At the University of Pennsylvania distributed systems lab (just a bunch of SPARC pizza boxes — a few 5s, lots of 20s, and a bunch of Ultra 5s and such, used as glorified X terminals, really) all the machines are named after dances, of all things. So you can sit down to work at lambada, waltz, or twostep. My personal favorites are foxtrot and tango, which just set the programming mood for me. Never before had I considered just how many dances there were.
There is another large group of machines named after units of measurement — from plank, mile, and fathom thru parsec, as well as others like peck, decibel, and mol. The one named gradient is used by all the TAs, a clever pun if you ask me. The main servers have such unimaginative names as red, blue, and button, Penn landmarks of a sort. However, we are redeemed: the engineering school's central server is called eniac. (eniac happens to consist of red and blue and the file server, but that's irrelevent.) The original ENIAC was developed at Penn. Go us. ;-)
There was a time when all my personal machines and some of my friends' were named after the Endless: destiny was the domain controller, dream was my dual-celeron box, death was my PII 250, despair was my roomate's P200, destruction was my friend Victor's box, and delirium was my (ex) girlfriend's. Nobody ever wanted desire, for some reason, which is kind of ironic, now that I think about it. This had the advantage of causing all our boxes to sort next to eachother in Network Neighborhood.
After Toy Story 2 came out, my computers were named Death By Monkeys and Slotted Pig on VNN.
Before college and thru Freshman year, my linux box was named nuku, after the titular character from All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku-Nuku. Somehow I never came up with other satisfactory related names for other machines, and decided to switch schemes.
Inspired by a particular softlink below, I might just have to rename my computers after alcoholic beverages: vodka, gin, rum ... lots of good short names.