2014 and Behold - Tue, 30 Dec 2014

2014 is almost over. It’s been quite a full year for me. This is my 35th blog post for the year. I’ve also been active on Twitter and GooglePlus.

I started the year off preparing for a lecture on Windows Phone for Genealogy at RootsTech 2014 in Salt Lake City. Then shortly after I got back, my father passed away and that messed up the entire spring for me. During the summer, I spent a lot of time preparing a comprehensive talk called “Reading Wrong GEDCOM Right” for the Gaenovium Genealogy Technology Conference in October in Leiden Netherlands. I helped rediscover GEDCOM 2 and GEDCOM 1 and GEDCOM 4 specs. I submitted a paper on Standardizing Sources and Citation Templates to FHISO in August. Shortly after that, FHISO started getting active and I was following the discussions and contributing to them somewhat.

But it was the Gaenovium conference that got me motivated again. After I got back, I knew it was my task to put all my efforts into getting that next version of Behold out. I motivated myself with an #amprogramming hash tag on Twitter, with the goal of programming every day for as long as I can. I even have an App on my Windows Phone that counts the days for me and says today is day number 78 since I began. I’ve been pretty diligent, and I’ve probably been able to work hard on Behold on 70 of those 78 days.

In the process, I upgraded the Find Files routine from Behold for the next version, and in November released it as a standalone freeware program called GEDCOM File Finder.

But alas, I never did get a new version of Behold out in 2014. Tamura Jones has threatened that I may get one of his GeneAwards as Vapourware for 2014 for promises of a release without the actualization of one. I hope he doesn’t, as I’ve given up all my excuses up above.

Even so, right up to a week ago, I was still hoping I’d still be able to squeak Behold version 1.1 into 2014. But it wasn’t to be. The last 3 days, I was trying to help my daughter solve her computer crash. Looks like we’ll be reinstalling Windows for her on Jan 1. (She did do a full backup less than 2 weeks ago)

I’ll be back working hard on Behold in the new year, and I do expect to release Version 1.1 in January.

Hope your 2014 was good and productive.
Wishing your 2015 to be bigger and better.