Monthly Archive for: ‘October, 2006’

What I Did On My Half Term Holiday

I’m back at the keyboard once more after a hectic week of fun and games.
What’ve I been up to? Let’s see…

Last weekend was Hugh’s stag do in the Lake District, where we:

Went ape in Grizedale forest (great fun, recommended).
Tried our hands at archery (I wasn’t very good..)
Took a ride in an Argo-Cat (crazy!)
Hurtled round a horseshit-covered barn in go-karts.
Witnessed a teenage girl burst into tears in the Penrith branch of Threshers because they didn’t have any peach schnaps!
Slept on a barn floor (but hey, it was cheap!)

…then on Tuesday Jocelyn and I visited Liverpool, where we…

Visited the Beatles Story (not bad).
Mooched around Albert Dock.
Went to the cinema to see Marie Antoinette (surprisingly enjoyable – great costumes).

…before catching an awfully early flight to Dublin, where we…

Visited the Guinness Storehouse (naturally).
Wandered around Trinity College and Temple Bar.
Took in some Irish history at Dublin Castle and Kilmainham Gaol (both very interesting).

…then caught another flight up to Derry and picked up a rental car which we took to see the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim before catching the Lough Foyle ferry back to the Irish Republic and down to the wonderful Carlton Redcastle hotel, where we…

Helped Bruce and Suzanne to celebrate their recent wedding.
Caught up with very many of my old university friends.
Treated ourselves to massages of the scalp (Joce) and back (me) varieties.
Took a dip in the pool (most unusual for me).
Made the most of the extra hour of drinking time.

All this and I even found time to have a much-needed haircut, and finally got round to reading The Time Traveller’s Wife, which Jez recommended to me over a year ago.

Now, after all that fun, I’m tired, skint, back at work, and we have five months of darkness to get through…!

del.icio.us Extension for Firefox 2.0

For the past few months, since upgrading Firefox to one of the 2.0 betas, I’ve been somewhat lost without my handy del.icio.us integration courtesy of the official del.icio.us extension for Firefox (which isn’t 2.0-compatible).

So it’s with much pleasure that I discovered this morning the existence of an unoffical del.icio.us extension which has bags more functionality and works with the 2.0 branch! Hurrah!

Anger Is An Energy

As we head towards the end of the year, and those inevitable critical lists of the finest albums that the year has produced, I try to make a particular effort to catch up and listen to the various new records that I haven’t played often. With iTunes, this is easier than ever this year, it’s just a matter of setting up a playlist to include music from 2006 with a low play count, and Bob’s your uncle.

Well, as a result of this process, my iPod just turned me on to “Living With War”, Neil Young’s visceral response to the war on terror, and it’s really rather good – definitely the best thing he’s done in many years. Being angry evidently brings out the best in old Neil, he’s channeled that anger into a superb collection of protest songs that pull no punches (“Let’s Impeach the President” being the most obvious example). And all this from a Canadian!

Definitely highly recommended and a certain entry on my personal list of 2006′s best albums.

Family Tree

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve taken up Genealogy to see me through the long winter months. Well, with much help from the web (especially Ancestry, Scotland’s People, and of course Google), I’ve managed to knock together a tree containing almost 600 relatives of Jocelyn and I. High time to make it available for public viewing, then:

Our Family Tree

Please note that this is a work in progress, and the data has been collated from many places, not all of which are primary sources! I accept no responsibility for any errors, though I would be interested to hear of them, as well as any additions!

Oh, and if my family tree goes back to the Romans, then I will change my name to Jones!

A Blast From The Past

I had the oddest experience earlier this week. I was in need of some short-term offline data storage, and the first thing to which I laid my hand was a dusty old CD-RW that I hadn’t seen for many years prior to the house move. Before adding new content to it, I thought I’d check what files it already contained, and was surprised to find a backup of my website from spring 1999!

Back in 1999 my site contained a somewhat navel-gazing daily journal in which I generally bitched about my boring job (I was a lowly recent graduate working as a mainframe Assembler programmer in a soulless bank), and at one point even wrote about the job interviews I had been attending. It was perfectly feasible to do so as very few people outside my immediate circle of friends actually read the thing! To put this in context, mine was one of around 500 sites listed on the “Open Pages” directory of online diaries at that time, and even got a mention in a Discovery Channel article on the subject.

