What I Do and What I Use

Thomas MacEntee over at GeneaBloggers started a new meme today. This is meant to help everyone know what kind of technologies are out there to aid in Genealogy research. Here’s my list.

Hardware: Dell XPS 400. IntelĀ® PentiumĀ® D CPU 2.80GHz/2.79GHz / RAM: 4 GB / Second Hard Drive: 1.5 TB Western Digital | Dell Inspiron 1525 Laptop

External Storage: Western Digital 1TB My Book | 4GB Data Traveler Thumb Drive

Online Storage: I back some things up to Mediafire, but I need to check out other options.

Backup: Right now, I back up all my digital files to CDs periodically

Firewall: Norton 360 Smart Firewall

Virus Protection: Norton 360

Spyware: Norton 360, Ad-Aware (free version)

File Cleaner: Norton 360, Ad-Aware (free version), CCleaner

Printer: Kodak ESP-3 All in One (Print, Scan, Copy)

Phone: LG enV Touch: Verizon Wireless

Mobile Media: Laptop/Phone/ iPod Nano 4th Generation

Music Player: iPod Nano 4th Generation

Car Audio: Toyota Factory Installed CD Player

eBook Reader: Don’t have a portable. Use my computers. (Kindle for PC, Microsoft Reader, Adobe Digital Editions)

Browser: Firefox (Default), Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer (only to test websites)

Blog: WordPress and sometimes Windows Live Writer

RSS: Google Reader

FTP: SmartFTP (licensed version)

Text Editor: Notepad; HTML: CoffeeCup HTML Editor (free version)

Graphics: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Screen Capture: IrfanView

Social Media: Facebook | Twitter

Social Bookmarking: None

Social Profile: Facebook | Twitter

URL Shortener: Tiny URL

Office Suite: Microsoft Office 2007

Email: Gmail | Mozilla Thunderbird. On Thunderbird, I use the IMAP option so that both the web mail and the mail on my hard drive are identical.

Calendar: None

Accounting: Microsoft Excel 2007

PDF Generator: None

Genealogy Database: Family Tree Maker 2010 | Roots Magic 4 | TNG 8.0 (Website)

Genealogy Tools: Google Earth | Microsoft OneNote

Other Tech Stuff: TweetDeck (updates Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace all at once)

Treasure Chest Thursday: Wamboughs

This is one of my treasures. This is a piece of music written by John and Tony Wambough. They are related to me through the Loves. John’s mother Agnes Love was sister to my Great-Great Grandmother Jennie Love-Thorward. Even though it’s not a direct relation, this is probably where my sister gets her musical talent. She played in band all through high school, and she could pick up any instrument you threw at her. I know she dabbled in writing her own music, so I can’t wait to show her that someone in the family actually did!

Treasure Chest Thursday is a daily blogging topic from GeneaBloggers.

Busy Weekend

It’s been so busy around here this week. My Aunts and their husbands visited for the first time in like 30 years this weekend. So we were busy cooking, catching up, cooking, and revisiting some old haunts. It was definitely a great visit. I’m getting much better at prying information from people. Don’t worry, there was no harm done, but sometimes you just have to steer that conversation back around to why Grandpa’s family practically disowned him. It’s just vital to my getting to sleep at night. Many things my Aunt told me, she said if I ever published before she died, she’d haunt me forever. Yikes!

We definitely have a project we’re working on though. Our own family cookbook. We have a very basic binder in the shed we can use. Everyone is going to send me some recipes for it. The ones that don’t, well I’ll just bug them until they do. The idea came about when I was showing them the Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook that I wrote about earlier. Both of them loved it so much they immediately had me order them both a copy. They should have them by next week, if not the end of this week. So that’s something we’ll be working on, and we hope to finish putting at least a first copy together by Christmas. We’ll see how things go!

Unfortunately, because my Ohio Aunts were coming, I had to miss my annual New York Moore Reunion. My dad and siblings went, but I stayed in Maryland to help Mom with the company. I don’t regret it! I did miss not seeing everyone but I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot of family stories when everyone was cutting loose. Now all I have to do is log them in One Note before I forget all the who, what, when, wheres.

I’ll keep everyone informed about how the Recipe book is coming!

Happy 4th of July Everyone!

I’ve got my Aunts from Ohio here, so I’ve been having a real good time this weekend. I thought I’d pop on real quick this morning and share my most patriotic pictures with you. These are from my Washington DC day trip back in April.

Happy Fourth of July guys, we’ve sure come a long way in this country. I couldn’t be more proud to be an American!