Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

My talk tonight about Behold to 40 people of the EEGS (East European Genealogical Society) here in Winnipeg went better than well. The audience was really taken by my talk of what`s wrong with genealogy software, and how Behold is doing it the right way.

Other genealogy software are all big black boxes where you deposit your data, entered inefficiently via tedius forms. To see your data, you generate inadequate reports that don`t display everything and then force you to bounce between your reports and input forms to manually fix or add to your data. Repeat and continue ad infinitum.

I surveyed the crowd. 90% had computers. About 70% used genealogy software, mostly Family Tree Maker, Legacy, Brother`s Keeper and PAF. There was one Unix GRAMPS user and one Mac iFamily user. Only about one quarter of them knew what GEDCOM was.

I took them through Behold step by step. I swear I could hear a pin drop. The next thing I knew and an hour and a half had passed and it was time to wrap up and questions. The biggest disappointment was that Behold cannot edit yet. The biggest surprise was that Behold has free upgrades for life.

Talk to any one of those 40 people, and you will now find them intrigued by Behold`s promising solution to making their genealogy data usable.

Days like today are great to get my motivation going.

Now back to making Behold the reality I expect it to be.

Every Spring, there seems to be a host of interruptions that slow the progress of Behold somewhat. April was no exception.

First there was the tragic end of my XP machine and the purchase and week-long setup of a new Vista machine, which I just love. Then there was income taxes to do.

Our newspaper stock market contest and The Financial Post contest took a few minutes each night to analyze, plus they are leading me to an actual stock market methodology I am implementing for myself that may actually produce good returns almost mechanically.

Spring comes with snow melt. Snow melt shows yard. Yard means yardwork, like the branches I have to get rid of, and the raking, and the backyard cleanup. Ugh. Winter’s better.

Spring also means Spring cleaning, and my daughters have pushed us to finally clean out the basement.

Family is the best thing in life. We get together with my wife’s family every Friday and with my family every Sunday. Mom passed away last year, but Dad’s getting along well. Family always takes precedence over everything else, and Spring seems to have the most school and family happenings.

My day job is at its annual busy time. Now as a manager, my job is not to do any work, but to coordinate, oversee, advise, teach, and administer. Deadlines are deadlines, and there is an art in getting others to do a quality job by giving them responsibility and accountability. And lunch hour squash three times a week is a relaxing necessity that I hope I can continue indefinitely.

Another project that I’ve deferred for years is to make my Jewish Heritage Centre’s website e-commerce-able, and to get their digitized material up there and available. I’ll continue working on that but Behold will have a higher priority.

And I’ll be giving a talk about Behold on May 20th to the East European Genealogical Society. Anyone in Winnipeg who wants to meet me should feel free to come.

I was up until 3 a.m. trying to get my old XP computer running again. I did and to my surprise, I was able to get it working again normally. Pheh! No way I’m going back. Tonight as I write this, I was wiping the XP and recovering the initial XP installation with the goal of donating it to my Heritage Centre. But no … five hours and all sorts of problems/glitches/troubles trying to do it.

At least it gave me time to write this post.

Instead of using the online Word Press admin area to write this blog entry, I’m doing it from my computer using another free Windows Live feature: Windows Live Writer.

It is not necessarily a tool I will continue to use, but let me say I’m very impressed with what Microsoft has done. It gives the ability easily edit, preview and work seamlessly with Word Press from a really nicely set-up interface. I’m impressed!

There are other hidden gems in the Windows Live packages. I mentioned Windows Live Photo Gallery earlier – which is free – and which is definitely, absolutely, positively replacing Adobe Photoshop Elements on my new computer, which I haven’t even bothered to install.

Genealogists need to Tag their photos. That was the one thing I thought Elements did well. Photo Gallery seemed to do some of it. Placing tags in the photos, it gives you a nice tree view by date taken, people tags and descriptive tags. What seemed to be missing was location data (the jargon words GPS and Geotagging) and a connection to showing picture locations on a map. But no, look a little further and you’ll find Pro Photo Tools, another free Microsoft download that will add all the features anyone short of a professional photographer might need.

I’m impressed. Very impressed.