May 14, 2007

My days are filled with discovering more about internet resources for family history and genealogy. Last week I was preparing for Saturday's Honolulu County Genealogy Society meeting where I helped discuss "Ancestry.com." Our President, Tom Bopp, does a wonderful job getting all the technology together, and many of the 30 members who were present had their laptops connected via Clear Channel wireless and could follow the presentation projected on a screen from Tom's laptop and a projector.

I showed an example of ancestrypress which is the part of Ancestry.com where you can print out in "book" form, the genealogical information/trees/stories/photos, etc that you have at your family history site. It's quite innovative right now, but there will be many more places on the web that offer working online and all your work is available on the Web.... Web 2 ... it's called now.

I even tested recording the meeting with my iPod and a special microphone attachment. I just set it on the table, and the Belkin microphone picked up the whole meeting. I downloaded the hour of audio from the iPod to my computer, then edited it with my Roxio "Sound Editor" software. I'm learning how to use this software, which is a little more complex than in the last version. I split the resulting 52 minutes of audio into three parts and e-mailed Part 1 to Harriet, who was unable to attend the meeting. Part 1 lasted 19 minutes and totaled 8.8 MB in the e-mail attachment. Only takes about 2 minutes to upload. AOL is only able to upload 16MB in an attachment.

Many from the Genealogy Society meeting (May 12th) went to the Tree Tops Restaurant again for lunch. This is in the rain forest area in the back of Manoa Valley by the University of Hawaii. After the lunch we had a board meeting there, which was the first for our new board. I wore a beautiful orchid lei that my daughter, Alisa, in Arizona, had delivered to me for Mother's Day, from a local florist. It was beautiful.

My fellow travelers on last year's trip to Mongolia came over to my house May 10th where we watched more of my videotape from that fabulous adventure. We watched a couple hours of our cavorting around with all the camels, goats, and sheep and trudging up sand dunes in the Gobi Desert. We also watched Joung's photos from her recent trip to Bali. We just put her CD into the CD player and watched her photos as a slide show. Phyllis, has just returned from a Windjammer sailing vacation, and Renate just returned from a trip to Samoa. Jim goes to Baton Rouge every three months to care for his elderly mother. It's tough to get us all together in one spot at the same time as we're all over the globe.