Audiobook finished

At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Public domain audiobook by Librivox

Edgar should stick to Mars. I can buy someone being magically teleported to Mars before I can buy gravity flipping around at midpoint through a hollow shell world, and explanations that gravity is "slightly less" on the inside of the sphere. I don't think Edgar took a lot of calculus in school. I can suspend disbelief as far as magic, or even to hyperspace, but not to trying to stretch Newtonian physics that far.

An OK story, and relatively short, but I think he was just warming up for Barsoom which he wrote a few years later. I *might* give Pellucidar a listen, since the two together might make a decent book.

The Librivox recording was OK. No glaring mispronunciations, and a fairly straight reading (not acted, not much emotion - I'm OK with that, FWIW, I can insert my own, same as when I'm reading from print).

Starting over

I have a genealogy database with something like 3800 individuals in it. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago I threw up my hands and walked away, because I became aware that a not insignificant amount of the data was contradictory, and I did not have proper citations for much of any of the data.

Tonight I reloaded the FTM software, restored the old database as a reference, and started a new file by merging my immediate family back in again.

Now I've got to start talking with people again on this stuff. I have a few reference works written by relatives that I can use, and those actually take at least my side of the family back probably 15 generations or so, I think to the 1600s in some cases. I spent a lot of hours going through one of those books several years ago, but I think I'd better do it again; I don't think it'd be a good idea to just bulk-import from a dodgy database, even if I *think* I know what's there.

I went out to see if I should buy a new version of Family Tree Maker. Check out the Amazon reviews on Family Tree Maker 2008. Wow, I've seldom seen such hatin'. Apparently they thought that taking the leading program in the field (by number of copies sold anyway) and completely rewriting it from scratch would be a good idea. Looks like mainly they managed to write a big stinkin' pile. So FTM 2006 is likely to be the pinnacle for quite a while.

The worst thing about reading those reviews is this: check the number of people who say they moved their data to the new version and now they're locked in. It's clear that they don't have backups. I know from talking to some others who are casually doing genealogy that hardly any of them do backups. This is honestly completely unfathomable to me. They spend hundreds to thousands of hours doing this, and they can't spend 5 minutes and 2 bucks for a floppy disk, or $10 for a thumb drive?

I shouldn't be surprised; nearly every month word filters down to me of a CPA who had no backups of his client data, which represents tens of thousands of hours of data entry; they can't spend $500 for a couple of backup drives to back up their livelihood.