Nice People Thread No. 14, all Nice and Proper

vivatifosi

PasturesNew wrote: »

I just find it very odd that "the keepers of the information" seem to like keeping it!

It's not that... it's the sheer amount. I can read and translate secretary hand wills. I'm not the best at it, but I can do it. It's an acquired skill. I could probably translate one and double check it in about a day. A single archive office could have several thousand documents written like that. That's before you start on the ones in latin, or moving forward to the periods where records were actually collected.

Digitising and collating takes a lot of time. Sometimes the records on archives don't even say what they have, just a box of records... so someone has to catalogue it as well as digitising.

Lots and lots and lots of work. Thank goodness for volunteers.

Nikkster

vivatifosi wrote: »

Lots and lots and lots of work. Thank goodness for volunteers.

So... Lydia, how are we doing? Give us some pointers?

Edit: unrelated, but meant to post this earlier. Just in case anyone had wondered how tall a rose can grow (especially if neglected and competing for light)... The answer is pretty effing tall! I'd guess at least 8 feet :eek:


And I'm hopefully getting some bespoke hand-made railings to replace my awful front wall... Below would be on my mood board (if I had one, is really not as grand as it sounds, neighbour is hopefully going to make them for me, pic is some nearby railings I like the look of (let me know if you have any other suggestions as they'll be made to measure ) Might use an accent colour to the front door, otherwise it'll be grey or a patina but not black)

GDB2222

LydiaJ wrote: »

Agree with what everybody else has said about (a) Spirit's continuing physio being more important than money, and (b) Chewy's babies being v cute indeed.

On a more trivial note, I am having trouble finding something to buy online, and wondered if anybody could suggest anything. At present, on my desk at work I have some filing trays like this:



...except that there are 6 of them rather than 3. I actually want 8, but closer together, so that the height of the whole stack of 8 will be ideally a couple of inches lower than the height of the current stack of 6. I need them to be open fronted, not closed drawers, so that I can see easily which ones have stuff in. They do not need to be separate entities that get attached in a removable sort of way - a single object with 8 mini-shelves would do fine if that was the easiest waHy to do it. They need to take A4, preferably with the opening at the narrow end. So far, I haven't spotted anything that fits all these criteria. Are there any NP out there with something uncongenial to do who need a displacement activity? Because helping me search online for something along these lines would give you a lovely excuse for putting off your unwanted task a little longer.

I have used the trays you have, and they work very well, so possibly a bit of lateral thinking will help. Perhaps the question you ACTUALLY ought to be asking yourself is what are the riser rods made out of? If they are metal, the best tool to shorten them is probably a mini hacksaw. If they are plastic, a bread knife might do the trick. The point is obviously that with shorter rods you can have more trays in the same height.

Have you checked whether your trays will stack without the rods at all?

silvercar

Pollygarter wrote: »

Thanks for the welcome Lydia and all!

My views on mushrooms? Actually I have very particular views on mushrooms. It was one of my very first jobs aged 14. Mushroom picking on a Sunday. 67p an hour to crawl over massive trays of horse poop n mushrooms 4 storeys high in darkened Nissan huts.

You'd go home with an indelibly stained thumb from cutting poop into it when trimming mushrooms, poop in your hair and a faint aroma of rot. Loved it. All the ladies who had worked there for years had mushroom workers lung. Awful cough from the spores growing inside them.

And mushroom soup is made out of the gritty poopy bits we cut off the bottom of the stalk. Where it grew into the horse manure.

Didn't eat em for decades. Love them now.

I bet that was more info than you wanted!

I lurked a little and jumped in a few weeks back to underpin my commitment to changing my game from hopeless spendthrift to hope-full steward of my reduced financial resources. Expect me to fall over a few times and get back up again!

Now what were the other topics? Judaism? I'm not, half Welsh type here. Lived in a Jewish household some of my student days, and have many friends etc and aim to live like a mensch best I can.

That Flanagan and Allen song...its hilarious. Warbly old music hall song about nice people with nice habits who got no money at all, I believe they kept rabbits and borrow from each other etc. Its probably on YouTube.

Are you allowed to post links to outside websites? Or is that not nice?

How are you all? Long weekend ahead....yessssss.

Post links as you like, perfectly acceptable.

I'm totally Welsh, though now living in Hertfordshire (often referred to as inner Hertfordshire by nice people, with the rest of the UK being outer Hertfordshire as so many NP have a connection to Herts we seem to be taking over the world.

vivatifosi

PasturesNew wrote: »

Maybe that's the problem ... how many people are interested in ones in Latin ... -v- how many people want to know about more recent/English things?

