WorldVitalRecords.com and Footnote.com is announcing a joint partnership enabling family historians, academic researchers and others free online search access to comprehensive indexes of the 1860 and 1930 United States Federal Census records.

I wrote a really funny piece yesterday called Making Scents of the Past. O boy, sometimes I just crack myself up. But by the time I went to bed I was pretty well sobered. There’s a big difference between dredging up records of the already-deceased and chasing memories of the still-living. continued …

The Admin tells me that she was a straight-A student but she knows if I’d been her English teacher she would have flunked. Yes, she would have.

But I understand. I hated English grammar myself. It was too constricting and borr…ring for my crazy adolescent mind, although we didn’t use the word borr…ring in those days. “It sucks” hadn’t come into prominence yet either, but it pretty well sums it up. continued …

Hot off the press. It’s that time of year for Adobe’s regular upgrade of their user-friendly graphics and video-editing software. Now available: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 (Win & Mac), Adobe Premier Elements 8 and the Photoshop Elements 8 & Premiere Elements 8 Bundle. They come with either a $20 or $30 mail-in rebate, which makes them even more of a bargain.  I’ve used Adobe products since my grandmother was hoisting me around over her shoulder and I’d be truly lost without them. Go see what’s new.

If you haven’t discovered Picasa 3.5 yet, you really should. It’s a riot. They’ve added face-tagging and a geo-tagging panel. No-one does geo-tagging as well as Google so that’s a no-brainer.  As far as the name tags go, I spent many months IPTC-ing 10,000 photographs in great detail and I was not keen to start over with something that’s not in the same league. But, as ever, Google has made this different enough and fun enough to be worthwhile in its own right and it’s not difficult.

First, prime the system by tagging a couple of dozen people and then just let it go. It will continue churning out thumbnails of faces and try to match them up with the faces you’ve already tagged. The accuracy rate is phenomenal. It’s having a problem with my identical twin sisters, (so do I) but other than that it’s stunning. Then you can do things like make collages or movies or desktop backgrounds.

If you want to go really wild, you can also add geo-tags with their new full-length geo-tagging panel and follow the life of your photos on Google Earth. It’s all integrated with Picasa Web Albums as well.

When you first install Picasa, it takes you to their blog where there’s an introductory video about what’s new.

‘Nuff said; just go there.