of names. It might already be obvious to you, but it wasn’t to me. I ought to name all my machines after the deities in the Forgotten Realms, which is by far my favorite D&D setting.