Reliance and Mischief

As pink vertical lines began flashing their way down Stuart's old powerbook screen, the obvious decision was to replace it with something bright and shiny, and not nearly so annoying. So, we recently acquired a new 17 inch MacBook Pro with all the extras to delight a developer's heart.

Investing in a new Macintosh for Stuart is an easy decision. He's able to leap tall buildings in a single "if" statement. It becomes more a matter of how fast can we get it here?

And of course, what to name it?!

Old 'Possum might agree with us that the naming of Macs is as difficult a matter as naming cats. You want to capture the spirit of the thing.

It also seemed clear to us, that we needed a sailing theme for this one. And we started thinking that "Bristol" might be good. Bristol, being nearby in Rhode Island, and Bristol Fashion being the way to keep everything just right. However that seemed to emphasize maintenance over creativity. So we kept exploring names.

Bristol got us to thinking about Nathanael Herreshoff, who it turns out was a brilliant MIT engineering student and boat nerd, nicknamed "The Wizard of Bristol!" Stuart is also an MIT grad, and he felt a lot of kinship right away with the idea of finding a name that would make a Herreshoff connection. We were on the right track, but Herreshoff is too hard to type. Two r's, two h's, two f's, two e's but only one s and one o?

Further research and questioning got us to "Reliance" -- a vessel our sailing instructor described as "his most thunderous!"

Reliance was the largest America's Cup ship ever built. It was 143 feet and 8 inches long, and carried 16,160 square feet of sail. (A quick google search show that this is larger than the size of Howard Stern's Mansion in the Hamptons, which has 12 baths, or the Manchester United MegaStore, which has three floors, or the entire business convention center at the Fairmont hotel in Quebec. Mind boggling!) Many thought she would be too dangerous to sail, but she did great! Reliance beat out the third and final try from Lipton's Shamrock III.

Reliance was definitely a magnificent sailing beast! And if there ever were something that we rely on, it is Stuart's mac! An amazing feat of engineering that inspires more amazing feats!

So, "Reliance" it is!

But, what to name the Windows partition that we run on this Mac? We settled on "Mischief!" A rival sailboat name from the same era.

:-)