Genealogy Journal - 07/25/08

Friday was a different genealogy day - some blogging, some help for a colleague, a nice chat, and not much else, genealogy wise.

I was on the computer by 8 a.m., read my email and blogs, and then posted Making beautiful wall charts. I worked on Facebook for awhile, got ready to go out, and left at 9:45 to go to Marie's house to help with her FTM 2008 problem. She showed me the problem - she gets an error message before the program finishes installing. We Googled the error number, and found two mentions of it - one in a blog post and the other on the FTM Genforum board. The fix seemed to be to download and install Microsoft .NET 2.0 so we tried, and failed. When we tried to remove all of the .NET versions, it wouldn't work. so we found a cleaner that did the job, then downloaded .NET 2.0 and it installed. Then we tried to install FTM 2008 and it worked. Voila! We imported her database and went through some of the menus and screens and what not. When she tried to make a PDF file, her Adobe Reader bombed for lack of a DLL file that probably got wiped out in the whole process. Arrggghh. I went to lunch and the ban, and was home by 1 p.m.

Having nothing better to write about, I posted "New England Ancestors" TOC - Summer 2008. I checked Ancestry's new databases, and remembered that I had tried to put a query into Everton's Gen Helper the other day, and didn't have my password. They emailed it to me, and I used it and submitted my query, but I couldn't input some of the information because I don't have an active subscription. So I wrote Queries at Everton's Genealogical Helper. Linda wanted to use the computer, so I went in and took a nap while watching the news. When I awoke, we headed off to the San Diego Zoo at 4 p.m.

It was warm and bright, so we tried to stay in the shade. We took the Skyfari across to the polar bears, who were trying to stay in the shade too. Then we walked down to the hippos who were in the water, and the pandas who were sleeping, and it was time for dinner. We sat in the shade and enjoyed watching the little kids run around and whine and laugh and listen to the South American musicians playing "Let It Be." We ate, and I walked up to see the big cats, then came back and we went up on Monkey Mesa. We stopped and sat at Monkey Trails and watched the animals play, then went to see Clyde and his family in the orangutan exhibit. That was enough - we left at 7:30 and were home by 8.

I read my email and blogs, checked Facebook, emailed MM about the scanfest on Sunday, then had a nice 30 minute chat about all kinds of things with MM. Finally, this post, and I'm done for the night.

Genealogy today was only 6.0 hours - 0.5 hour doing email, 0.5 hour reading blogs, 1.5 hours writing blog posts, 2.5 hours helping Marie, 0.5 hour on Facebook, and 0.5 hour chatting with MM.