Tech Overload

For the last two days I have been at "school" and it was hard. We started at 8 AM on Friday and I sat right through until 5:15 pm on Friday afternoon. Actually if you count last Saturday, March 7th you could say that I have been "in class" 3 out of the last 8 days. Going back to March 7th I was at The South Davis Genealogy Fair at Bountiful High. This is always held the week before or very occasionally the week after the BYU Technology Genealogy Conference. Many of the same speakers present in Bountiful at a reduced price because they are getting here on BYU's dime and then they use the days between to research at the FHL. The Family Search folks are always front and center at Bountiful and so Vickie and I decided that we would do all the New FamilySearch classes that were offered so I could use the BYU Conference for other area's of information.

For those of you who don't know, the New Family Search is the wave of the future as far as the LDS Church is concerned. PAF (personal ancestral file) is a thing of the past and will no longer be supported or updated. That has meant that the for profit companies have really been scrambling because to everyone's amazement (read that programers for the FH dept) the biggest majority of genealogy people do not want to up load their information to the web for all to see. That is the path that people will use if they choose to use NewFamilySearch and the large majority of users said absolutly not, for a variety of reasons. For my ownself, I don't want half researched information out where just anyone can see it. I put some information out on the internet (through Pedigree Resource File and the old Ancestral File) years ago and have seen it mutilated by what I refer to a "gatherers" (folks who don't research, they just go around the internet gathering up and combining information). How ever, I have posted small files and have been grateful for others who do the same with the idea that we can find others who are working in the same area and perhaps share information. So I wanted (along with everyone else who was attending these conferences) to see and compare which program worked best with NewFamily Search (hear after refered to as NFS), so getting better acquainted with NFS on March 7th was the goal. I still don't like it, but fodder for another place and time.

This weekend though, was the fun days! Vickie and I have been going to this conference since it began about 12 years ago. She has missed one and I have missed one, but not the same ones. We were laughing that the first time we went to hear Alan Mann in @ 1996-97 we came out of the class asking eachother if he was speaking English or if he was from another planet because we didn't understand more than half his vocabulary and most of the stuff he was showing us seemed like it was coming right out of science fiction. We went together to his classes in 2007 and went right to our lap tops to try out some of his suggestions, it was a LOL moment as to how far we had come.

Well lots of preface, now the good stuff.
Does anyone recognize Optoma, 3M MPro110, ShowWX, Samsung (beat them all to the punch anouncing in Feb9th about a phone they are working on for release this spring) they are making phone that do all the things the IPhone does, web search, email test, camera, GPS, anotate photos with date and place, and make phone calls, BUT this thing will allow you to down load your Power Point or Slide show to the phone or will connect to a web site where you have stored it and then project it on to a screen, white board etc. and give your PP. No lugging around a computer and hoping for a decent projector. Thanks but I am doing well to learn to text thank you.

Do any of you know what RSS is? (Mann says "really simple syndication" and other things) Basically it is a way to manage numerous blogs that you might want to belong to. You get an instant message that "so & so" who you have stipulated to be notified about has posted something and you go to your blog manager and see if it is relevant. NetVibe was one he previewed and mentioned ProtoPage and PageFlakes in the syllabus.

Carnivals were something I need to check into more because I saw an immediate use for them. They are an "event" sort of like a magazine that several Bloggers get together and publish. Sort of taking the place of the journals that organizations used to publish quarterly to get out the most up to date information in medicine, biology, business what ever. I would like a place to publish currant research for others who are looking for the same people/area to see and help analyze, give me some feed back and tell me if I am barking up the wrong tree. These allow images and sort of an instant messaging format, so they seemed to be a good place to do what I was talking about. Vickie and I have used eachother for years but it would be really great to have someone who really "knew the territory" to help with specifics.

Of course FaceBook and Blogs were a big part of the presentation but there are always several "Buck Rogers" type of sites also.

Runkeeper; for joggers it will track the duration,distance, pace speed, altitude and path of your typical walk, run or ride. It will calculate caloric out put. You can auto tweet your location,data and progress to your Twitter pals with the idea that they will be holding you accountable.

And last but not least Wiki's Which even Dad and I knew about.

I also took a class on old photos, one on using my digital camera for taking pictures of films and books at the library instead of making copies on paper. Using MS One note for a research log, too learning curve intensive but some great suggestions to add to what I already do.

A couple of classes on Google where really great from a guy named Dan Lynch who wrote a book about using Google in all aspects. He gave some great search stratagies that I didn't know about and then the one on Google Books was a good refresher and I did learn a few new things on the page.

All in all it was a good weekend. I told Dad my brain was trying to shut down about 11 am on Friday but I pressed on and it came back to life by afternoon. I need to do this more often to keep it tuned up.

There were a couple of things you may see in December that were a result of things I saw, so brush up on your family history, you'll be playing in teams of 2. More about that later.

Love MOM