I recently blogged about Google’s Google Book Project. Now get this, Google finally opened up Gmail to new comers just few hours ago. They finally decided to drop its ‘invitation-only’ restriction.

Gmail, which is now the 3rd largest email hosting company, currently has approximately 60 million users. And with the existing 2.8GB (and growing) mailbox capacity, powerful email search capability, and its tight integration with different, extremely useful Google apps, such as Google Talk, it will definitely keep its main competitors, namely MSN’s Hotmail (approx. 236 million users) and Yahoo! Mail (approx. 246 million users) on their toes.

You can take a gander at what the impact will be for us ‘netizens’. This will most likely mean an improvement in the overall global webmail service offering. Which spells good news for us!

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Sources:
People’s Daily Online
The Register

Have you ever asked your parents the story behind your name? Do you think your name is weird?

The idea of this post came about thanks to a comment made by a colleague, Ganns, on one of my previous posts. I also recall a previous BBC Article about “The Philippine Name Game”. This was also discussed during Conne’s surprise birthday party.

I know some people who ‘hated’ their parents for giving them ‘awful’ names. I, for one, didn’t like having two names (Philip John – which I was told was derived from my father’s name, Phil) and would always shorten it out to PJ when I was younger, probably because it took up an entire school pad paper width to write my name in full (I had big handwriting then, and I think I still do).

Here are some of the interesting ‘name’ anecdotes I’ve encountered through the years:

1. One of the most colorful names I’ve encountered belonged to a classmate of mine, Roygibv. Yes, he’s got the spectral colors of the rainbow (ROYGBIV: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).

2. My brother’s children have nicknames pertaining to colors: Purple and Indigo.

3. One of my best friends was really dead set and serious on naming his son ‘Dragonlord’. He was a big guy, so we didn’t think it was funny at all.

4. A schoolmate had a dad whose name was Florendo, and so he named his son “Odnerolf” – Florendo spelled backwards.

5. A former officemate was born on December 30, Rizal Day. He was named Joeriz, based on Jose Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines.

6. The first name of current mayor of Makati City in the Philippines, Jejomar Binay, is composed of the first few letters of Jesus, Joseph and Mary.

There are a lot more. Perhaps you have some names you’d like to share? Feel free to add to the list.

Cheers!