You may remember a while back we brought you a series of stories about unique team names that Rackers give themselves. Well, today we’re back with more tales of “What’s in Name?” but this time it’s all about Austin Teams!
Red Dwarf
When we started with our project, we knew the name had to be related to the stars in some way or shape. We were building something that bolted on top of nova, the openstack compute product. We originally went with blue dwarf, and found out its a “hypothetical class of star” (as reported by the always true wikipedia), so that was not necessarily fitting, and some could even say had a negative connotation. So we decided to change the name to avoid the “hypothetical-ness” of the product we were building. At the same time we wanted to pay homage to a awesome british from the early 90s. Hence the decision to name it red dwarf. and to throw in a toaster, cuz who doesnt like toasters?
Team LEAF:
The first shift linux teams in austin used to be called:
LEAF – Linux Emerging Austin Firstshift
Our symbol was the fern leaf or aya:
The AYA or fern is an African Adinkra symbol of endurance and resourcefulness. The fern is a hardy plant that can grow in difficult places. “An individual who wears this symbol suggests that he has endured many adversities and outlasted much difficulty.”
The Flying Toasters:
What is a Flying Toaster?
The Flying section of our team name comes from an homage paid to the Windows OS. If we roll time back to the early days of Windows, we will remember a screensaver which displayed animated images of flying toasters traveling across the screen to prevent image burns on the monitor. While we could have pulled the full name of our team from this screensaver alone, we chose to have a wicked-badical double meaning in our name, which will be explained as follows:
A Cylon was the robotic enemy of the human race in a science fiction series named Battlestar Galactica. Due to the fictional war between the robots and humans, a creative nickname was assigned to the Cylons by the human military. That nickname, Toasters, was a symbolic representation of how the humans were superior to the Cylons because the Cylons were just machines. This section of our team name harkens to the reality that machines would win any type of war against the puny human race and we all know it, deep down inside. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
There you have it. We are the Flying Toasters, we are fierce, and we also heart Windows so much!!!