Maybe the keepers of the information are more interested in 14th century Latin documents than digitising stuff from 1800 onwards in English

I figure if they just scanned stuff in, "as is", with a platform that enables people to see/transcribe bits and pieces themselves - then the "lower level keepers" could approve/scan through what's been done .... and the "top level keepers" could use all that stuff as sources for whatever it is they do.

e.g. imagine if you scanned 100 pages of Latin and chucked it at the web. Then people interested would translate it .... and then you could have "discussions" and links. So everyday people could start a discussion that says "Does this line say what I think it does?" and others would say "Yes/no" - and others chip in ... "Yes, which is exciting as look at this one I found" ... and they could, collectively, tie up loose ends and odds and sods.

There was a thing on the telly the other week where a man had spent his life trying to prove something - and the answer lay in a document held by somebody in a castle. The document was a simple letter from a man to his wife that said "Off to the crusades with Bob". And with 10,000 eyes looking at things, that'd have been picked up decades before ... before the man who was looking for it had died and never knew.

If you see what I mean.

While things are sitting in files nobody's got a chance of making random discoveries and connections ... just the privileged keepers.

That in turn is also an issue. Say you look at the older records... you have several thousands of them, you need to maintain them and stop their condition deteriorating. You need to catalogue them and translate them. These will be in their thousands.

Then take more modern records. There are many, many more of them. Births were not routinely registered until the late 15th century, so records aren't that common, but still not all done. Now everyone is recorded. So fast forward to the late 19th century. Now you have a population of several million. Most of those will have several records.. birth, marriage, death, perhaps a presence over five or six censuses, court records, school records, poor house records, newspaper references... so now you are into the millions of records, just for one period of time.

I don't know of an archive that doesn't work really hard to digitize all if this. They'll generally not be working on recent stuff, due to data protection issues, but there's a lot to do and only so many people are willing to do it for free... digitizing for hours on end requires meticulous attention to detail, can be exceptionally boring and there's never a budget for staff to do it.

Where I live, a team of local volunteers has been focusing on the centenary of the first world war. To do this, they have been getting the names off of all ofvthexlocal memorials and putting lists online of those recorded and where. Even that by itself is a large project.

As its something you are interested, have you thought of asking your local records office or local history society whether there is anything you can help with? They would probably bite your arm off for the help.

I should also mention that where there is a national need to digitize a collection, then that is generally managed and done centrally... e.g. The National Archives led the project to digitize birth records and that one project took two years.

The National Digitization review, although more about university libraries, gives a good indication of the problems, if you feel like a Google and read.

lostinrates

Hi Pollygarter.

lostinrates

Doozergirl wrote: »

Cute! We have a similar plan for tomorrow's cake. Four 10
Year old girls for a sleepover. Or just an 'over'.Different coloured layers, buttercream icing and rainbow sugar - i wasn't planning on as much sprinkle!

This was four layers but just the same colour because I was feeling lazy, I quite like the idea of graduated tones, but I'm reluctant to commit to layers before seeing them baked:o. And also, this was two ( Madeira) cakes cut in half so could only have been two tones or one colour. Instead there are more sprinkles inside for bursts of colour in the cake :rotfl:

I iced with Swiss meringue buttercream. I think sometimes you just have to go with things for full out kitch value. I had not finished decoration then, but I think it looked lovely all summery and sort of Spanish or Mexican in its yellowy and orangey colours.


I cannot stand non pareils, btw, I hate the texture :rotfl:

Nikkster

There are more sprinkles inside too?!
:rotfl:

lostinrates

Nikkster wrote: »

There are more sprinkles inside too?!
:rotfl:

Yes, but because they went in the cake batter they have no texture and just become lovely little explosions of colour.

Doozergirl

lostinrates wrote: »

Yes, but because they went in the cake batter they have no texture and just become lovely little explosions of colour.

Ahhh! Interesting

I am procrastinating our wedding anniversary celebration. I must have looked at 200 hotels. Still can't decide. I have a sort of shortlist but meh. It's only UK. I think it would be easier if it weren't.

I bought champagne yesterday for doozer to come home and he didn't. Can I open it now?

We have one cake mould for four cakes. One died in a sunday roast stuffing stabbing incident (bad choice of receptacle by the doozer). I forgot to buy another.