Baby Names and the origin story of babynamer.com

About 10 years ago when I lived in Seattle we created a new site called babynamer.com. At that time the owner of the company and me were both having children (as was Bill Gates too who used our site to pick the name of his son Rory).

One of the most interesting properties about names that came up right away as we were researching baby names was what we later termed -- the 'ancient form of a name'. The best example of it is between the modern name Robert and all its derivative name forms and the ancient form Hreodbeorht. You can only imagine what my wife said when I told her that I wanted to name our son who was expected in 2 months Hreodbeorht. NO NO NO.

I was recently reminded of this origin story in a modern context by one of our very talented developers Daniel (who did the recent beautiful rewrite to our baby names site - babynamer.com) and our director of development Luke.


Question: will the origin story for this name in 100 years be Skype - an ancient name meaning a primitive text chat and VOIP communication system?

My Son’s 5th Grade Graduation

I have been working on a photo montage / slide show for my son's 5th grade graduating class from Redwood Elementary school in West Orange, NJ. Its been lots of fun because many of the kids have been in the same elementary school for all 5 years. You can really see the growth and change in the photos.

Because so many of you have asked for a copy of the DVD I uploaded it to Youtube.com and you can see it here. I had to break it into two clips.