In grad school I studied a gene which at the time was called Oct1 ("octamer binding protein 1"). My main problem was literature searches, which often found "OCT-1" (organic cation transporter-1). Genomic naming is a total mess, I found it easier to just mentally compute the md5sum of a name, then memorize the first few digits (only need about 8-10 hex digits).
md5 is easy- you only have to remember a few hundred constants (they can also be computed on the fly) and do basic bit operations on a small output (16 bytes).
