Category: Crankypantsing

Crankypantsing, Genealogy

Randomization Fun

Shelly

And by “fun,” I mean the opposite of enjoyable.

I’ve been using the unindexed Irish Parish Registers, via the catalog, at FamilySearch. But, they’re unindexed. And they’re kind of a pain to navigate, because disparate parishes are tossed together in the same microfilm set, and other parishes are split between sets. There may be a rhyme or reason to it, but I can’t figure it out.

These are fairly large image sets, too. The one I’m working on right now has 3500+ images. It’s important to be methodical and not lose your place. There are a couple of things that make this tolerable:

1. There are start and end images, created by FamilySearch, for each film within the record set. The start image has a bunch of metadata, including the diocese, parish, the date it was filmed, and the types of records contained. So Aughagower Parish, Diocese of Tuam, baptisms, filmed on 24 May 1984. And the structure should be fairly stable, so you can link to an image and have some expectation that someone else can follow it.

The end image just tells you you’re at the end of that particular film.

2. You can navigate from image to image by keying in the image number. So if you stop one day with image 1204, you can pick up the next day with image 1205. I’ve made master lists for each of the sets I’m searching, with a break-down of each film, the parish it covers, the record type, and the image numbers that correspond to it. So I know that I finished Aughagower Parish recently. Maybe.

This week I noticed that the images had been shuffled. Totally, completely, randomly shuffled. I have no idea what is what. Aughagower Parish should be contained in fiche 007768669, images 4-259. Only now? Those image numbers are meaningless. There’s no way to tell what parish any particular image corresponds to. If you look at image 188 in fiche 007768669, you should find a start image for Aughagower Parish marriages. Instead, it’s a page of baptisms from 1879-1880 from who knows what parish.

This is a giant mess.

ETA 4/13: I opened a support ticket with FamilySearch on 4/12, and it looks like the problem has been fixed, at least with fiche set 007768669. That was fast!

Crankypantsing

Strong Unrecommend

Shelly

I thought I’d be clever and clear my browser history. I navigate from the address bar a lot, and sometimes the drop-down menu gets cluttered. No big deal, right? But when I cleared my browser history, Firefox got hung up. I eventually force-quit the program, via task manager.

Huge mistake. When I restarted Firefox, it wouldn’t start in regular mode. Safe mode worked fine, but starting in regular mode made the program freeze before it even got to the start screen. Force quitting made n error message pop up. There was something wrong with the add-on container. A web search indicated it might be a Flash problem, but I was unable to fix it. One of our tech support people found a work-around. He created a new user profile, which seems to be working. So far, so good, at least.

Tech support is willing to do a little maintenance for Firefox, but if it breaks too badly, we are told to use Chrome instead. I really don’t want to use Chrome. I have a “one service from Google” policy, and that one service is Gmail.

I hope I don’t run into the same problem on my own machine. If I do, though, I’ll just switch to Opera. Opera isn’t supported at work, though. Hmf.

So, I strongly unrecommend doing what I did, whatever the hell I did.

Crankypantsing

Stay Confusing, Comcast

Shelly

Stay Confusing, Comcast

The progress bar shows more than half my April allotment has already been used, but I’m only at 15GB out of my theoretical (though never in the 9 years I’ve been a customer enforced) 250GB/month data cap.

Also upload and download speed is 0. But actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed, thankfully, because that’s just nonsense.

Crankypantsing, Photography

Nothing Is Ever Easy

Shelly

Two hours of aggravating troubleshooting, and Netflix has finally been achieved. #paininmyass

I bought my blu ray player years ago, and I recall having trouble getting it to connect over wi-fi then. I haven’t had Netflix or used the blu ray player in ages, and forgot. I re-subscribed to Netflix, before dumping cable, and I ran into the same crap again.

Ugh.

But after two hours of troubleshooting, I remembered I had an old cable modem in my box of computer junk. Huzzah! It’s ancient and flaky, so I’ll have to come up with a better plan soon, but for now, it works.

And now I can tell Comcast to GDIAF. (My bill for basic cable, phone, and internet went up to $250. It’s been slowly creeping up for years, but that is my limit. So I’m joining the 21st century and dropping it to just internet.)

Crankypantsing, Photography

Watching Paint Peel

Shelly

Peeled Paint

Four years ago, the paint in my bathroom started falling off the walls in sheets. Good times! I assumed at the time, because of the way it peeled, that a former tenant had used oil-based paint on the walls, then maintenance folks slapped a coat of builder beige latex over it all before I moved in, not realizing they were painting over oil paint.

I called the management office, they sent painters, I told the painters my theory, painters said they would scrape and sand everything down, then skim coat the whole thing with mud, then paint, and it would all be fine. I was dubious that the mud would stick to whatever was on the walls any better than the latex paint had. But what to I know? I only have a college degree that says I know stuff about paint, right? But it was not my circus, and it was not my monkeys.

The painters scraped, sanded, skimmed, and painted.

And guess what? Within a couple of months, the paint was peeling again. Not as badly as the first time, but bad enough. I decided to ignore it, though, because my faith in the painters was non-existent.

