daveydave

It has been a few years since I posted about finding my 4th-great-grandfather. Although I was sure that I had found his death in 1852, I was never convinced about his birth, mainly because he had never been at home with the wife on census night. As as result, I knew his age at death, but not where he had been born. I had, during a visit to the National Archives in London, noted a few William Millers down from the register of seamen and one had seemed to be a fit: William Miller of South Shields, born 17 Dec 1795. This was wrong. Now then, I count myself very fortunate indeed to have a partner in crime as far as family tree research is concerned. A distant cousin living in Australia is looking at exactly the same William Miller as I am and, conveniently, he retired this year. Boy, has he put his time to (what I would class as) very good use. The key documents he found were William's claim for his Master's Certificate of Service and the resulting certificate itself which, bet...

And so begins another rambling post... You may have read my last post (which was about 3 months late in publishing) about fountain pens which included a brief reference to notebooks. Specifically, the A5 Leuchtturm1917 I am now using as my main notebook. This has turned out to be a really lovely book to use, with very nice features such as contents pages, archiving stickers and page numbers; and the paper is splendid to write on. I tend to carry a smaller A6 book around with me all the time and, recently, this has been a hardback Black n' Red. The paper in these books is lovely and smooth and takes fountain pen ink really well. But, as my current book was almost full, it was time to think about a replacement. There are many premium notebooks available these days, Rhodia and Moleskine being two fairly well known brands. My wife has a Rhodia (because I bought her one, not because she's that interested in this sort of thing) and I considered getting one of those, but then I ca...

I was given a fountain pen set for a birthday long ago, a lovely slim Elysée with matching rollerball. I've no idea where the latter has gone, but the former hadn't been out of the box much for many years, until I decided I was going to make proper use of it again a couple of years ago. Despite the French-sounding name, Elysée was a German brand which went out of business in around 2000. Sadly, despite still being a great writer, the top doesn't stay on very well any more; it is also very slim and light. It was time for something more substantial. As usual, I procrastinated about which make, style, etc. and I had really wanted a British pen if I could find one. But nothing was available at a sensible price, so I ended up looking at US maker, Sheaffer. They have a large range of good, solid pens and I did the usual "if I stretch another fiver, I can get this one" a couple of times. Anyway, I settled on a Sheaffer Prelude which I got at First Stop Stationers f...

I have an interest in law and, in particular, constitutional and administrative law - how the state works - and I have been thinking about this for a little while, because I'm odd like that. The current set up in the UK is not, to my mind, satisfactory. The UK government is far too centralised (although Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have a better set up thanks to devolution) and local authorities in England have too few useful powers to affect the lives of the people who live within their borders. This lack of influence over their own territory will become more important and more marked over the next couple of years as Scotland gains more powers either as an independent state, or with a more powerful devolved government. Here in the north east of England, we have already seen this imbalance at work when Amazon decided to set up a new site in Scotland rather than North Tyneside. Even now, the Scottish government has sufficient powers to significantly influence the lives o...

Back in October I posted about replacing Ubuntu on my Dell Mini 9 because it was just getting too much for the poor little netbook to cope with. I went into some detail about installing Chromium OS (different to Chrome OS) which was a bit of a chore, finally installed, but then really didn't do anything for me. So I removed that and installed Joli OS instead. Joli OS is Linux based, syncronises with your JoliCloud account which allows you to have the same interface / applications / etc. on your computer and through a web interface (say, on a Windows box). It's interesting and quite nicely done, but it hasn't inspired me to make any more use of the Mini 9, which I suspect will now be heading to eBay to help fund a Google Nexus 10. References: http://www.jolicloud.com/