I completed my genealogy final on Saturday, which means I have a bit of a break until my fall classes start. Granted, the break is only a week, really. Remember how I said that I have a lot of on-campus meetings for my fall classes? On Saturday and Sunday, I have all-day meetings for LIBR 248: Beginning Cataloging and Classification. It’s not a required class, but my aunt has recommended that I take at least one cataloging class. I haven’t started looking at the course information yet. I can be quite detail-oriented (okay, detail-obsessed) at times, so hopefully that will come in handy for this course. At the end, I fully expect to be able to identify Dewey Decimal numbered drinks off the cuff. Or something.

Summer classes, had me a blast,
Summer classes, happened so fast…

(I’ll stop parodying Grease music now.)

Okay, sometimes (especially at the beginning of the semester) I think I’m crazy for taking classes over the Summer, but I had a lot of fun with them, especially the genealogy class. The amount of reading for it was pretty insane, though, with two chapters of the book a week (avg of 150 pages, maybe) plus other reading, and an assignment each week. And that was just the one class. I did learn more about formalizing my genealogy research, which is what I was hoping to learn in this class. I also learned a lot more about the crazy number of sources there are available for using in genealogy research.

One of the assignments for the class was to write a research report on an ancestor. I decided to research my father’s family, because I know a lot less about his side of the family than I do about mom’s. I was hoping to find out more about the Devine name and where that part of the family originated. Instead, I ended up learning a lot more about the Platte family - my paternal grandfather’s mother. I was able to trace them back to Wales, which is kind of neat. I’ve requested some birth certificates and other information from the UK in hopes of learning more. It’s exciting to take the time to do more research - in fact, to be required to do it, for class!

All that’s left of my summer classes is one assignment, a quiz, and a final exam. Then I have a couple weeks before my Fall classes begin. Unlike the Spring and Summer, in which none of my classes met in person (although my genealogy class met online once a week), I have a lot of in-person meetings for my Fall classes. I’ll be spending some Saturday mornings or afternoons in San Jose. Luckily, I know the way to San Jose.

I’m reading the introduction to Printed Sources, the primary book for my summer genealogy class. It’s pretty interesting so far. In discussing sources, it mentions that you should evaluate a book in various ways to determine if the book is a valid source. One way to evaluate the book is to evaluate the book’s sources, and I just imagined an infinite loop (or perhaps just a very deep stack) of evaluating a book by looking at its sources and evaluating books in the source list by evaluating their sources and…

I guess it would be hard to have a loop because if source A cites source B, then it’s unlikely that source B, or a source cited by B, will ever cite A because of timing. (I’m such a computer scientist sometimes.)

Yesterday, I visited the Santa Clara Family History Center as part of an assignment. The Family History Library in Salt Lake City, supported by the Latter-day Saints, has branches throughout the world that allow you to access various genealogy materials. I’ve been meaning to visit one of the local branches since I first moved here, and this finally gave me the push I needed. The people there were quite friendly and welcoming (not that I was expecting otherwise), and it was a nice little visit. One thing I really liked is that they had a scanner available so that people could scan the information they find instead of having to print it out. Yay for saving paper.

Here are two pictures from my visit:

Update on the Blackboard situation: I can post without problem on my machine at work, running Firefox 2.0.0.4 (same version as home). There must be some interaction between the plug-ins I have in Firefox at home, or something with the connection between home and SJSU. I haven’t had a chance yet to investigate more, but I will this weekend because having to post with IE is driving me batty.

Back to reading…

Recently, the school upgraded the Blackboard server, and I’m kind of cranky with the new version so far. In the older version, I didn’t have any problems using Firefox 2.0. However, it seems that there is something incompatible between Firefox and the new version. If I try to fill out a survey (like the one asking about what time is good for my genealogy class to meet each week) or start a new thread on a discussion board, Firefox freezes. If I then close it, I also have to go to the task manager and kill the process.

It looks as if it’s freezing when creating the text box. I poked around on the web a bit, trying to find a solution. I found a reference to the VTBE (Visual Text Box Editor) and thought that might be the problem, so I disabled it in my preferences on Blackboard. That didn’t seem to have an effect. For now, I filled out my survey and posted my introductions using Internet Explorer, but I’ll keep fiddling to try to get it to work with Firefox.

I’m also not very into the new layout for the discussion forum. I think it’s harder to scan and use. For example, before, I could browse the list and quickly see that there was a new message because of the yellow “new” image. Now, I have to scan a column of numbers. I also found, in looking through previous courses, that the list of forums is now paginated, so you don’t get all of them in one big list. That will make it more difficult to browse, I think.

So far, the experience for me has been less than stellar.