Nerds and their nomenclature

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, October 23, 2007 8:13am

Our server at work is named Maple. Although I was around when it got installed and named, I don't remember why that name was picked. Something about our company being a publisher of horticultural books and, I dunno, relative stalwartness. Also, it kind of sounds like "mail", which is one of its major functions.

Along the way, we added another server, named Dogwood. Sure, why not?

But Maple is getting along in years, and we need to upgrade to a new server. I was given the honored task of coming up with a name for the new server. Or at least, in my utter dorkery, I consider it honored.

See, nerds like order. Order and niche knowledge. So when there's a group of things they have to name, they pick names from a different name space. If at all possible, a dorky one.

I was first introduced to this concept back at Rice, where various buildings or rooms would have themes to their computer names. One particular favorite was a computer lab with the names One, Two, Red, Blue, ... Little-star, Little-car, ... Yellow-hat. (If you hadn't picked up on it, these are all descriptions of fish from Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.)

And I distinctly remember the difficulty of coming up with a name to satisfy the über-nerds that ran the network at my college (i.e. dorm), Lovett. Tired (or suspicious) of the pop-culture naming themes at other colleges, they decided it would be wholesome and geeky to choose names from Norse mythology. Except not the obvious ones. No Thor, no Odin, maaaaaybe Freya. I remember one friend, Eric, was lauded for naming his computer Yggdrasil. Nerd.

Mind you, this was in the days before the Web [collective gasp], so there was no obvious source for Norse mythic nomenclature besides heavy tomes at the library. Not that it matters — I don't remember what I named my computer, and that wasn't the point of my story.

So I got to pick the new server name at work. And now that we had a theme going, I couldn't violate that. So I had to pick a tree name. But I also wanted to pick something easy to type and spell, because nerds don't like typing long words. Or spelling.

(As much as Eric's computer name won high praise for its relative obscurity and tight adherence to the rules of our college's name space, there was always the issue of "How many G's in 'Yggdrasil'? ... And how many S's? L's? Any umlauts?")

So, to put it anticlimactically, I named the new server Oak. Short, easy to spell, definitely a tree, and quite possibly a sturdier tree than Maple. Oak.

Which, because I am a nerd (cf. the previous sentences in this entry), instantly caused me to think of a Rush song about maples and oaks.

And simply because I am positively exulting in my nerditude here, I will end by presenting the lyrics to that song, "The Trees", slightly altered to fit the present context. Feel free to look away.

The trouble with poor Maple
And it's quite convinced it's right
It says that Oak is just too speedy
And it grabs up all of the bytes
But Oak can't help its feelings
If it likes the way it's made
And it wonders why poor Maple
Can't be happy with its RAID