Well that's a long story [pulls up chair] . . . time was, 'round about 2004 as I recall, I had an idea to develop an application to interface the eBay API to Quickbooks in a higher quality manner than was being done at the time (due to a combination of computer guys either not understanding accounting or eBay, or maybe both). It's been done since, but at the time I would have had an early, high quality product in that market. My computer guy was one of the best at that sort of thing, but of course he was terribly busy, and I was too, I already had two jobs. So the idea never really got off the ground.
But I did need a company name. My brilliant in-the-shower idea (most of my good ideas involve exposure to water, such as the ocean or the hot tub) was "pencilfish". Dunno where the fish came from, but I liked it. Unfortunately, trademark and domain name registration is a real byaaaatch, and that name wasn't clear. So rooting around the fish idea, I recalled my clan's arms:
Argent two lions rampant combatant Gules supporting a dexter hand couped at the wrist of the last, in chief three estoiles of the second, in base waves of the sea therein naiant a salmon all proper.
"naiant" in heraldic language denotes an animal swimming horizontally (archaic French; modern French is "nageant"), and salmon is tasty. Best of all, the domain name was open (difficult even in 2004 for a six-letter English word) and trademark was clear (I have never registered it, don't really care as I have the domain name and pretty much own the Google first page on that word).
The website used to have pictures of fish, but they've been replaced mostly by pictures of my kids . . . swimming
Anyway, the last thing I wanted to name the company after was myself; this is probably because of my background in accounting & law, and also because I don't really need a bunch of surfers being totally stoked because they think I sell hydrophones. dUdE!
I mean accountants & lawyers don't have very creative firm names. I would have gone with AAA A-1 Accounting Firm (see my avatar) so I could have been first in the phone book
