April 30, 2007 - Monday

It's been an interesting time since I last posted here. Most importantly my hard drive gave up the ghost and became deader than a doornail. This four year old hard drive had been giving me indications for several months, and luckily I bought a 750 Gigabyte external hard drive before Christmas and then spent weeks trying to figure it all out. After I finally re-formatted it to NTFS from Fat32 (as previously described) I was able to move all my data including my digital videos over to it (150 gigabytes). I barely finished the transfer the last time I saw my desktop alive. I was really lucky to get everything into the external storage (drag and drop) before the end came. I think the only things I lost were all the e-mails I'd saved "To My PC." Luckily I've copied and pasted all my genealogy e-mails to Word documents from each correspondent under the appropriate related Surname. So that is all safe. I took my computer to Super Geeks and paid $50 to get priority line service. It was done in 3 days. Today they called me twice to find out if everything was OK, or if I was having any trouble, etc. It was like a doctor calling you after outpatient surgery. Very nice.

Last night I did more re-editing of the Mongolia video tape 1st hour, and I was able to cut out about 30 minutes at the first whack. I find that I have to be very careful with the Roxio software as it is a bit unforgiving if I get too wild with the mouse, or try to edit/split while the video is playing. So I learn every time I work at it. Here is a photo I took of a young Buddist monk-in-training in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia

Another new free offering at Ancestry.com for subscribers is wonderful. It is the ability to print the family tree data from the online Member Trees. It is in the Beta testing stage, and probably wouldn't seem so spectacular to some, but I am very happy with it's output as a Family History Book. It's called AncestryPress. It's free to Ancestry.com subscribers like the audio story-telling capability. I have found out that without the actual audio link, even ancestry.com subscribers can't find the audio tab on my Hague Family History Site. So here it is - http://trees.ancestry.com/fhs/home.aspx?tid=1567361&pid=&msg=ism - I sure would like to know if anyone can listen to it. It's all kind of a test for me too. You can make a comment at this blog.

After a very busy week at the Capitol after my last posting, I finally looked at some of the mail I'd received earlier in the week. Much to my dismay I found a summons to be a juror for the Grand Jury. This is not a simple little summons, evidently it entails a one year commitment - to report each Wednesday for 6 months, then every other Wednesday for the last 6 months. I called the Court and was advised to explain that I don't stay in Hawaii all year. I mailed all the receipts for my many months of upcoming family gatherings on the mainland, travels and tours. I served on a murder trial in 2005 and it was interesting, but difficult. I lasted two weeks or more altogether. We'll see how this summons turns out.

On a lighter note, I joined the "Solemates" hiking club for a walk in Downtown Honolulu. We gathered together around Ala Moana Shopping Center and walked down Queen St. to the old Mission House and Iolani Palace area, past the Capitol and on to St. Andrews Priory. One of the members is one of their official bell ringers and he gave us a demonstration (see picture on left). This isn't with the hand-held bells, mind you... but with eight big big cast bells in the church belfry. There is quite an art and a lot of sweat in the whole bell-ringing activity. Very interesting way up there in the belfry. We continued the "hike" to Aloha Marketplace where we ate. I went up to the top of the tower for the ever-inspiring views in all directions. I never get tired of watching the activities at Honolulu Harbor. Lucille gave me a ticket to the Honolulu International Spring Film Festival so with aching feet I drove over to the Dole Cannery theaters and watched a movie from India "Vanaja" - It wasn't the Ballywood musical I was expecting, but a very nice movie.

I'm keeping up with the genealogy podcasts on my iPod. With an active few days at the gym, I'm branching out to find other podcasts, one I just downloaded is by the Story Corps, a radio show on National Public Radio. The Story Corps drives around with an airstream trailer and interviews people for about 5 minutes to record some of their life for the National Archives, or somewhere... not too sure yet about it all. I guess they have thousands.

Next time I'll have to tell you about the "LostCousins" website. It's free for the next few days, so I spent all day today putting some data into it.