Version 2008. Over 40 Matthew Healeys have signed the Guest Book!
Congratulations to the family of the newest Matthew Healey, born 3rd August 2007 in Ontario, Canada!
I've updated the links to various Matthews' pages, which are in no particular order. To contribute a new link, click on the email at the bottom of the page.
Updated: Photographer, New England, USA
Updated: Furniture maker, Vermont, USA
Animation specialist (Wallace & Gromit), UK
(the same MH who's a Glasgow artist involved in landmine clearance in Cambodia).
Professor, Cranfield University, UK
Law partner, Hinckley, UK
Dentist in Billerica, Mass., USA
Freelance writer for The New York Times, USA
Student, University of Miami, Florida, USA
The student at Huddersfield, UK, seems to have graduated... if so, congratulations!
Still a work in progress.
Read the guest book
Sign the guest book
Previous updates:
Update, Spring 2006. A bit more than a year ago, I set up this page as a little social experiment, just to see what would happen. The results have been very pleasing. The guest book has registered 15 different Matthew Healeys from all over the world, and the responses have been quite positive. Without any clever search-tinkering on my part, this page now tops the Google results for "Matthew Healey".
January 2005. A famous design guru once said to me, "Register your own name dot com, otherwise some other idiot will, and who knows what embarrassing rubbish he'll put there." And of course he was right.
What's in a name? This web site raises some interesting paradoxes. Each of us is unique, and yet here we are all the same. Most - if not all - of us are total strangers to one other, but on this webpage we have a little community so cohesive that it transcends space and time. Our names, which I assume we all consider to be something deeply personal, suddenly seem trivial, superficial and quite inadequate to describe us. They don't even really seem to belong to us.
Lack of time has prevented me from taking the logical next step, which is to turn this into a proper home base for all the Matthew Healeys out there. But I intend to get to that in the next few months, in fits and starts as time allows. I've started by adding a few more links below. Bear with me. I think the results will be fun.
I took his advice and for a while, I used my domain name for selfish purposes, like trying to get a job and sharing family photos with the world. Then I started to consider.
Have you ever done a web search for your own name? Unless your parents bestowed an unusual moniker on you, you'll likely find that there are all sorts of people out there who answer to the same name as you do.
This can be disconcerting at first. Growing up, I always assumed my name was something personal, something I could use to identify myself as unique. Well, once Google came along, I had another think coming.
For all the other Matthew Healeys in the world, I was that idiot who had beat them to their personal domain name. There I was, grinning at them from my homepage and pretending to the world that my cv was the only thing that mattered.
Then I began to wonder if I wasn't missing an opportunity for a neat little social experiment. After all, there are a couple dozen guys out there, randomly scattered about the English-speaking bits of the globe, who have absolutely nothing in common but a single, superficial characteristic - their name.
What would happen if we all got together - virtually - to share details of our lives and compare notes on our varied existences, disconnected but for that one small detail?
So here goes. I've tried to contact all the Matthew Healeys I can and asked them to sign the guest book. It's a simple little guest book so as not to be too intimidating. If it gets interesting, I'll expand it and make it prettier.
Thanks.
Read the guest book
Sign the guest book
A deceased Matthew Healey (died 1840):
Gravestone in Campbelltown, New South Wales
E-mail the keeper of this page.