….and now your daily public service announcement.

Always place your laptop away from the flour.

Fall Colors

Day two of reasonable temperatures (below 80).  It's put me in the mood for cooler weather.  Check out all of these lovely items on Artfire.

Educate Yourself

The Internets are full of sites where you can learn interesting facts, news, and things maybe you didn't want to know.  A growing trend on the Internet has been in the form of online education.  Khan Academy paved the way for may who wanted to expand their education horizon without spending an arm and a leg.  Each month more services and sites become available.  I've collected a partial list of some of the sites I've learned about in the past few months.  Feel free to add your favorite sites in the comments.

• New Charter University - Accreddited online courses (mostly Business for now)
• ThinkTutorial - Free Computer Tutorials and Lessons
• mybringback - Programming & Science videos
• TED - Ideas worth spreading
• KhanAcademy - Science/Math tutorials
• ThinkingAllowed - Thought-provoking videos
• CS50.tv - OpenCourseware - Harvard Computer Science 50
• Open Yale Courses - OpenCourseware - Yale
• Library.nu - eBook database
• MIT - Free Online Course Material - Lectures, Assignments, Projects, Media
• Stanford University - Online course lectures, various subjects
• University of Reddit - Learn & study with your fellow Redditors
• ReadPrint - Online books
• Udacity - Computer Science related courses
• Academic Earth - Online Academic Video Lectures
• Instructables - Makes, How To, and DIY
• HowCast - Instructional Videos
• TopDocumentaryFilms - Watch free documentaries online
• DocumentaryHeaven - Watch free documentaries online
• CodeAcademy – Learn how to code
• HTMLdog – Learn HTML and CSS
• CosmoLearning – Educational website for students and teachers covering all topics

On the Beach

In celebration of the second day in a row with a heat index of over 100, here's a bit of the beach!  See the products featured in this collection on Artfire.

Follow the Ball

In which I make my first video about a ball, doing things that a ball likes to do with it's other ball friends.

Finding Toney

Sometimes I am the Queen of sidetracking..  That's partly why I start much of my writing with a pencil and a pad of paper - too many things to distract me on the Internets.  There's always the temptation to see what's on the front page of Reddit.

But I digress.  (See?  Even without the Internet, I get sidetracked.)  One of the aspects of my sidetracking carries over to researching genealogy.  More than once, I've found myself exploring not just direct ancestors but their siblings, their wives, and eventually their great grandchildren who lived just this past century.  Information that isn't necessarily critical to my family tree - but very interesting nevertheless.

So one day I focused on the family of one if my paternal great grandfathers, Benjamin Jackson, Jr.:

I knew some things about his family.  I was also familiar with many, many mistakes about his family on Ancestry.  Unfortunately, while Ancestry is great at disseminating genealogical information, the website also great at disseminating plenty of completely erroneous genealogical information.  Benjamin Jackson Jr. is listed as his own grandfather on far too many public trees (do people ever even check what they copy & paste onto their trees??).

One of the things I learned about Benjamin was the name of his mother.  I already thought that I knew her name was Lorena Toney Jackson up until I found a scanned copy of his death certificate.  Poor Benjamin had died in his forties from tuberculosis.  His father answered the particulars for his death certificate including the mother's name which was America Coleman not Lorena.  It turns out that Benjamin Sr. married America first and they had two children before she died sometime before 1870.

As I had the opportunity, I explored more on Benjamin Jr.'s siblings and half siblings.  Toney Beauregard Jackson, the baby of the family, was the last sibling I focused on and the one that I found the most information.

Ancestry's search tends to bring back everything but the kitchen sink.  I figured with a name like Toney, I'd be seeing every Tony and Anthony on the east coast returned in searches.  So instead of starting with Ancestry, I Googled Toney instead; not really expecting anything except maybe an obituary.  Toney Beauregard Jackson didn't return any hits to speak of.  But Toney B Jackson had a scholarship fund established in his name at the Citadel, a South Carolina military college.

Not one week before, I had the opportunity to see a college portrait of my father's brother - in his Citadel uniform.  This was getting exciting.

So ok, time for that Ancestry search.  Several pages into it was a Yearbook picture with more than a passing resemblance to my father and wearing a now familiar uniform.  Hello Toney.

Finding a photo on Ancestry, other than a headstone or a photocopy of a census page, is actually an uncommon experience for me.  It's funny how I'd always mentioned the Glover resemblance (something with the eyes and eyebrows) that people could see in my family.  Glover, because I always associated it with my father and therefore "Glovers".  Looking at Toney though made me realize the obvious fallacy of that.  It was the Jackson resemblance all along.

Featured Product: Earth Day In Distress

Earth Day in Distress started with a photograph taken in the mountains of Western Maryland.  Using various techniques and brushes in Photoshop, I gave the photo a more washed-out and rough feel.  This digital print is an outer reflection of inner turmoil; the contradiction of nature's beauty being overshadowed by the pollution threatening our environment.

I've never understood how business and industrialization could be so important as to put our very existence on the chopping block.  Yet year by year, it feels like we as a species are putting ourselves closer to a point of no return.  You can purchase Earth Day in Distress in my Artfire store.