My First Impressions of Texas Ranch House 1867 (PBS)

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My first impressions of PBS’s Texas Ranch House 1867 are not the best – it seemed like about half the volunteers put themselves in the right mindset. To give you a quick back-story – PBS and the BBC have put together a series of shows where they take volunteers and put them in a historical setting. It might be 1940 London, or the American West of the 1870s. This one is set on a small West Texas ranch.

This time around they cast more people who would be more comfortable with the environment, but at the same time some of the people didn’t have the sense of urgency or duty that the environment should have encouraged. They had certain conditions that needed to be met (rounding up so many cattle, etc.), and the ranch owner seemed more concerned with doing chores for his wife than going out with the cowboys to round up cattle, and this after they are already down a man, as well as having a few days of downtime due to illness among several of them.

Maybe it’ll get better (if you missed the first two hours last night, it’ll be repeated in the upcoming weeks). It runs several more nights this week.

Panel Vows to Fight For Access to Records (The AP Gets It)

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An article from Elizabeth M. Gillespie, for the Associated Press, Panel vows to fight for access to records, gets into an issue that is going to be cropping up a lot more as time goes by, access to public records. The article is about the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee, and their fight to keep access open.

Yahoo’s Babel Fish

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Yahoo has updated their translation site – babelfish.yahoo.com. If you need webpages or snippets of text translated, such as historical documents or newspaper articles, you can paste them in (either the URL or the 150 words of text) and it’ll spit out the translated text.

Very handy when working with international records.

Update: From a genealogical perspective, Yahoo inherited Babel Fish from Overture, who bought it with AltaVista. This is the actual, official launch under the Yahoo brand.