Then, a few months ago, the city rental inspector did their every-five-years inspection of my apartment complex. She did not like the peeling paint, oh no, she didn’t. So we had another round with the painters (a new crew this time). I explained what had happened the first time, and that I thought the walls needed to be primed before painting. Head painter guy said yes, they would prime them.

Did they prime the walls? Oh no, they did not. So guess what started to happen, just a few weeks after they were painted?

All Photos-3869

I’ve called the office twice now, to tell them that the paint is peeling AGAIN. I thought they might want to know before the city inspector comes back to do a re-check. Eventually the re-check will happen, but I doubt the bathroom walls will be fixed.

(Oh, and don’t even get me started on the godawful mudding job they did. Look at those lumps!)

Crankypantsing, Genealogy

More Ancestry Shenanigans

Shelly

1841 Census of England and Wales (Ancestry)
1841 Census of England and Wales limited by birthplace Ireland (Ancestry)

1841 Census of England and Wales (FamilySearch)
1841 Census of England and Wales limited by birthplace Ireland (FamilySearch)

If you use Ancestry, beware that whatever problems are causing searching to be slow as molasses, they are also making search results unreliable. Just for fun, I looked at the 1841 England and Wales census for all people born in Ireland. Ancestry returned 208 hits. That cannot be right. Sure, it was pre-famine, but there had to have been more Irish folks living in England at that time.

I did the same search at FamilySearch, with much more believable results.

You would expect some variation in total numbers, because of human error. Ancestry and FamilySearch have their own transcriptions, and those are full of fun mistakes. The numbers should be in the same ballpark, though. The results from both searches for the 1851 England census are generally in line.

1851 Census of England and Wales (Ancestry)
1851 Census of England and Wales limited by birthplace Ireland (Ancestry)

1851 Census of England and Wales (FamilySearch)
1851 Census of England and Wales limited by birthplace Ireland (FamilySearch)

So clearly the problem is affecting random searches and is not consistent across the board.

Crankypantsing, Ladybusiness

Default

Shelly

Male Pelvis

This image is making the rounds of Facebook. It’s kind of amusing, until you look closely. Likely an honest mistake. I doubt whoever made the image even realizes that male and female pelvises are anatomically different. But they are, and this is just one more example of how male bodies are the default.

In this case, it’s exasperating but harmless. It can be dangerous to women, though, when we only study men’s bodies and then assume that women’s bodies behave just like men’s. Sometimes they do, but often they don’t.

Crankypantsing

Seriously, Agatha?

Shelly

Seriously, Agatha?

Sweep, sweeping, swept. The curving bits are only marginally better. Was she sleepwriting? Was her editor drunk?

I don’t read Agatha Christie often. The racism, sexism, and classism may be dismissable as typical for her social group at the time, but the older I get, the more appalling they become. But it was $1.99 in the Kindle
store, so I thought, “What the hell?”.

The hell, indeed. It has plenty of our old friends, sexism, racism, and classism, along with some new isms. It also contains some shockingly bad writing.

Crankypantsing, Genealogy

Adventures in Genealogy

Shelly

Minnesota State Population Census Schedule
1895 Minnesota State Population Census Schedule

Today’s adventures in genealogy haven’t been very exciting. I did turn up a great-great uncle who apparently spent some time in a mental hospital. (Lots of those in my family tree. Eeep!)

I’m not sure what the 0 in front of Alfred’s name indicates (or whether it’s an O or 0). It’s a code, and it surely has a specific meaning. For now I’m assuming it was used for folks who are not actually present in the household at the time of enumeration, but who the enumerator felt needed to be recorded.

I wish there were a way to find out more about why our ancestors were institutionalized, just to satisfy my own nosy curiosity. Alfred was supposedly a patient at what was then known as Fergus Falls Insane Asylum, which doesn’t look to have been a horrific place, but pictures can be deceiving. I’d love to know why he was there, and for how long. (The first photo was taken just five years after the above census, so it’s roughly contemporary with when Alfred was a patient there.)

Fergus Falls State Hospital circa 1900
Fergus Falls State Hospital circa 1900

Fergus Falls State Hospital
Fergus Falls State Hospital

Other than that, the most exciting part of my day was having a minor brain hemorrhage over how Legacy handles federal level census citations. It creates a master source for federal censuses at the county level. Totally bizarre. And I couldn’t get an explanation for why that was a good idea, when I asked about it in the Legacy user group.

The reason it’s a problem (in my opinion), is that instead of one master source for the entire US census for any given census year, Legacy will create a master for every single county. You could end up with hundreds of master records for every census year.

Why don’t they put the state and county level information in the source detail, where any logical person would expect it to be? That way you would have just one master source for each census year, the way the good lord intended.

I expect this is a “different people think differently” issue. Person A will solve a problem in a way that would never occur to Person B, but both will end up at the same end point eventually.

I wish someone could explain to me what benefit there is in Legacy’s handling of census master sources. Surely there has to be one? And it’s within the realm of possibility that there’s a good reason to do it their way, but so far, no one can explain it. The responses I’ve gotten have mostly been in the vein of, “You don’t have to do it their way.” No shit, Sherlock.