Here's some background first: I tend to name all of my computers. Usually they have something to do with pop culture. My first laptop was named Raichu. My tandem PC towers that are in my office right now are named Totoro and Voltron. These names just kinda find their way into my lexicon; I never really sit down and think, "What would be a good name for this computer?"
Except that's exactly what I did when I got my white MacBook almost 2 years ago. I thought, "I need a better way to identify it rather than just 'laptop' or 'MacBook.'" I wondered (probably because I'd been hanging out with tangentbot) what the Japanese word for computer was. So I typed "computer" into Google Translate, and it came back as コンピュータ (sorry for anyone who doesn't have Japanese character fonts installed).
With my limited knowledge of katakana (and help from Wikipedia) I figured out that コンピュータ is pronounced "konpyuta." So the Japanese word for "computer" turned out to be "computer" pronounced with a Japanese accent. I began calling my MacBook "Konpyuta," saying it with the accent and everything.
Quickly, though, with my wife and I talking about it quite a bit (mostly asking where it was and if the other one of us had it or not), Konpyuta developed a nickname: コンピューュー, or "Konpyupyu," which was very quickly shortened to simply ューュー, or "PyuPyu" (pronounced like you're shooting a tiny, cute laser pistol—"Pew! Pew!").
PyuPyu came with an 80 gig harddrive, which seemed like a lot at the time. But Carrie & I like to have a wide variety of music on hand, and I've made quite a few videos and movies for Fools Play. As you might know, audio and video are two of the most expensive things to put on a computer from a memory-hogging perspective.
When I got under 8 gigs of free space I knew it was time to do something.
So I spent my Christmas money and did this:
500GB MacBook Harddrive Upgrade for Under $100
I simply followed all the steps and it was absurdly easy. Copying PyuPyu's harddrive to the external took about two hours. Actually swapping the harddrives took about 20 minutes.
So now instead of a dwindling 8GB of dwindling space, I have in the neighborhood of 400GB to luxuriate in. That's a lot of audio. That's a lot of video. And that's plenty of space to finally be able to dual-boot with Windows XP (on my to-do list for Saturday).
To commemorate this aweXomeness, PyuPyu has been renamed "PyuPyu 500." But we still just call it "PyuPyu" for short.