There was, you won’t be surprised to hear, little in the way of technical content on the site at that time, although I did publish a few small VB5 apps I wrote, including a Noughts and Crosses game and an application called “Motivation” which sat on the taskbar and displayed the amount of salary accumulated so far that day. I’m delighted to see that they all work fine under XP Pro, which is probably more testament to Microsoft’s dedication to backwards-compatibility than my coding skills (I haven’t dared view the source code, which I also find on the CD-RW). In retrospect I don’t know why I didn’t blog, er, I mean write about some of the JavaScript techniques I was using to power the site, as they seem quite clever now – I’ve long since forgotten most of that client-side programming knowledge.

Two years later, in 2001, I’d left that job, bought my own home, and was sat in an auditorium in the Hilton, London, listening to Bill Gates give a keynote speech at the launch of Visual Studio .NET. It really was like the difference between night and day, and reading those old entries brings back the feeling of how incredibly bored I was in my day job.

Still, I made up for it at the weekends with lots of short trips up to Scotland for munro-bagging and heavy-drinking. This was back when I and all my friends were still single, and still had the energy for such excursions!

I’m toying with the idea of posting the old entries on this site. Do you think I should? Most of the links won’t work any longer, and I wrote at length about TV shows and bands which have long since slipped into obscurity, but there may be some value in some of the material, at least from a nostalgic perspective. But then on the other hand, do I really want to re-publish entries in which I sound like, well, a bit of a twat?

Genealogy – My New Winter Hobby

"INTPs are always so mentally active that they continually delve into new interests… The interests of an INTP would be enough to occupy him for several lifetimes if that were possible."

– A description of the INTP personality type, Paul James.

I’ve been in need of a new hobby for a while now. The mental challenges offered from getting married, changing jobs and moving home have passed, and my free evenings and weekends were becoming prone to bouts of restlessness and sighs of "I’m bored". This is not a good thing.

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a Digital SLR for a while, but the initial outlay for all the required kit would be close to four figures, a sum not easy to come by after the aforementioned marriage and house move. Besides, I’m not sure that taking up a pastime which is essentially outdoor in nature is a good idea as the nights draw in and we enter the almost perpetual darkness of a British winter.

So, inspired by WDYTYA and the wife’s purchase of a Martha Stewart genealogy fan chart, I decided that the time was right for me to do one of those "things I’ve always meant to do" and start tracing our family trees.

Like life insurance, dating, and selling unwanted tat to unsuspecting strangers, genealogy is one of those areas that has been radically transformed by the proliferation of the web. I can’t imagine how much slower it would be to undertake this research just ten or fifteen years ago. Sites like Ancestry, Scotland’s People, and even simple things like online certificate ordering from the GRO have really reduced the time taken to trace lines back, at least over the last couple of centuries. A couple of months ago I knew the names of six of my direct ancestors (i.e. my parents and grandparents). Today I know 66, with more potential lines of research still untapped. My database currently contains 298 individuals, with more to be keyed in later tonight. Virtually all of this has been discovered via an ethernet cable without leaving the comfort of my office.

But on some of my lineage I’m now starting to reach the limits of what is possible using the web alone. It turns out that my great-great-grandfather, John Nelson, was born in County Monaghan, Ireland, in the mid-nineteenth century. The Irish government are being somewhat tardy at putting their records online, so if I want to know more I’m going to have to find out in person. Fortunately, we already have plans to visit Dublin later this month, so a visit to the Irish GRO isn’t entirely out of the question.

I’m still very much a beginner at this game, but here are a few links and tips that I’ve amassed so far:

