Back to my Roots

August 4, 2025

Lately, I’ve started picking at my genealogy again—hence the oh-so-clever title of this post. It all began with updating the software I use, which was several versions behind. The creator, Darrin Lythgoe, has clearly been much busier than I have, continuing to pack new features into the TNG software.

Next, I dove into all the “places” I’ve recorded, working on standardizing the naming conventions (see the GEDCOM 5.6 PLACE_NAME definition if you have an uncontrollable urge to know what convention I settled on). I also updated most entries to include GPS coordinates where possible. This part is still a work in progress. At the moment, there are 886 places defined—so yeah, it’s going to take a while.

Most recently, I’ve been tackling the thumbnails. Back in 2003, I thought 50×50 pixels was just fine. In 2025? Not so much. They’ve now nearly doubled to a luxurious 96×96 pixels, which means in many cases you can actually tell what you’re looking at. Sadly, I’m missing the original source images for quite a few, so some thumbnails are still stuck in the early 2000s. If you have any old pictures of folks in my Roots section, feel free to send them my way!

Lastly, the “organization” of my research files are… let’s just say, aspirational. Which may explain why I can’t track down some of those original images in the first place. While this won’t show up on the site right away, maybe—if I come up with a better system—it’ll lead to some indirect improvements here.

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Piddlin’

June 24, 2025

I’ve been picking at the web site a bit lately. I updated the genealogy software to the latest version. I think I was two versions behind so hopefully there’s a bunch of cool new stuff but I’ve not yet had much of a chance to mess with it. I also fixed the google maps stuff that it uses. In addition just an assortment of other tweaks. For example the copyright footer now goes up to 2025. Amazing, no?

That’s pretty much it. Nothing too exciting but something’s better than nothing I suppose.

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Hey There!

June 2, 2025

Just my triennial check to see if I still have a blog that works. Turns out it’s still here! I won’t make any promises to try and be a little more active here. That never works. I’m giving some thought to making some updates to the Roots sections. I’m quite a few versions behind it would appear! We’ll see how / if that goes.

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Morning: Nov 10

November 10, 2022

So I’ve had some sort of character encoding issue here at the ol’ website that I’ve been dealing with. After a little investigation it seemed to only affect the last few posts so I manually edited them after tweaking a configuration file to which hopefully makes it clear to WordPress, my database, and anything else involved that, yes, UTF-8 everywhere. Please and thank you.

As I was editing those posts I was like, good lord this is all very depressing. I promise I’m generally not so morose though it certainly appears that way. Maybe I’m only motivated to type out a bunch of nonsense when I’m in a mood. I’ll try and do better about that. Assuming, that is, that I begin writing here with any regularity. Wouldn’t bet the ranch on that.

Also realized I had wrote about my hiatus from working back in Feb of ’21 but neglected to write anything down about my return. Maybe I’ll write something longer at a later date but for now just mention that I’ve been back at the keyboard since July of this year and really enjoying being back. I actually started fiddling around early this year with some microcontroller and IoT development and it was a blast. Especially working so close to the metal. I think it rekindled that spark. Though I’m pretty far away from the metal in my current role at work, it’s been very rewarding nevertheless. 

Alright, I’m going to go do some more tidying up around here. There are something like 300 broken links that I’m slowly going through and fixing or removing for some reason. 

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Still Alive

November 5, 2022

Every now and again I’m like, oh right I have a blog. Like when you’re watching Twitter implode and wondering whether or not it’s worth caring about and if an alternative should be considered. That equals: Oh right, I have a blog.

So, Twitter. These days, or the the last several years really, Twitter is the place I go if I’m in a pretty good mood and want to do something about that. That’s what it feels like anyway. I expect that’s by design or perhaps simply the natural progression of any collection of humans. Nothing fuels engagement like outrage. And I’m inclined to think that’s just the way that people work. They naturally begin to coalesce into these groups and, well George Carlin said it best when it comes to groups:

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you’re really looking.

– George Carlin

There are still times where Twitter doesn’t really have an equal. Live events and so forth like sports, breaking news stories, Apple announcements, awards ceremonies (if that’s your thing). Otherwise, not a whole lot. It was way better back in the day when it was just a bunch of nerds. I’m having an old man yells at cloud moment.

I’ve given Mastodon a try hoping it might recapture some of what made Twitter so much fun in the early days. Several times in fact, but I’m just not feeling it. Maybe that’s the the thing they need to push them into the mainstream. My skepticism that is. I think I also said similar things about iPods, iPhone, reality TV… Trump. Actually I had my doubts about Twitter too, way back in 2007.

Anyway, so Twitter is a slow motion car crash right now and we’ll see where that all winds up. Meanwhile the universe spins on.

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