Saturday, April 25, 2009

Genealogy Journal - 04/25/09

The seminar day was here and I was ready! I never sleep well the night before a presentation, and I didn't last night.

I was up early, had breakfast and came in after 7 a.m. to read email, read blog posts and Twitter and make sure I was ready for the day. The post Working in RootsMagic 4 - Post 15: Creating Lists - Part 4 went up this morning but I wrote it last night. I wrote the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Where's Your Date Calculator? post and scheduled it for the afternoon since I was going to be busy all afternoon. Went in and got cleaned up, came back and scrolled through the presentation again, gathered up the research problem statements and left at 9:20 for the library.

We couldn't get into the library early for some reasons, so had to set up after the 10 a.m. opening. Gary got the projector and computer hooked up, I got the presentations transferred to his computer, and we started the seminar on time. After a short introduction, Gary introduced me and I spent 80 minutes going through 120 slides about "Doing a Reasonably Exhaustive Search." I don't know if the audience was exhausted, but I was! I had many compliments on the talk, which I really appreciated! We had lunch - I talked to several people out on one of the benches in the sun. At 1 p.m., we set up the table on the stage and started the "Solving Your Brickwall Problems" segment of the seminar - Gary was moderator and four of us were panelists. Six problems were presented verbally and on charts on the screen by the "owners" of the problems, and the panelists provided help and guidance, and commiseration, on the problems. I will post on the two sessions later. This was over at 3 p.m., and I was home by 3:45 p.m. I read everything, and went in for a nap and to watch TV. We had dinner and I spent a while working on the "Best of..." post for Sunday.

At 7 p.m., I went in and watched my Padres lose 10-1 to the Pirates in a terrible game (for me anyway - worst pitched game of the year by us, and best pitched game by an opponent). I read the paper, then read my book, toyed with the idea of typing seminar notes on the laptop, but didn't. The game was mercifully over at 9:45, and I came in to finish the "Best of ..." post, write this and read everything.

Genealogy today was 9.0 hours - 0.5 hour doing email, 0.5 hour reading blog posts, 0.5 hour on Twitter/Facebook, 2.0 hours writing blog posts, and 5.5 hours on the CVGS seminar.

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