June 2007 – Yak & Natter

Family trees

I did quite a bit of work on my family tree years ago and bought a copy of Family Tree Maker at the time. Since then I’ve installed it on machine after machine until now, when I have a mac and don’t want to install parallels just to run a very old version of FTW. Instead I downloaded a copy of MacFamilyTree which is quite a pleasant application, and works well with the GED file exported from FTW, but seems to be short on a couple of useful features whilst still in demo mode, and until I know what those features are like I don’t particularly want to spend $50.

Yesterday Aral twittered about Geni and Richard quickly sent me the link. It looks like quite a nice way to get a quick visualisation of your family tree, and is very usable, allowing you to invite other members of your family to contribute. Unfortunately for me there is no way to import GEDCOM files yet and until then it won’t become a usable solution as I’m not about to retype 150 or so peoples data in. Sigh!

Recipe book index rant

I was looking in a recipe book for the recipe for moussaka. I knew I’d made moussaka before, and I was convinced that this was the correct book. I looked in the index and couldn’t find it listed, I flicked through the book and didn’t find it. Then I remembered, the recipe was called “red bean moussaka”. I looked in the index under red and there it was.

This isn’t the only recipe book to have this problem, in my experience recipe book indexes are often hopeless, in fact at least one recipe book doesn’t have one (preferring instead to list every recipe in the table of contents).

So, what should the index contain? I’m happy for the index not to divide food into sections – i.e. starters, main, vegetable etc as long as they do that in chapters or something. For me, the index should contain a list of food stuffs, and every recipe in which it is a major ingredient, so:

lamb
– moussaka
– rogan josh
– roast
etc
thus allowing me to find recipes based on what I have to hand.

Twitter

Some of my non-Twitter friends are incredulous at my use of Twitter. I thought I’d better explain.

I don’t think Twitter is anything like blogging (or microblogging). I don’t think of it as IM, although you sometimes get into IM-ish exchanges. What does it do?

Well, there have been a couple of interesting spontaneous group pub trips, although how spontaneous I don’t know because people go to the pub on a Friday night anyway. What I have found is that I’ve got a sense of getting to know people—people who I meet from time to time anyway but don’t normally get any kind of extended involvement with (weak ties, Tipping Point fans). And I’m enjoying that a great deal. This familiarization is almost certainly an illusion to some degree, because meatspace is so important for really getting to know someone. Perhaps it’s just another social lubrication. Like beer.

Krypto the Superdog

Whilst at the gym this morning, one of the screens was showing BBC2 and more specifically Krypto the Superdog. The gym has a couple of screens, and this morning the other screen was showing MTV and the sound from this was being piped out. This led to me having a moment of realisation, as this was one of those cartoons where you don’t actually need to hear the voices and soundtrack to know what is going on, meaning that you could use such a cartoon for language studies, as you could pick up the story without having to understand every word. Thanks to Mike who sits opposite me at work for finding the video clip :-).