I tried the CrossOver / RootsMagic combination (as suggested by the loyal readership), but couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. It worked, and opened my old RootsMagic data file without incident, but…it was ugly. With no antialiasing, everything looked grainy & harsh. I didn’t like the intrusion of Windows into OS X: redundant directories, with silly names (‘My Pictures’, ‘My Documents’, etc.). I couldn’t synchronize with my iPhone (nor, I suppose, with the as-yet hypothetical iPad), so my data would have been trapped on the MacBook.

And emulation layers just aren’t sustainable. Sooner or later, you have to write a native app, or lose your customers. That’s what happened to Quicken, and – alas – that’s what is happening to RootsMagic. If/when they get around to releasing a native OS X app, I’ll be very interested. But for now, I’m back to Reunion 9.

(The folks at Leister released Reunion 10 this week. Unfortunately, I bought Reunion 9 about three weeks too early to get the free upgrade. Oops. I think I’ll pass on 10 for a while, and get used to 9 first.)

I’ve decided that diving into data (re-) entry is the wrong approach. First, I want to catalog all my documents: birth certificates, marriage licenses, that sort of thing. I have quite a pile of them, and I want to create source records for them all in Reunion.

But Reunion’s default source templates are unsatisfying. I need to create a custom template, with the right fields in it – but that means I have to figure out what the right fields actually are. The Reunion documentation is spectacularly useless on this point. It tells me how to create a source template and add fields to it; it even tells me how to create custom fields, to add to my custom source template; but it has nothing to say on which fields I should have.

For that, apparently, I need a book such as Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian by Elizabeth Shown Mills, only $16.95 from Amazon. That might be a better investment than dropping $40 on CrossOver.

(I hear the loyal readership, suggesting: “Maybe the library has a copy.” They do – the Archives at the Urbana Free Library has two copies, neither of which can be checked out. Since most of my genealogizing – if that’s a word – happens at home, when the library is closed, a reference-only copy isn’t much use to me.)

Today, I was asked a direct question and gave a direct answer: I believe that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

…and there was much discussion. The talking heads talked, the chattering classes chattered, everybody had an opinion.

I wondered: Why this? And why now? The obvious answer: because it’s an election year.

President Obama’s statement won’t change any minds on the Republican side: they loathe him, nothing he could say or do will change that. Some few Democrats might take offense, but it seems likely to charge up the more progressive wing of the party & produce a net increase in votes come November.

Never one to turn up my nose at free stuff, I downloaded Portal & installed it on the iMac. I had a grand time playing it – though I proved somewhat less dextrous than the game’s designers seem to have expected.

Portal turned out to be a gateway drug: since then, I’ve accumulated several more games (Half-Life 2 and its sequels, plus Team Fortress 2). I even bought a game from the OS X app store.

That last one didn’t turn out so well. I ended up deleting it.

I’ve been wanting to play Portal 2, which looked interesting; but it cost $20, way out of impulse-buy territory. So I waited, checking Valve’s daily-deal page as often as I remembered.

My patience paid off: yesterday’s deal was Portal 2, $6.79. (Odd price….) I fired off an order, and bought a second copy as a gift for Jake.

(Portal 2 is an11GB download. I had to leave it running overnight.)

It’s a nice game, though it promises to be even more of a challenge. But all is not joy in Muddville – Jake installed his gift copy, and it refused to run. The iMac’s video hardware is unsatisfying.

Sorry, Jake.

• Chain letters: “If you’re a true friend, you will copy this into your status RIGHT NOW.”
• Political and/or religious sloganizing, generally as an image with text pasted into it. (Jeff Duntemann calls these bumper stickers.)
• Links to music videos, generally a dozen or more at a time. “Here’s my playlist for this afternoon.”

I’d consider switching to an online service that somehow manages to avoid these, but there is none (and – human nature being what it is – never will be).

Clever terrorists, thought I.

Then I renembered news reports from last year, of porn videos found in the compound of newly-deceased terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Not such an ascetic after all, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, said the reporters.

I wonder if anybody checked Osama’s porn stash for hidden Evil Plans^(tm)….

Update: As it turns out, the terrorist group in question was the big one, the great bogeyman of the 21st century, al Qaeda.

