Genealogy. Those who might be interested know who you are.

Back at work. Busy and stressful, but in a different way from holidays.

The Beechworth trip was good, even if it did include two days of 40˚C+ heat. I found Robert Taylor's grave. (Knowing in which section to look made it much easier). I looked through all the headstones in the Presbyterian section of the Yackandandah cemetery, but did not find a single Taylor. I suspect that they were all wooden headstones, and have been elided by termites, rot and bushfires. I will be contacting a guy to see if I can get my hands on a CD with the records of the Yack cemetery, saved from the gutted museum. (Apparently quite a lot of records in filing cabinets, and on hard drives, were saved from the rubble.)

Also, in Yackandandah I found a history of the Yack Primary School, which includes a list of the first hundred students: Robert is #19, and his big sister Eliza is #21.

I also found (I think) the house he lived in (it looks in places about old enough at the core, although there have been people living in it and changing it for almost a hundred years since. Once it was named "Iolanthe"), and the place he worked. (Now it is the Beechworth Galleries, and is for sale, but then it was a store owned by a man called, I think, Samuel Shaw (1826-1901). The ad for the property describes extensive cellars, and Shaw's entry in the Biog. Dict (#27) says that his stores were general stores, but also sold wine. The description says that the store was on Camp and Kerford, where it is now Albert and Kerford, but Albert is just a section of Camp st renamed, I think

( Genealogy and NE Victorian history within )

I see dumb people. They're everywhere. They don't even know they're dumb.

4:30. I normally don't mind people coming with jobs at 4:30. The usual sort of jobs, I mean. Change the toner, install Office, change a password, that sort of thing.

Then there's this one guy who just called up.

He wants to re-partition his hard drive. He wants to change the sizes and move around actual working partitions. I told him last night, when he turned up at something around 6:00pm to collect an install disk, that this was a magnificently dangerous thing to do, and to back up everything he wants to keep, and did he really want to do this? He replied that he had been googling, and everywhere he had looked had told him all the above. “Not tonight”, I tell him then. Let me know tomorrow, and I'll come and help.

And when does he call? Four. Goddamn. Thirty. And this is, I know, an hour-and-a-half marathon of stupid-tolerance. As evidenced when he said that he had “installed gparted...” ... uh oh. The live CD has it on there already, why should he... oh. Oh no.

“You're not ... running it from the hard drive, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Not from a live CD.”
“No. Should I be?”
“You're trying to repartition a live disk, running the software from the very disk you're trying to repartition.”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow. I'll come and see you tomorrow. don't try anything until I'm there.”



It's not just that he's a waste of oxygen, it's that he waits all damned day, then summons me down for an extended session of pain right at the end of the day.

I have a low stupidity tolerance as it is. He's just using up my reserves of pretending-to-care, which could be going on honest mistakes made by intelligent people who know what they're doing, and why they shouldn't be doing it, and why they have to anyway.