Sunday, November 28, 2010

Buy an external hard drive and donate $1.11 to the SDGS

Staples.com is having a 2 day Cyber Monday sale. One of the items is a Western Digital 2 TB external hard drive for only $69.99! Two terabytes is the equivalent of 1,388,888 3.5 inch floppy disks! Since the purchase is over $50 the shipping is free.

I took a look at the flier and read the specs on the hard drive and it's pre-formatted for a PC so all you have to do is plug in the power block and the usb connection. Your computer should recognize it and you are good to go. Mac users will have to format the drive for Mac use.

Sixty Nine dollars and Ninety Nine cents is an excellent price for a drive this size. But the nifty thing is that Staples.com is one of the Igive.com partners. If you create an Igive account then log on to the Staples.com site your purchase will generate a $1.11 donation to SDGS.

This sale is only good November 28 and 29, 2010.

This has been another shameless plug.

Monday, November 22, 2010

A Shameless Plea

This is probably getting a little bit late in the season but it is worth a shot.

The Society is affiliated with igive.com as a means to help us raise money for the Society. We have talked about igive.com in the past so I will just mention that if you sign up with I-Give then do your online shopping from their list of stores, the Society will get a small kickback for everything you purchase.

A quick sampling of stores and the percentage of rebate to the Society:

Barnes & Noble or Borders 2.4%, Cabela's 1.6%, Dell Business or Dell Home .8%, Harry & David 4.8%. If you use Turbo Tax buy it online through I-Give and the Society will get 6% of your purchase price. If you just get the free version through your I-Give account the society will get $0.40! If you don't have an online back-up system yet, subscribe to Carbonite.com and they will kickback 12%.

For you out of towners who will be coming to the Annual Meeting and Seminar on 8 January, 2011 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, book your reservation through I-Give and the Society will get 3.2% of your cost.

The nice thing is that by going through igive.com the Society raises needed money but it does not add anything to your bill. It's an easy way to donate to the society.

Just go to www.igive.com and look around. If you want to sign up in the "Find a Cause" form search on California, All Cause Types and the keyword Genealogical. Our society is the first one listed.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Important Meeting on November 13

Our monthly meeting on November 13, at St. Andrews Lutheran Church, is really important for a couple of reasons.

Number one is that it is time to vote for next years board of directors. If you don't come and vote for the board of directors you don't have any room to complain about them. Of course that is just my opinion.

Number two reason is the announcement of our monthly meeting hours for 2011. There are going to be some changes made and it would behoove you to show up for the announcement. This will also affect the beginning genealogy classes and the RootsMagic Users group.

See the previous blog entry about our speaker.

Our speaker at the November 13 Meeting

Monthly Meeting
November 13, 2010
St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church
Speaker: Hal Horrocks
Preserving Your Heirlooms and Cemeteries: What They Tell Us

How does one decide what to save, give away, or toss? Learn how to develop a preservation strategy and which methods and tools to use.

Have you ever wandered through a cemetery and wondered about the meanings for the designs carved on the old gravestones? Learn the proper etiquette when exploring and conducting research in a cemetery.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

I'd better get back to work

I am back from my summer in Nebraska. I had only planned on being gone for two months but that dragged on to almost four months. My online time was limited to only about 2 hours a day so I certainly didn't spend much of it doing SDGS stuff.

A lot has happened at SDGS during my stay in the hinterlands.

There is a major change coming concerning the people who come to the Rootsmagic Users Group before each monthly meeting.

I don't know if the change in the monthly meeting schedule has been promulgated, but you will get it, unofficially, right here.

Effective with the February meeting we will start the regular meetings at 10 A.M. and be finished by 1 P.M.

That means that the RootsMagic Users Group will not be held before each meeting. We are going to have to come up with some other time and place.

I am considering changing to meeting at the SDGS library at 7347 Ronson Rd, Suite O. That will be a pain for you folks that live in the East County. However it is pretty easy to get to the library.

As for meeting time I am looking at the 4th Saturday of the month. Our monthly meeting is on the 2nd Saturday and several of us go to the CGSSD meeting on the 3rd Saturday. There is a Senior Computer Users group that meets in Mission Beach on the 1st Saturday, I think. I don't know of anything on the 4th Saturday.

I chose Saturday as there is not a lot happening at the SDGS library on Saturday and the freeway traffic is usually lighter than during the week.

Go ahead and post any comments here. I will also discuss this at our November 13 monthly meeting.