I started with Family Tree Maker (doesn’t everybody?). Honestly, it’s been too long to remember much about FTM, aside from a certain annoyance that it nagged me to ‘share’ my data with them, so they could sell it to their other customers.

After a while, I switched to Personal Ancestral File. I used PAF for a long time. It was…adequate, no better than that. (PAF was my first experience with Mormon-centric genealogy software. Ever since, in every application I’ve used, I’ve had to find & turn off all mention of temple ordinances, sealing-to-whoever, etc., etc. I don’t do any of that, I’m not interested, I don’t want to see it.)

In 2006, I bought the iMac, which presented a problem: PAF was Windows only. After a bit of research, I switched to Reunion: supposedly, the best OS X genealogy application available. But Reunion fell somewhat short of adequate, and I never did get very far with it.

In 2009, I bought the netbook, which – since it came with Windows XP – presented new options. After a bit of experimentation, I settled on RootsMagic. I like RootsMagic, it’s a good match to the way I (want to) do genealogy. I set about recreating my genealogy database, recording even more information than before and with proper source citations on everything. Life was good.

Then, last December, I bought a MacBook Pro and spoiled everything. The iMac went to Jake, the netbook went to Sam, and I was back to using Reunion. I even upgraded to the latest version (Reunion 9), which wasn’t particularly cheap.

This afternoon, doing a little data entry with Reunion, I realized: I don’t like this program.

The screen layout is ugly, data entry is cumbersome. Some date fields accept free-form dates, others don’t. There’s no way to record an event – e.g., residence, military service, etc. – that spans a range of dates. Source management & citation are pretty feeble, compared to RootsMagic.

So I’m done with Reunion, and the search for a suitable replacement is on.

Akers, Bob burnisher Anderson r4076 Delaware

A comment from Lisa cleared up the mystery:

Dad did go in, serve his ‘hitch’, and get out. He played minor league baseball for a while, for a Cubs field team I believe, but when that didn’t pan out he re-enlisted in the Army and stayed until his retirement in roughly 1975.

Today, I had a look at Ancestry.com’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs records, and found an entry confirming Lisa’s story:

Name:              Bob Akers
Branch 1:	   ARMY
Enlistment Date 1: 7 Jan 1949
Release Date 1:    6 Apr 1956
Branch 2:          ARMY
Enlistment Date 2: 13 Nov 1957
Release Date 2:    31 Jul 1972

(Is this as unusual as it seems? I used to think that people who left the Army stayed out, but now I’m wondering how many of them re-enlist after a year or two.)

Most of my e-books came from Amazon, but I have a growing number of e-books from O’Reilly (generally acquired when their deal-of-the-day was both interesting and priced significantly below $10). That’s been something of a problem, because getting O’Reilly’s books into the Kindle required fooling with USB cables, manual file copying, etc., etc. I’m much too lazy for all that.

As it turns out, Amazon’s manage-your-Kindle page has a few (new?) features that greatly simplify things. I have 5GB of online ‘personal document storage’; even better, there’s a Send-to-Kindle app for OS X. I installed it on the macbook this morning, and used it to upload all my non-Amazon e-books. (They occupy a mere .1MB of my quota.) The Kindle automatically downloaded them the first time I powered it up: very convenient.

It would be nice if I could also download them to the Kindle app on the MacBook, but apparently that’s not possible. (Yet?)

So now I can read my O’Reilly books on the Kindle and the iPhone, and have all my annotations, etc., synchronized. That’s nice.

I saw one of these last year, at State St. & Fox Dr.; now there are two of them, at the far corner of the old Hobby Lobby parking lot.

Looks like people are still falling for the scam, too.

Honestly, are people really so gullible, that they’ll hand over their property to any fool who says he’s running a charity? And is their reading comprehension really so poor, that they’ll pile their donations on the ground immediately in front of the sign that says, “Please do not leave any items outside this bin”?

Sometimes I find the human race rather disappointing.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Ignoring for now the 17th-century commas (which to this 21st-century reader make no sense at all), the important question is: Who decided that ‘Arms’ should refer exclusively to hand-held devices that propel pieces of metal out the end of a tube?

Surely the 2nd Amendment confers upon me the right to ‘keep and bear’ an F-22, or a hydrogen bomb. If not, why not?