My lab uses painters. We have DaVinci, VanGogh, Munch, and others. What's cool about these hostnames is that we can find out other painters and learn stuff about them, such as name pronunciation, paintings, etc. When we have a new machine, we search for another painter, we look at their paintings. This is good to learn new stuff. Another good category would be rock 'n' roll bands:

- "Hey, I will run some experiments on zeppelin tonight. Is she free? Thank you." - "All our computers play a song from its hostname band. Except pinkfloyd. No one had patience to listen to a song for 20 minutes."