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In a perfect world of the distant future, man may someday invent and perfect a method for very long-term data archival. Unfortunately that is only a dream for now, but there are practical methods which you can begin to employ immediately to preserve your genealogy data. The key is to begin using these steps now and make them a regular part of your family history research. The majority of these steps are designed to deal with the loss of your digital data at some point in the future and also to preserve your paper documentation. Chances are that you’ve already spent hundreds or even thousands of hours doing genealogy research. Don’t put off taking these easy steps any longer. Your cost in time and dollars is small compared to your existing investment. You already know how valuable and meaningful your research is – more so than anyone else who is now alive. If you really want it to survive because of the treasure it is, you have to make it very easily identifiable as a treasure and both easy to store and view. Just like your genealogy can’t remain solely as a digital asset and survive long term, it also can’t be boxes of files or papers that someone in the future may not appreciate or understand their significance either. As a result, your strategy must be to make your genealogy research something that is easily identifiable, easy to understand and enjoy, and significant enough that future generations will treat it as a treasure. So let’s review 7 easy steps you can begin using today. (more…)
Ancestry Graphics and Printing has a GREAT article about preserving digital information. Whether you’re a genealogist or keeping track of warranties for your appliances, the digital information degrades too! Remember that history started with the WRITTEN word–nothing preserves your data as well as a good transcript stored carefully.
Come back next week for their solutions! (more…)
TURN ON CAPTIONS BELOW TO VIEW YOUTUBE’S AUTOMATIC CAPTIONS (more…)
Thanks to Coding Horror 
for this review.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/06/whatever-happened-to-voice-recognition.html
My car was broken into and I called the Houston Police Department to leave a report. It’s all automated and organized these days, so I left a message and gave them all the information about my car. When they called back, here’s what Google Voice thought they said:
Yes this is missing the harbor. Police Department.
I’m trying to get a hold of Mary.
I’ll call back in a little bit and I do need the information on the vehicle.
Once upon a time there lived a vain Emperor whose only worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes. He changed clothes almost every hour and loved to show them off to his people. Word of the Emperor’s refined habits spread over his kingdom and beyond. Two scoundrels who had heard of the Emperor’s vanity decided to take advantage of it. They introduced themselves at the gates of the palace with a scheme in mind. “We are two very good tailors and after many years of research we have invented an extraordinary method to weave a cloth so light and fine that it looks invisible. As a matter of fact it is invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality.” (more…)
NEWS RELEASE
September 20, 2012
ACES announces agreement
with The Poynter Institute
ACES announced today that it has entered into a training alliance agreement with The Poynter Institute’s News University. As part of the agreement, Poynter NewsU will provide discounted training for ACES members in exchange for ACES contributions on several Poynter NewsU training initiatives. (more…)
If I had $1 for every time I hear “look what that cat drug in”
GRAMMAR GIRL SAYS: First, let me be clear – the correct form of the word is “dragged.” I should have said, “I dragged myself over to the condo.” “Drag” is a regular verb, which means you add “d,” “ed,” or in this case “ged” to make it past tense. “Drag” becomes “dragged.” (more…)
Sift the debris of a young writer’s education, and you find dreadful things — strictures, prohibitions, dos, don’ts, an unnatural and nearly neurotic obsession with style, argument and transition. Yet in that debris you find no traces of a fundamental question: where do sentences come from? This is a philosophical question, as valuable in the asking as in the answering. But it’s a practical question, too. Think about it long enough, and you begin to realize that many, if not most, of the things we believe about writing are false.
This astonishing editorial can be found at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/where-do-sentences-come-from/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20120814
In reviewing your responses to our question What do you LOVE about transcription, I’m struck by your thirst for knowledge! I thought the overwhelming response we’d get would be the ability to work at home. Instead, everybody is talking about how much they love to learn.
This is a fast-changing world we live in, and it’s a good time to be driven by a love to learn. I’ve been reading a book by a gentleman who was the Director of Development at Google–Getting Organized in the Age of Google. (more…)