Decent genealogy software will make it much easier to keep track of your findings. Amazon have the BBC-branded version of GSP’s Family Tree Maker software for £19.99, which I’ve found to be more than adequate so far. This comes with a free thirty-day subscription to the UK datasets on Ancestry.co.uk. Of course if, like Jocelyn and I, you are interested in relatives from both sides of the pond, you’ll probably end up buying a "World" subscription to Ancestry anyway.
If your software offers the ability to give each individual in your database a unique reference number, use it! Half the folk in my tree seem to be called Benjamin, Joseph and William, and it’s all too easy to get them confused!
From the earliest stages of your research, keep a note of your sources. This can’t be emphasised enough, as you risk having to repeat your research otherwise. I failed to note my sources initially as I got caught up in the fun of the research, and now I look at some facts in my database and wonder "but how do I know that?".
If, like me, you have Scottish blood, then Scotland’s People is an invaluable trove of information, with digitized BMD records going back to 1855, the Scottish census returns, and searchable parish records to 1513.
Don’t jump to conclusions. Just because a search only yields one result doesn’t mean it’s the individual you seek. Datasets can be incomplete, or names can be spelled differently (William, Willm, Wm, Will, Willie; Benjamin, Benjm, Ben, Benny…). I am now the proud owner of a birth certificate for an individual who shares the name and birth year of one of my ancestors, but isn’t him!
OneWorldTree and other sites which allow you to link your tree to others can be a great way of sharing research and rapidly discovering entire branches of your family, but take everything with a large pinch of salt! You don’t believe everything you read on the internet, do you? Before convincing yourself that you’ve traced your family all the way back to Adam, get sources for all the pertinent facts.
"The Genealogist’s Internet" by Peter Christian is a mine of useful information for those using the net to undertake this kind of research. I’m sure other books will prove useful for the next (offline) stages of my investigation, but I’m still waiting for Amazon to deliver a couple of those.

We Have Curtains

After six weeks in the new house, we can finally shut the night out of the living room thanks to these fantastic curtains that Jocelyn has made:

Aren’t they swish?

Google Reader

For several years now I’ve been trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to convince friends and family to start making use of web feeds. In August 2005 when I made a list of ten things that I felt were not popular enough, I put RSS feeds at #1. It drives me slightly crazy to watch people going about tasks with sub-optimal efficiency, so knowing that in this day and age folks are still habitually surfing round a list of favourite websites on the offchance that new content has been added really winds me up.

I don’t really understand why feeds are still largely used only by techies when the industry has put so much effort into making them more accessible. We stopped calling them XML feeds, in favour of RSS feeds, and then finally just Web feeds. The orange “RSS” icon was replaced a standard icon across most browsers and applications. Newspapers and other websites wrote tutorials explaining the concept. Stylesheets were even applied to the feeds themselves to make them human-readable, lest an accidental viewing of the XML scared people off!

I’d pretty much given up thumping this particular tub, happy to sit and wait until Outlook 2007 and IE 7 get a decent penetration on the average desktop with their out-of-the-box promotion of RSS. But last week John brought to my attention the shiny new version of Google Reader (http://reader.google.com), which has come on in leaps and bounds since the initial release. It’s now an absolutely stunning implementation of the RSS Aggregator concept that has given me new hope that the protocol will soon be as readily accepted and understood as email.

I’ve been happily using Bloglines since July 2005 and didn’t anticipate feeling the urge to switch. However, Google Reader offers the following key benefits that will probably lead to it becoming my aggregator of choice:

Older, read items are still visible quite easily by choosing to “View All” – this strikes me as being more intuitive than the “Display items within the last…” combo box offered by Bloglines.
Items are marked as being read only once you’ve clicked on (or, optionally, scrolled past) the entry – unlike Bloglines where clicking to view several hundred entries can mark them all as being read simultaneously.
A subscription can have more than one tag/label, breaking free of the more traditional folder-based paradigm.
Entries can be “starred”, in the same way that you star GMail messages. This offers more flexibility than simply keeping an entry flagged as “new”/”unread” (when, after all, it isn’t).
Entries of interest can be “shared” so that they appear on an aggregated page (here’s mine).
Naturally, the shared entries have an RSS feed of their own (here’s mine).
A clip of the shared entries can easily be included on a website (mine coming here soon, underneath the del.icio.us links).
If you’ve avoided RSS feeds because you enjoy reading posts in their original format, you’ll be interested in the “Next bookmark”, a canny idea which lets you easily cycle through all your favourite sites that have new material.
Google reader can be added to your personalised Google homepage (along with GMail, Google Calendar, etc), from where you can even read the entries themselves in a nice big popup balloon.

It really is all very cool. So far I only have two minor niggles:

Confusing terminology – are they labels, tags, or folders? The same concept is referred to by three different names, even on the same screen. Make up your mind guys!
Update frequency – Bloglines seems to be picking up on new posts several hours before Google Reader. I need my Dilbert fix in the morning!

If you’re already au fait with web feeds, I recommend taking a fresh look at Google Reader – there’s an Import OPML feature so switching is painless.

And if you still haven’t made the leap into the brave new world of web feeds, I suggest, nay, implore you to give it a try. It’s easy, convenient and a huge time-saver.